Bücher von Bret Lott

PRAISE FOR BRET LOTT "A beautifully crafted first-person epic of one poor Southern woman's personal duel with God . . . This is a voice we don't want to stop hearing. . . . Some of the tenderest scenes of family love since those in Dickens."--"Chicago Tribune "Lott is one of the most important and imaginative writers in America today. His eye for detail is unparalleled; his vision--where he looks--is like no one else's in this country."--"Los Angeles Times "Bret Lott has a gift for making the ordinary seem luminous. In Jewel, he applies his art to a broad canvas and produces what may stand as his masterpiece. . . . Lott matches the honest strength of his characters with that of his prose. His Jewel is a force of nature, her story rising out of a perfect, seamless union of teller and tale."--"The Boston Globe

This marvelous guide begins where other books on writing and the writing life leave off. Delving deep into the creative process, Bret Lott reveals truths we scarcely realized we needed to know but without which we as writers will soon lose our way. In ten intimate essays based on his own experiences and on the seasoned wisdom of writers including Eudora Welty, E. B. White, Henry David Thoreau, Henry James, and John Gardner, Lott explores such topics as• why write? why keep writing?• the importance of simple words• the finer points of character detail• narrative and the passage of time• the pitfalls of technique• making a plan-and letting it go• risking failure-and reaping the benefits• Accepting rejectionWriters travel alone, but Bret Lott's book makes the journey less lonely and infinitely more rewarding. Before We Get Started will help you make your work as good as it can be: "Pay attention recklessly. Strain to see through the window of your own artistic consciousness in the exhilarating knowledge that there is no path to the waterfall, and there are a million paths to the waterfall, and there is, too, only one path: yours.”

For a long time, Claire and Tom Templeton have wished in vain for a child. What they have instead is a house, a charming old Cape that is their consolation. In the gray chill of a Massachusetts autumn, the Templetons and two local handymen, loners and eccentrics, work to rebuild the ramshackle home. As the house takes on a new life, Claire begins to understand its tangled history -- and to reconcile her own past and renew her hope for the future.

Bret Lott's powerful, insightful stories illuminate the everyday episodes that move us -- husbands and wives, parents and children, friends and neighhors -- along the intricate paths of intimacy. A little boy's first bad dream brings his father back to his own childhood nights when danger lurked beneath the bed; in the California desert at night two brothers in a pickup tune into radio stations from distant places, interrupted by sudden bursts of static; estranged suburban friends become good neighbors again in the course of thwarting two thieves.Lott's previous novels, The Man Who Owned Vermont and A Stranger's House, established him as "e;one of the strongest voices to come along in some time"e; (The San Francisco Chronicle). A Dream of Old Leaves stakes out his place in the landscape of new American fiction.