Jane Alison is the author of a memoir, The Sisters Antipodes, and four novels: The Love-Artist, The Marriage of the Sea, Natives and Exotics, and Nine Island. She is also the translator of Ovid’s stories of sexual transformation, Change Me. She is professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville. Find out more at www.janealison.com.
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2019 | A Poets & Writers Best
Books for Writers
"Alison’s close readings can be exhilarating. One of her more
seductive ideas is the notion of possible 'correlations between
kinds of stories and certain patterns,' as when reflective
first-person novels adopt the spiral . . . Alison’s prose is potent
and lush, her enthusiasm infectious . . . The fecundity of Alison’s
writing is of a piece with her larger mission: to turn narrative
theory into a supersaturated mindfuck of hedonistic extravaganza.
It is a special kind of literary criticism." ―Katy Waldman, The New
Yorker
"A playful, insightful taxonomy of narratives that while seeming to
defy categorization, in fact take their innovative structures from
patterns found in nature: fractals, cells, wavelets, and more . . .
A thought-provoking manual for writers, critics, and casual readers
alike." —The Atlantic, One of the Best Books of the Year
"You don’t have to be a professional writer to enjoy novelist Jane
Alison’s brilliant new craft guide Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design
and Pattern in Narrative, published by Catapult Press. Anyone who
reads stands to appreciate her argument that the primary way most
of us are taught that fiction ought to be structured―Freytag’s
famous triangle―is neither the best nor the only method." ―Kathleen
Rooney, Chicago Tribune
"Transformative . . . This book will introduce you to works you’ve
never heard of, and also change your interpretation of better-known
stories; Alison’s reading of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, for
instance, pushes the novel’s symmetrical structure beyond gimmick
and into something sublime. The questions many of these texts ask,
Alison points out, are not 'what happens next?' but 'why did this
happen?' and 'what grows in my mind as I read?'" ―Maddie Oatman,
Mother Jones
"How lovely to discover a book on the craft of writing that is also
fun to read. Australian author Jane Alison has written a great one
in which she urges us to abandon―or at least improve upon―the
traditional story arc that has dominated fiction since the age of
Aristotle. Alison asserts that the best stories follow patterns in
nature, and by defining these new styles she offers writers the
freedom to explore but with enough guidance to thrive." ―Maris
Kreizman, Vulture
"If you’d like permission to write something that doesn’t fit into
a traditional sense of what constitutes a story, this book is very
affirming." —Rachel Krantz, BuzzFeed
"Jane Alison’s book on craft calls into question the dramatic arc
many writers have been taught to follow in their work . . . Alison
presents a 'museum of specimens' including writing by Anne Carson,
Raymond Carver, Gabriel García Márquez, Jamaica Kincaid, Clarice
Lispector, and Mary Robison, to illustrate some of the
possibilities for nonlinear storytelling―and she invites her
readers to follow these examples to 'keep making our novels
novel.'" ―Poets & Writers, One of the Best Book for Writers
“Meander, Spiral, Explode is the best craft book I’ve read in
years; it questions the primacy of the arc-shaped narrative and
presents a series of alternative ones, using for examples―and this
is no accident―some of the best books in modern literature . . .
It’ll blow your mind.” ―Emily Temple, Literary Hub
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