A Guide to Creative Writing and the Imagination

"Teaching creative writing for the multicultural, global, and digital generation, this volume offers a fresh approach for enhancing core writing skills in the major forms of Poetry, Fiction, Nonfiction, and Drama. Creative Writing and the Imagination aims to provide students with organic, active learning through imitation and examples which not only emphasize writing and reading but look to other art forms for inspiration. This volumes key features include: Strengthening key underlying capabilities of what we mean by imagination: physical and mental alertness, clarity of perception, listening skills, attention to detail, sustained concentration, lateral thinking, and enhanced memory. Taking direction from other art forms such as African American musical improvisation, Brancusis sculptural idea of "finding form," key idea from drawing such as foreground, background, and negative space-and some of the great lessons learned from National Geographic photography. Incorporating techniques drawn from unusual sources such as advertising, military intelligence, ESL, working with the blind, stage magic, and oral traditions of remote indigenous cultures in Oceania and Africa. The work is intended for a global English market as core or supplementary text at the undergraduate level and as a supporting frame at the M.F.A. level"--

Literature & Fiction

Saknussemm, Kris

History & Criticism

Routledge

Teaching creative writing for the multicultural, global, and digital generation, this volume offers a fresh approach for enhancing core writing skills in the major forms of Poetry, Fiction, Nonfiction, and Drama. A Guide to Creative Writing and the Imagination aims to provide students with organic, active learning through imitation and examples which not only emphasize writing and reading but look to other art forms for inspiration. This volume's key features include: - Strengthening key underlying capabilities of what we mean by imagination: physical and mental alertness, clarity of perception, listening skills, attention to detail, sustained concentration, lateral thinking, and enhanced memory. - Taking direction from other art forms such as African American musical improvisation, Brancusi's sculptural idea of "finding form," key ideas from drawing such as foreground, background, and negative space--and some of the great lessons learned from National Geographic photography. - Incorporating techniques drawn from unusual sources such as advertising, military intelligence, ESL, working with the blind, stage magic, and oral traditions of remote indigenous cultures in Oceania and Africa. The work is intended for a global English market as a core or supplementary text at the undergraduate level and as a supporting frame at the M.F.A. level.

A powerful, sometimes brutal, but often outrageously funny saga of survival and salvation on the road across a New Depression Era America, where only one thing may be clear anymore. People need each other more than ever.“Saknussemm is a rare visionary of American culture, a fearless artist with is very own skew on the western world. Reverend America is brilliant.”- Jonathan Evison, New York Times best-selling author of West of Here“Dangerous, hilarious, wildly imagined, weird as a carnival midway, and real and tragic as blues harmonica. Reverend America is blisteringly good."- Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander (Oprah Book Club Pick)“Mr. Saknussemm soloed like a jazz master.”- New York Times

Reverend America

Literary

Argo-Navis

WHO IS ELIJAH CLEARFATHER? Futuristic bioweapon or good old-fashioned messiah? Reincarnated ex-porn star or mutant information-age revolutionary? The man who awakens in New York City’s Central Park with no memory of his identity and the enigmatic message FATHER FORGIVE THEM F carved into the flesh of his back may be all of these things and more. Taken in (and then expelled) by a group of freedom fighters battling the soul-deadening Vitessa Cultporation, Clearfather is a stranger in an even stranger land. Following tantalizing clues that point to the gnomic Stinky Wiggler, and pursued by murderous Vitessa agents, Clearfather embarks on a surreal odyssey of self-discovery across an America that resembles a vast amusement park designed by some unholy trinity of Walt Disney, Hunter S. Thompson, and Hieronymus Bosch. Accompanying Clearfather is an unforgettable cast of characters–including Aretha Nightingale, an ex-football-playing drag queen; Dooley Duck and Ubba Dubba, hologram cartoon characters sprung outrageously to life; and the ethereally beautiful Kokomo, whose past is as much a mystery as Clearfather’s own. By turns hilarious and deeply moving, a savage, fiercely intelligent satire that is also a page-turning adventure and a transcendent love story, Zanesville marks the arrival of a brilliant new voice in fiction.

Zanesville: A Novel

Humor & Satire

Villard

Enigmatic Pilot is Kris Saknussemm’s outrageously brilliant yet profoundly moving exploration and excavation of the American dream—and nightmare.   In 1844, in a still-young America, the first intimations of civil war are stirring throughout the land. In Zanesville, Ohio, the Sitturd family—Hephaestus, a clubfooted inventor; his wife, Rapture, a Creole from the Sea Islands; and their prodigiously gifted six-year-old son, Lloyd, whose libido is as precocious as his intellect—are forced to flee the only home they have ever known for an uncertain future in Texas, whence Hephaestus’s half-brother, Micah, has sent them a mysterious invitation, promising riches and wonders too amazing to be entrusted to paper.Thus begins one of the most incredible American journeys since Huck Finn and Jim first pushed their raft into the Mississippi. Along the way, Lloyd will learn the intricacies of poker and murder, solve the problem of manned flight, find—and lose—true love, and become swept up in an ancient struggle between two secret societies whose arcane dispute has shaped the world’s past and threatens to reshape its future. Each side wants to use Lloyd against the other, but Lloyd has his own ideas—and access to an occult technology as powerful as his imagination.

