Val Nolan

Tiffani Angus (Ph.D.) and Val Nolan (Ph.D.) met at the 2009 Clarion Writers' Workshop in California and since then have collaborated many times as fans and scholars on panels for SFF conventions and writing retreats.Working together on this book and combining their experience as SFF writers and as university lecturers in Creative Writing and Literature made perfect sense Every year they see new students who want to write SFF/Horror but have never tried the genres, have tried but found themselves floundering, or, worse, have been discouraged by those who tell them Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror are somehow not "real" literature.This book is for all those future Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror writers. Tiffani and Val are approaching these three exciting fields by breaking them down into bite-sized subgenres with a fun, open, and contemporary approach.Each chapter contains 10 subgenres or tropes, with a quick and nerdy history of each derived from classroom teaching practices, along with a list of potential pitfalls, a description of why it's fun to write in these subgenres, as well as activities for new writers to try out and to get them started

Hailed in the Irish Times as a 'great Irish novelist', Neil Jordan is, in the words of Fintan O'Toole, 'a peculiarly emblematic figure of cultural change'. Yet, extraordinarily, such critical acclaim has come about without detailed scholarly engagement with Jordan's most sustained interrogation of Ireland and notions of Irishness: his fiction. Neil Jordan: Works for the Page fills this gap in contemporary Irish literary criticism, and, while Jordan's filmmaking is often discussed, the focus here is on his published work: his early volume of short fiction, his many novels, and several of his uncollected stories. The result is a work which will enhance understanding of contemporary Irish cultural studies while also suggesting future directions for the criticism of other artists operating in multiple creative disciplines. The significance of this book lies in its discussion of what kind of artist Neil Jordan really is, which is not necessarily the kind of artist that Irish Studies currently perceives him to be. He is neither just an Oscar-winning filmmaker nor a European novelist of the first rank, he is both, and the comprehensive introduction to the literary author provided by Neil Jordan: Works for the Page has been carefully structured to appeal to those familiar with only the filmmaker. This engaging study examines how, in a forty-year writing career, Jordan has engaged with and expanded upon many core concerns of Irish literature: the struggle to define oneself against the weight of history, both political and artistic; the quest to understand the nation's violent efforts to transcend and process its colonial past.