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stormblessed4's review against another edition
Okay book, wrong time. I'll likely get back to it at some point. (Also, Stacey D'Erasmo was my professor in college!)
binchsensei's review against another edition
informative
fast-paced
4.0
Solid! Definitely achieved what it set out to accomplish. Great variety of strategies and sample texts.
snowmaiden's review against another edition
3.0
When I first came across this book, I thought from the title it must be a self-help book. Then when I read the description, I decided it was best classified as a writing manual. But now that I've read it, I think it fits best to call it a meditation. D'Erasmo, a novelist, examines how a wide range of authors are able to render the intimacy between characters on the page. She would make a wonderful literary critic, as her description of each of her sources makes me want to read the book myself! I'm not exactly sure that I got any really useful tips on how to depict intimacy in my own writing, though. All in all, this was a nice read that introduced me to some new books, but if I had paid $12 for it, instead of getting it for free from a Goodreads giveaway, I might have been disappointed. (Especially because it's so very short-- only 123 5x7 pages with wide margins. It was really more like reading a longish journal article than a book.)
luucy's review against another edition
3.0
This book read like a high school English class with some of its literary analysis insightful and some pretty unnecessary and possibly too much of a stretch. Regardless, it wasn't what I was expecting when I picked up the book.
libraryfairyrachel's review against another edition
4.0
A book that's somewhere between a writing manual and literary criticism. The author here writes about writing, which many authors have done, but she does so with an *argument* in mind: that great literature explores unique character relationships through different forms of intimacy. Her examples show an interesting perspective on what brings people together. Sex(uality) is mentioned here and there, but more illuminating examples were the use of candlelight, the interactions between a murderer and his victim, the grammatical subjunctive, and many others that had little at all to do with traditional forms of intimacy. It definitely made me reconsider the way my characters interact on the page and how I can make their intimacy more unique.
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