MACW: Masters in Creative Writing: Home

Creative writing has become a highly professionalised academic discipline, with popular courses and prestigious degree programmes worldwide. This book is a must for all students and teachers of creative writing, indeed for anyone who aspires to be a published writer. It engages with a complex art in an accessible manner, addressing concepts important to the rapidly growing field of creative writing, while maintaining a strong craft emphasis, analysing exemplary models of writing and providing related writing exercises. Written by professional writers and teachers of writing, the chapters deal with specific genres or forms - ranging from the novel to new media - or with significant topics that explore the cutting edge state of creative writing internationally (including creative writing and science, contemporary publishing and new workshop approaches)

From one of the greatest modern writers, these stories, gathered from the nine collections published during her lifetime, follow an unbroken time line of success as a writer, from her adolescence to her death bed.

This book focuses on creative writing both as a subject in universities and beyond academia, with chapters arranged around three organising sub-themes of practice, research and pedagogy.

A man looks back on his life in Cairo from 1997 to 2011, involving secret poetry clubs, drugs, messy love affairs, violent sex, intellectual bravado, the Beat poets, and a burning Tahrir Square.

A collection of post-modern fairy tales that chronicle the interwoven lives of Weetzie Bat, her friend Dirk, and their lovers Duck and My Secret Agent Man.

Jeanne Thornton's debut novel is a love story unlike any other, featuring Julie Thatch, a tough-as-nails, chainsmoking, wise-cracking 17-year-old Texan. Her idol, her older sister, jogs headlong into the lights of an approaching car, and dies. And Julie falls in love with a girl who both is and isn't an echo of her older sister, a long-limbed Francophone named Patrice—who is also a devotee of the Institute of Temporal Illusions, a Church of Scientology-like cult.

A high-octane paranoia deranges a writer and fuels a dangerous plan to return home to El Salvador.

"Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people. He is an office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners; she is an uninspired but dutiful wife. The acceptable flatline of their marriage is interrupted when Yeong-hye, seeking a more 'plant-like' existence, commits a shocking act of subversion. As her rebellion manifests in ever more bizarre and frightening forms, Yeong-hye spirals further and further into her fantasies of abandoning her fleshly prison and becoming - impossibly, ecstatically - a tree."--Inside front book cover.

An unforgettable novel set during the final days of the Sri Lankan civil war, portraying the struggle to create a human relationship when being human has become impossible. From the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of A Passage North Shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize Winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature Dinesh and Ganga meet and marry in the final days of the Sri Lankan civil war. For months their lives have been pared back to the essentials: eat, sleep, survive. Now, as the army draws ever closer, they begin to explore their new and unexpected connection - a fragile light to keep the war at bay.

A speculative thriller about the end of all things, set in the Pacific Northwest. A harrowing descent into a secret world. 'Jane Smith' receives an unexplained envelope containing the key to a storage unit. And inside that storage unit is a taxidermy hummingbird and directions to a taxidermy salamander. Somehow, this bizarre treasure hunt, that Jane never expected or asked for, sets in motion a series of events that quickly put her and her family in danger. As she desperately seeks answers, she discovers time is running out - for her and possibly for the world.

In her brilliantly inventive debut collection, Vanessa Onwuemezi takes readers on a surreal and haunting journey through a landscape on the edge of time. At the border with another world, a line of people wait for the gates to open; on the floor of a lonely room, a Born Winner runs through his life's achievements and losses; in a suburban garden, a man witnesses a murder that pushes him out into the community. Struggling to realize the human ideals of love and freedom, the characters of Dark Neighbourhood roam instead the depths of alienation, loss and shame. With a detached eye and hallucinatory vision, they observe the worlds around them as the line between dream and reality dissolves and they themselves begin to fragment. Electrifying and heady, and written with a masterful lyrical precision, Dark Neighborhood heralds the arrival of a strikingly original new voice in fiction.

