Writers At War

Download or read book Cold Warriors written by Duncan White and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this brilliant account of the literary war within the Cold War, novelists and poets become embroiled in a dangerous game of betrayal, espionage, and conspiracy at the heart of the vicious conflict fought between the Soviet Union and the West During the Cold War, literature was both sword and noose. Novels, essays, and poems could win the hearts and minds of those caught between the competing creeds of capitalism and communism. They could also lead to blacklisting, exile, imprisonment, or execution for their authors if they offended those in power. The clandestine intelligence services of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union recruited secret agents and established vast propaganda networks devoted to literary warfare. But the battles were personal, too: friends turned on one another, lovers were split by political fissures, artists were undermined by inadvertent complicities. And while literary battles were fought in print, sometimes the pen was exchanged for a gun, the bookstore for the battlefield. In Cold Warriors, Duncan White vividly chronicles how this ferocious intellectual struggle was waged on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Among those involved were George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Mary McCarthy, Graham Greene, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, John le Carré, Anna Akhmatova, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, Boris Pasternak, Gioconda Belli, and Václav Havel. Here, too, are the spies, government officials, military officers, publishers, politicians, and critics who helped turn words into weapons at a time when the stakes could not have been higher. Drawing upon years of archival research and the latest declassified intelligence, Cold Warriors is both a gripping saga of prose and politics, and a welcome reminder that--at a moment when ignorance is all too frequently celebrated and reading is seen as increasingly irrelevant--writers and books can change the world.

Download or read book The Art of War for Writers written by James Scott Bell and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-12-09 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Strategies and Tactics for the Master Novelist Successfully starting and finishing a publishable novel is often like fighting a series of battles. You not only have to work hard to shape memorable characters, develop gripping plots, and craft dazzling dialogue, but you also have to fight against self-doubts and fears. And then there's the challenge of learning to navigate the ever-changing publishing industry. That's why best-selling novelist James Scott Bell, author of the Write Great Fiction staples Plot & Structure and Revision & Self-Editing, came up with the ultimate novel-writing battle plan: The Art of War for Writers. You'll find tactics and strategies for idea generation and development, character building, plotting, drafting, querying and submitting, dealing with rejection, coping with unrealistic expectations, and much more. With timeless, innovative, and concise writing reflections and techniques, The Art of War for Writers is your roadmap to victory.

Download or read book The French Writers' War, 1940-1953 written by Gisèle Sapiro and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-23 with total page 806 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The French Writers' War, 1940–1953, is a remarkably thorough account of French writers and literary institutions from the beginning of the German Occupation through France's passage of amnesty laws in the early 1950s. To understand how the Occupation affected French literary production as a whole, Gisèle Sapiro uses Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the "literary field." Sapiro surveyed the career trajectories and literary and political positions of 185 writers. She found that writers' stances in relation to the Vichy regime are best explained in terms of institutional and structural factors, rather than ideology. Examining four major French literary institutions, from the conservative French Academy to the Comité national des écrivains, a group formed in 1941 to resist the Occupation, she chronicles the institutions' histories before turning to the ways that they influenced writers' political positions. Sapiro shows how significant institutions and individuals within France's literary field exacerbated their loss of independence or found ways of resisting during the war and Occupation, as well as how they were perceived after Liberation.

Download or read book We are at War written by Simon Garfield and published by Random House. This book was released on 2006 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes portions of the diaries of: Pam Ashford, Christopher Tomlin, Tilly Rice, Eileen Potter, and Maggie Joy Blunt.

Download or read book Women Writing War written by Katharina von Hammerstein and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent scholarship has broadened definitions of war and shifted from the narrow focus on battles and power struggles to include narratives of the homefront and private sphere. To expand scholarship on textual representations of war means to shed light on the multiple theaters of war, and on the many voices who contributed to, were affected by, and/or critiqued German war efforts. Engaged women writers and artists commented on their nations' imperial and colonial ambitions and the events of the tumultuous beginning of the twentieth century. In an interdisciplinary investigation, this volume explores select female-authored, German-language texts focusing on German colonial wars and World War I and the discourses that promoted or critiqued their premises. They examine how colonial conflicts contributed to a persistent atmosphere of Kriegsbegeisterung (war enthusiasm) that eventually culminated in the outbreak of World War I, or a Kriegskritik (criticism of war) that resisted it. The span from German colonialism to World War I brings these explosive periods into relief and challenges readers to think about the intersection of nationalism, violence and gender and about the historical continuities and disruptions that shape such events.