Enigmatic Pilot: A Tall Tale Too True

Del Rey

MATHIAS TRUE IS REVEREND AMERICA. CALLING YOU BACK TO THE HOLY MUSIC OF LIFE. IT IS TRUE! LOVE IS YOUR ONLY REDEEMER! Rocky is the road. Weary is the way. Lay your burden down. Come be Healed by this Glorious WHITE KNIGHT! Mathias is better known as Casper, an albino preacher who had healing ways in his youth. Back in his hometown of Joplin, Missouri seeking rest from years of hurt, Casper soon finds himself with the pregnant teenage prostitute Angelike outrunning their pasts on the great road south. Dangers follow them, characters as crazed and colorful as America’s own history greet them, and Casper finds himself on the unexpected road to salvation. Singing in a space between Flannery O’Connor and Carl Hiaasen, Reverend America mixes the old with the new. A kicking and spitting true-to-life tale that is Saknussemm’s most heart-rending to date.

Dark Coast Pr

By the author of Zanesville, a seductive story of grit, gunplay, vampirism, and a bit of bondage. Detective Birch Ritter is a man on the edge-of himself. His past is filled with secrets, shadows, guilt, and ghosts. Then a dubious police buddy he hasn't seen in a year introduces him to a mysterious woman who says her business is shadows. What she knows about what lies between the darkness and the light inside men is more than Ritter may want to find out, and much more than he can resist learning. It's said that to try to forget is to try to conceal, and concealing evidence is a crime. But maybe revelation is another kind of crime-against nature. Kris Saknussemm, the widely acclaimed author of the sci-fi smash Zanesville,, now delves into another genre, and another world-a world where even the sunlight is shadowy and where deviancy is the norm. Private Midnight is a journey into the seedy, sexy, underbelly of life-crime noir for a new generation.

Private Midnight: A Novel

United States

The Overlook Press

Detective Birch Ritter is a man on the edge-of himself. His past is filled with secrets, shadows, guilt, and ghosts. Then a dubious police buddy he hasn't seen in a year introduces him to a mysterious woman who says her business is shadows. What she knows about what lies between the darkness and the light inside men is more than Ritter may want to find out, and much more than he can resist learning. It's said that to try to forget is to try to conceal, and concealing evidence is a crime. But maybe revelation is another kind of crime-against nature. Kris Saknussemm, the widely acclaimed author of the sci-fi smash Zanesville, now delves into another genre, and another world-a world where even the sunlight is shadowy and where deviancy is the norm. Private Midnight is a journey into the seedy, sexy, underbelly of life-crime noir for a new generation.

Bowling lessons with a hunchback. A bizarre first-grade teacher who hallucinates in class. A tragically innocent family blind-sided by flower power, and the salvation of soul music at a radio station straight out of a Quentin Tarantino version of The Twilight Zone. These are just a few of the luminous characters and conjurings Kris Saknussemm delivers in his kaleidoscopic Sea Monkeysthe story of his growing up in the counterculture San Francisco Bay Area and central California in the 1960s. Known for his genre-bending works Zanesville and Private Midnight, Saknussemm now gives us a highly original take on the nonfiction memoir, in which he shatters the stained glass windows of his father's church and mixes the pieces with ghost cartoons, the Cronkite contradictions of Civil Rights demonstrations, and ads for laxatives during a strange hiatus in American sanity when Sly Stone and Perry Como could both be in the Top 10. Honest, funny, and at times heartbreaking, Sea Monkeys is the no-holds-barred tale of one of our most exciting contemporary authors’ own coming of age, and the perfect follow-up to Saknussemm’s Zanesville, which Booklist hailed as one of the most creative, edgy, and entertaining novels spawned in a decade.”

Sea Monkeys: A Memory Book

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

Catapult

Sinister Miniatures is the definitive collection of short fiction by Kris Saknussemm, confirming that he is one of the best, most daring writers of the weird to emerge in the twenty-first century.

Sinister Miniatures

Erotica

Eraserhead Pr

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Saknussemm, Kris. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Saknussemm, Kris

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Saknussemm, Kris. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A Guide to Creative Writing and the Imagination

A Guide to Creative Writing and the Imagination

Reverend America

Zanesville: A Novel

Enigmatic Pilot: A Tall Tale Too True

Reverend America

Private Midnight: A Novel

Private Midnight: A Novel

Sea Monkeys: A Memory Book

Sinister Miniatures