The link below is to a book review of ‘The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands,’ by Mary Jane Seacole.
For more visit:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/10/100-best-nonfiction-books-wonderful-adventures-of-mrs-seacole
The link below is to an article that takes a look at what makes a good book cover.
For more visit:
http://www.hollybrady.com/what-makes-a-good-book-cover/
The link below is to an article that takes a look at speed reading apps.
For more visit:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/08/speed-reading-apps-can-you-really-read-novel-in-your-lunch-hour
The link below is to an article that takes a look at Kindle Create.
For more visit:
http://the-digital-reader.com/2017/04/06/kindle-create-lets-make-kindle-ebook-word-file/
The links below are to articles that take a look at Amazon’s Family Library.
For more visit:
– http://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2017/04/06/share-kindle-ebooks-between-amazon-accounts-with-family-library/
– http://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2014/11/16/how-to-setup-profiles-and-family-library-sharing-on-kindles-and-fire-tablets/
– https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=as_li_ss_tl?nodeId=201632870&linkCode=ll2&tag=ter000-20&linkId=8fabd533f55b31018c708bc45ba4b62f
Camilla Nelson, University of Notre Dame Australia
It started when an American academic noticed how frequently the acknowledgements sections of weighty academic tomes featured a male author thanking his nameless wife for typing. 
The academic, Bruce Holsigner, began sharing the screenshots on Twitter under the hashtag #ThanksforTyping.
And the response was stupendous. As the screenshots flooded in, a veritable army of unpaid women suddenly became visible. Not only were they typing, and retyping, but translating and editing and – um – doing the actual research.
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Of course #ThanksForTyping is not a practice that’s confined to academics. A considerable portion of the western canon is built on the unpaid labour of women.
So here’s my top ten list of the male writers who thanked – or failed to thank – their long-suffering wives.
Sophia Tolstaya not only gave birth to Leo’s 13 children, she also published his books and took care of the family’s financial interests. She acted as her husband’s secretary, famously copying out War and Peace – including multiple revisions – seven times. In the age before the typewriter, the writing was all done by hand. Leo, as scholars have established, was a lot less than grateful. At age 82, following the legendary act of renunciation in which Leo gave away significant amounts of the couple’s property to roam the country with a begging bowl, his family was left impoverished.
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Wikimedia Commons
Stenography, or writing in shorthand, was a popular occupation for writer’s wives. In 1866, Fyodor Dostoyevsky employed a stenographer named Anna Grigoryevna to help him finish his novel The Gambler, for which he had signed a risky contract. If he did not deliver by November his publisher F. T. Stellovsky would acquire the right to publish Dostoyevsky’s works for a further nine years without any compensation. Fyodor dictated The Gambler, and Anna wrote it down in shorthand, then copied it out neatly. Fyodor proposed to Anna within eight weeks, and married her two months later. Anna took over her husband’s financial affairs, made Fyodor give up gambling, and stopped him from signing further dodgy contracts.
As well as being the most influential poet of his time, T.S. Eliot was a director of Faber & Faber, in which capacity he employed a typist named Esme Valerie Fletcher as his assistant. Towards the end of 1956, the 68-year-old poet proposed marriage. He wrote the poem A Dedication to My Wife, which is filled with lines like “To whom I owe the leaping delight” and other adoring phrases which are almost un-Eliot-like in their warmth and sentimentality. After his death, Valerie became the editor and annotator of Eliot’s works.
Nabokov’s wife, Vera, was her husband’s sternest critic and biggest fan. Vera acted as his typist, editor and literary agent, and did all the driving. Vera was vigilant in making Vladimir rewrite his fastidious prose if it wasn’t up to scratch. There’s also a story that she saved Lolita from the flames, when the manuscript was abandoned in a bout of frustrated rage.
Not only did William Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy produce the fair copies of her brother’s work, but his wife and sister-in-law also helped out with the transcribing. Rumour has it that Dorothy did far more than simply transcribe: she also acted as his literary executor after his death, and edited his unpublished works.
Fitzgerald was more indebted to his wife Zelda than he ever let on. As Zelda scathingly announced, after the publication of This Side of Paradise:
I recognize a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.
In a recently published book The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald, by my colleague Deborah Pike, you can finally read some of these stolen passages and their sources side by side.
“Willy” was the pen name of the once famous but now forgotten writer Henry Gauthier-Villars, a tremendously successful self-promoter and author of 50 novels penned by a stable of ghostwriters, including his wife. The apocryphal story goes that Henry would go so far as to lock his wife in a room until she had produced the desired quantity of prose. One day his wife, deciding she had finally had enough, left. She published the rest of her work under a surname you might recognise: Colette.
Alison Summers was Peter Carey’s wife and editor for 20 years. She’s been thanked for a lot more than typing in all of Carey’s best known books, such as The True History of the Kelly Gang, where he thanks Summers for her “clear literary intelligence and flawless dramatic instinct”. This all changed following their famously acrimonious divorce, after which Summers claimed she had been transformed into a minor character – described as the “Alimony Whore” – in Theft: A Love Story. Carey denied the link.
On a happier note, Samuel Clemens – better known as Mark Twain – met Olivia Langdon in 1867, and took her to a reading by Charles Dickens. They married, and Olivia almost inevitably became her husband’s editor, assisting him with his books, and also with his journalism, until her death in 1904.