Download or read book Hemingway on War written by Ernest Hemingway and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-05-22 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ernest Hemingway witnessed many of the seminal conflicts of the twentieth century—from his post as a Red Cross ambulance driver during World War I to his nearly twenty-five years as a war correspondent for The Toronto Star—and he recorded them with matchless power. This landmark volume brings together Hemingway’s most important and timeless writings about the nature of human combat. Passages from his beloved World War I novel, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, about the Spanish Civil War, offer an unparalleled portrayal of the physical and psychological impact of war and its aftermath. Selections from Across the River and into the Trees vividly evoke an emotionally scarred career soldier in the twilight of life as he reflects on the nature of war. Classic short stories, such as “In Another Country” and “The Butterfly and the Tank,” stand alongside excerpts from Hemingway’s first book of short stories, In Our Time, and his only full-length play, The Fifth Column. With captivating selections from Hemingway’s journalism—from his coverage of the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–22 to a legendary early interview with Mussolini to his jolting eyewitness account of the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944—Hemingway on War collects the author’s most penetrating chronicles of perseverance and defeat, courage and fear, and love and loss in the midst of modern warfare.

Download or read book "...the real war will never get in the books" written by Louis P. Masur and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-07-13 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "These thousands, and tens and twenties of thousands of American young men, badly wounded, all sorts of wounds, operated on, pallid with diarrhea, languishing, dying with fever, pneumonia, &c. open a new world somehow to me, giving closer insights, new things, exploring deeper mines than any yet, showing our humanity, (I sometimes put myself in fancy in the cot, with typhoid, or under the knife,) tried by terrible, fearfulest tests, probed deepest, the living soul's, the body's tragedies, bursting the petty bounds of art." So wrote Walt Whitman in March of 1863, in a letter telling friends in New York what he had witnessed in Washington's war hospitals. In this, we see both a description of war's ravages and a major artist's imaginative response to the horrors of war as it "bursts the petty bounds of art." In "...the real war will never get in the books", Louis Masur has brought together fourteen of the most eloquent and articulate writers of the Civil War period, including such major literary figures as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Henry Adams, and Louisa May Alcott. Drawing on a wide range of material, including diaries, letters, and essays, Masur captures the reactions of these writers as the war was waged, providing a broad spectrum of views. Emerson, for instance, sees the war "come as a frosty October, which shall restore intellectual & moral power to these languid & dissipated populations." African-American writer Charlotte Forten writes sadly of the slaughter at Fort Wagner: "It seems very, very hard that the best and noblest must be the earliest called away. Especially has it been so throughout this dreadful war." There are writings by soldiers in combat. John Esten Cooke, a writer of popular pre-Revolutionary romances serving as a Confederate soldier under J.E.B. Stuart, describes Stonewall Jackson's uniform: "It was positively scorched by sun--had that dingy hue, the product of sun and rain, and contact with the ground...but the men of the old Stonewall Brigade loved that coat." And John De Forest, a Union officer, describes facing a Confederate volley: "It was a long rattle like that which a boy makes in running with a stick along a picket-fence, only vastly louder; and at the same time the sharp, quiet whit-whit of bullets chippered close to our ears." And along the way, we sample many vivid portraits of the era, perhaps the most surprising of which is Louisa May Alcott's explanation of why she preferred her noon-to-midnight schedule in a Washington hospital: "I like it as it leaves me time for a morning run which is what I need to keep well....I trot up & down the streets in all directions, some times to the Heights, then half way to Washington, again to the hill over which the long trains of army wagons are constantly vanishing & ambulances appearing. That way the fighting lies, & I long to follow." With unmatched intimacy and immediacy, "...the real war will never get in the books" illuminates the often painful intellectual and emotional efforts of fourteen accomplished writers as they come to grips with "The American Apocalypse."