Bøger af Stephen Marche

According to Stephen Marche, if you want to be a writer then you'd better be ready to hurl yourself at the door, again and again. In his pithy and erudite essay Marche outlines how perseverance, in the teeth of rejection, forms the essence of a writer's life. It's what it takes, so no whining. Even successful writers grapple with failure. Along with his own history of rejection, Marche illustrates his thesis with vignettes of literary history, from Samuel Johnson, 'broke as f**ck', to Jane Austen signing lousy deals, to Herman Melville earning a pittance and ending his days as a customs inspector. Yet for new and seasoned writers his words are salutary, and, in a paradoxical way, consoling. All writers are up against it. Why should you be different?

“Satisfying food for thought on the ever-changing dynamics of men and women as they interact and go about their individual lives” (Kirkus Reviews) as cultural commentator Stephen Marche examines contemporary male-female relations—with the help of his wife, writer and editor Sarah Fulford.One morning in New York City, Stephen Marche, then a new father and tenure-track professor, got the call: his wife had been offered her dream job…in Canada. Their decision to prioritize her career over his and move to Toronto sheds new light on the gender roles in their marriage (and in the world around them). As Marche provocatively argues, we are no longer engaged in a war of the sexes, but rather stuck together in a labyrinth of contradictions. And that these contradictions are keeping women from power and confounding male identity. The Unmade Bed is a deeply researched, deeply personal exploration into the moments in everyday life where women and men meet. After all, within offices and homes, on the street, online, and in bed, we constantly ask ourselves: What are we expected to sacrifice? Is it possible to be equal? As he attempts to answer these questions, Marche explores the issues that define our modern conversations on gender, from mansplaining and sexual morality to parenthood and divisions of the domestic sphere. In the process, he discovers that true power remains shockingly elusive for women while the idea of masculinity struggles in a state of uncertainty. The only way out of these mutual struggles is together. With footnote commentary throughout the book from Marche’s wife, The Unmade Bed is a “compelling” (The Globe and Mail, Toronto), uniquely balanced, and honest approach to the revolution going on in our everyday lives—a thought-provoking work of social science that is sure to be a conversation starter.

Writing is, and always will be, an act defined by failure. The best plan is to just get used to it. Failure is a topic discussed in every creative writing department in the world, but this is the book every beginning writer should have on their shelf to prepare them. Less a guide to writing and more a guide to what you need to continue existing as a writer, On Writing and Failure: Or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer describes the defining role played by rejection in literary endeavors and contemplates failure as the essence of the writer’s life. Along with his own history of rejection, Marche offers stories from the history of writerly failure, from Ovid’s exile and Dostoevsky’s mock execution to James Baldwin's advice just to endure, where living with the struggle and the pointlessness of writing is the point.

A spellbinding (Publishers Weekly) literary novel with fangs: a sweeping, genre-busting tale of money, morality, and the American Dreamand the men and monsters who profit in its pursuitset in New York, London, and the Canadian wilderness.Hunters found his body naked in the snow. The body is that of Ben Wylie, the second-richest man in America, and it is found in a remote patch of northern Canada. Far away, in New York, the son of the Wylie familys housekeepers tries to figure out how and why Ben died. The answer lies in the tortured history of the Wylie family, who built up their massive fortune over three generations. All of the Wylie men struggle with a secret: they are werewolves. The threads of their destinies, both financial and supernatural, lead twistingly but inevitably to the naked body in the snow and a final, terrible revelation. The Hunger of the Wolf is a novel about what it means to be a man in a world of money. Its about the pursuit of wealth through the rising tide of America in the twentieth century, seen through the sober lens of more recent economic times. Its a novel about the innate nature of violence: The Wylie men struggle to control their inner rage, through physical restraint, psychotherapy, drugs, hedonistic abandon, and good old-fashioned denial. Its a story of fathers and sons, about secrets that are kept in families, and about the cost of the tension between the public face and the private soulthe cruelty and loneliness and occasional joy of being a magical being in a quotidian world. A brilliant mystery from page one, The Hunger of the Wolf is simply one of the most observant and entertaining examinations of modern will-to-wealth that fiction has produced in recent years (Miami Herald).

Shakespeare is all around us. From nightclubs to Broadway musicals, in voting booths in the American South and the trees of Central Park - William Shakespeare's literary power is so intense and widespread that it intrudes into the material world. This title takes us on a tour through the continuous stream of Shakespeare's influence.