Of course, if you want to thank your wife, and do the job properly, there’s no better example than John Stuart Mill. His effusive thanks to his wife Harriet is exemplary. Mill wrote, in the dedication to On Liberty, that Harriet had been responsible for all of the “great thoughts” he ever had. More than a few churlish critics have taken issue with Mill’s claim, arguing that more than a few of these thoughts got published before John and Harriet even met.
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Of course, there have been times when the hard work has also run in the other direction. George Eliot’s portrait of Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, slaving away as an assistant for her strikingly untalented husband, Edward Casaubon, writing his unfinished book Key to All Mythologies, is not a portrait of her own relationship. Her soulmate George Henry Lewes never faltered in his admiration for his far more famous partner, and even, legend has it, went to fetch her library books.
Leonard Woolf, husband to Virginia, the author of A Room of One’s Own – perhaps the most famous argument for a space for women writers in a male dominated tradition – also gave up much to comfort his finally inconsolable wife. He took her on trips to Harley Street, and long cures in the country. As Virginia wrote in her fateful suicide note of 1941,
You have been entirely patient with me, and incredibly good … I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.
Camilla Nelson, Associate Professor of Writing, University of Notre Dame Australia
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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There is a wonderful scene in the film Amadeus that depicts Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart dictating, from his death bed, the words and music of his Requiem mass – a piece thought of as a requiem for the composer’s death which is now regarded as one of the greatest pieces of music ever written. Mozart dictates to the rival composer Salieri, who in equal measure admires and hates Mozart. A central theme of Peter Schaffer’s original play, which the film is based on, is the originality of genius versus “mediocrities everywhere”. 
Building on my recent work on the philosophy and history of writing, I’ve been trying to work out what constitutes “world-leading” writing, and effective writing more generally. Over the past three years I’ve analysed interviews with the world’s greatest writers as well as examined renowned guides to writing styles and standards of language. I’ve also been studying young people’s creativity and writing. And, throughout my work, the composition of music has been compared with the composition of written text.
World leading is a big claim. Perhaps we would agree, just as the Nobel Prize committee did, that Peter Higgs’s and François Englert’s work in physics on the Higgs boson particle was world leading. How about Virginia Wolfe’s contribution to literature? Or Andrew Wiles’s mathematical proof that solved the 300-year riddle of Fermat’s last theorem?
In addition to the work of people such as Mozart, Higgs/Englert, Wolfe and Wiles, a sense of what is “world leading” is also fundamental to assessing research more generally. For example in the UK’s 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise, an assessment of research in all the UK’s universities that takes place every few years, 30% of research outputs across all academic disciplines were rated as world leading. These outputs included musical compositions and performances, artefacts and exhibitions, and, of course, journal articles, chapters and books. Across all these different outputs the most important criterion to demonstrate world-leading research quality was “originality”.
But what is originality? And how do people write something original?
With regard to writing, one source of information about originality is in the words of world-leading writers themselves. For the Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway, writing involved the creation of a whole new thing, a “birth” that – if it succeeded – would be immortal. Hemingway suggested that originality draws from things that already exist but also that the creation must be genuinely new, and even “alive”.
Originality is not just the preserve of fiction writers. The biographer Michael Holroyd said he disliked the “non” in non-fiction, preferring instead the descriptions “re-creative writing” or with an addition: “non-fiction stories”. Holroyd felt that there can be originality in the primary research that underpins an outstanding biography as well as the ways in which the story is ultimately told. Primary research is also part of the work of novelists. Marilyn Robinson’s first book, Housekeeping, was revered by critics. This success was achieved in part, according to Robinson, through careful scholarship including reading of primary historical sources.
Another source of information about originality can be found in psychological research on creativity. Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky saw originality emerging from particular kinds of thinking that combined unknown conditions with experiences recorded in memory. And psychologist Morris Stein’s definition of creativity included the idea that “the creative work is a novel work that is accepted as tenable or useful or satisfying by a group in some point in time”. So a feature of originality, in writing or other creative outputs, is that ultimately it can only be determined through the judgements of others.
Comparison of musical composition with the composition of words can teach us more about writing. Melodies in music are like themes or lines of argument in writing. And musical metaphors are common in writers’ attempts to explain the more ethereal aspects of creativity. Jack Kerouac spoke of “blowing like the tenor man”, describing the improvisation of the saxophonist when playing jazz music, to elucidate his understanding of the improvisational qualities of fiction writing.
The ears and the mind engage with one another in the composition of music. This is also true of the composition of written text. My hypothesis, inspired by my research, is that the “the writer’s ear” is equally as important as that of the musician.
The writer’s ear explains the ability to “read like a writer”, which involves not only admiring writing, and engaging emotionally, but also perceiving the techniques that writers use. The ear of the writer is instrumental in the initial attention to a wide range of relevant sources for writing: for example the previous research in the field. This consideration of previous work is part of the writer’s drive for originality – the writer’s ear supports the selection of the original idea for research. The writer’s ear also ultimately attunes the rhythms of the specific written language, in a paper or book, that is also needed to convince people that the output is world leading.
But even those authors with a good ear for writing would never say the process is easy. When American novelist and essayist William Styron was asked if he enjoyed writing, he replied:
I certainly don’t. I get a fine, warm feeling when I’m doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let’s face it, writing is hell.
Dominic Wyse, Professor of Education, UCL
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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