which won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award, and The Art and Craft of Fiction: A Writer's Guide.His entry begins:
I’ve just started reading Kevin Powers’s debut novel The Yellow Birds for three reasons: 1) Some of my favorite works of fiction are military-focused (Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5, Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead come immediately to mind). Something fascinating happens, I believe, with interpersonal relationships when they are both highly regimented and especially urgent. 2) The reviews have been so across-the-board strong; and 3) It has one of the best first sentences I’ve read in a long time:...[read on]About The Art and Craft of Fiction: A Writer's Guide, from the publisher:
A down-to-earth guide to writing fictionLearn more about the book and author at Michael Kardos's website.
Brief, practical, and wonderfully readable, The Art and Craft of Fiction gives aspiring writers all they need — in under 400 pages. Michael Kardos focuses on technique andpresents fiction writing as a teachable (and learnable) art. With an organization built on methods and process rather than traditional literary elements, Kardos helps students begin their stories, write strong scenes, use images and detail, revise for aesthetics and mechanics, and finish and polish their own stories. He delivers clear instruction, effective examples, and assignments that build toward finished work in a tone reviewers praise as "pitch perfect." A brief fiction anthology at the back of the book — of 15 works that Kardos draws on in his instruction — provides stories that students will love to be inspired by.
Writers Read: Michael Kardos (September 2012).
The Page 69 Test: The Three Day Affair.
My Book, The Movie: The Three-Day Affair.
Writers Read: Michael Kardos.
--Marshal Zeringue
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