In her father's Peruvian family, Marie Arana was taught to be a proper lady, yet in her mother's American family she learned to shoot a gun, break a horse, and snap a chicken's neck for dinner. Arana shuttled easily between these deeply separate cultures for years. But only when she immigrated with her family to the United States did she come to understand that she was a hybrid American whose cultural identity was split in half. Coming to terms with this split is at the heart of this graceful, beautifully realized portrait of a child who "was a north-south collision, a New World fusion. An...

Don Victor Sobrevilla, a lovable, eccentric engineer, always dreamed of founding a paper factory in the heart of the Peruvian rain forest, and at the opening of this miraculous novel his dream has come true--until he discovers the recipe for cellophane. In a life already filled with signs and portents, the family dog suddenly begins to cough strangely. A wild little boy turns azurite blue. All at once Don Victor is overwhelmed by memories of his erotic past; his prim wife, Dona Mariana, reveals the shocking truth about her origins; the three Sobrevilla children turn their love lives upside...

How do writers approach a new novel? Do they start with plot, character, or theme? A. S. Byatt starts with color. E. L. Doctorow begins with an image. In Off the Page, authors tell us how they work, giving insight into their writing process. Gathered from some of today s best writers Paul Auster, Martin Amis, Gish Jen, Dan Chaon, Alice McDermott, and many others interviewed on washingtonpost.com s Off the Page series host Carole Burns has woven their wisdom into chapters illuminating to any writer or reader. How does place influence authors? How do they make a sex scene work? How do they tell...

This book presents the work and the advanced studios of Gregg Pasquarelli in "Versioning 6.0," Galia Solomonoff in "Brooklyn Civic Space," and Mario Gooden in "Global Typologies. It features interviews and the work of the architects along with their studio projects.

Featuring a gathering of more than fifty of contemporary literature's finest voices, this volume will enchant, move, and inspire readers with its tales of The Writing Life. In it, authors divulge professional secrets: how they first discovered they were writers, how they work, how they deal with the myriad frustrations and delights a writer's life affords. Culled from ten years of the distinguished Washington Post column of the same name, The Writing Life highlights an eclectic group of luminaries who have wildly varied stories to tell, but who share this singularly...