Welcome to Buenos Aires, a city thrumming with murderous intentions and morbid desires, where missing children come back from the dead and unearthed bones carry terrible curses. These brilliant, unsettling tales of revenge, witchcraft, fetishes, disappearances and urban madness spill over with women and girls whose dark inclinations will lead them over the edge.

"A fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining. When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger: these are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives Labatut's book thrusts the reader, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life to the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear. At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Benjamin Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible"--

"Welcome to 1990s Norway. White picket fences run in neat rows and Christian conservatism runs deep. But as the Artist considers her work, things start stirring themselves up. In a corner of Oslo a coven of witches begin cooking up some curses. A time-travelling Edvard Munch arrives in town to join a death metal band, closely pursued by the teenaged subject of his painting Puberty, who has murder on her mind. Meanwhile, out deep in the forest, a group of school girls get very lost and things get very strange. And awful things happen in aspic."--Amazon.com. "Ellinor, a jaded PR consultant, is landed with an unusual brief when a colleague commits suicide. She finds herself working with the Norwegian Post and Communications Union, focused on a strange, inspiring story of one undelivered letter. What follows is a story of mundane lives raised to the pitch of heroism"--

"Yuri Herrera does not simply write about the border between Mexico and the United States and those who cross it. He explores the crossings and translations people make in their minds and language as they move from one country to another, especially when there's no going back. Traversing this lonely territory is Makina, a young woman who knows only too well how to survive in a violent, macho world. Leaving behind her life in Mexico to search for her brother, she is smuggled into the US carrying a pair of secret messages--one from her mother and one from the Mexican underworld"--Publisher's description

"The Deer is a rhythmic, surrealist psychological thriller about a physicist who hits what appears to be a deer. As he returns from the scene of the accident to his childhood home, long-forgotten memories flood his consciousness, and he must come to terms with the fact that his past, and reality as he knows it, are not what they appear. Part experimental film, part jazz record, but always lyrical, luminous, and austere, The Deer is a poignant meditation on familial love, loss, and the mystery at the heart of existence."--Provided by publisher.

"Definitive proof that Africa is *not* a country. A lively, entertaining and informative portrait of modern Africa that pushes back against harmful stereotypes to tell a more comprehensive, personal story. 'This book should be on the curriculum.' Nikki May, author of WAHALA Africa Is Not A Country is a bright portrait of modern Africa that pushes back against harmful stereotypes to tell a more comprehensive story. You already know these stereotypes. So often Africa is depicted simplistically as an arid red landscape of famines and safaris, uniquely plagued by poverty and strife. In this funny and insightful book, Dipo Faloyin offers a much-needed corrective. He examines each country's colonial heritage, and explores a wide range of subjects, from chronicling urban life in Lagos and the lively West African rivalry over who makes the best Jollof rice, to the story of democracy in seven dictatorships and the dangers of stereotypes in popular culture. By turns intimate and political, Africa Is Not A Country brings the story of the continent towards reality, celebrating the energy and fabric of its different cultures and communities in a way that has never been done before"--Publisher's description.

"Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, [this novel] tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean-up and financial reparations are made - and ignored. The country's government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interest only. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. But their fight will come at a steep price ... one which generation after generation will have to pay. Told through the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community's determination to hold onto its ancestral land and a young woman's willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people's freedom."--Provided by publisher.

In the eighteenth century, a giant strides the border of the Cape Colony frontier. Coenraad de Buys is a legend, a polygamist, a swindler and a big talker; a rebel who fights with Xhosa chieftains against the Boers and British; the fierce patriarch of a sprawling mixed-race family with a veritable tribe of followers; a savage enemy and a loyal ally. Like the wild dogs who are always at his heels, he roams the shifting landscape of southern Africa, hungry and spoiling for a fight.

"A Horse at Night is like light from a candle in the evening: intimate, pleasurable, full of wonder. It asks us to consider fiction as life and life as fiction. Amina Cain is our generous, gentle guide through an exquisite library. A truly beautiful book.” ...