Perplexing Plots

By David Bordwell,

Book cover of Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder

Book description

Narrative innovation is typically seen as the domain of the avant-garde. However, techniques such as nonlinear timelines, multiple points of view, and unreliable narration have long been part of American popular culture. How did forms and styles once regarded as "difficult" become familiar to audiences?

In Perplexing Plots, David Bordwell…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Perplexing Plots as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I love mystery novels and crime films and Perplexing Plots explores the tricks and techniques that writers use to conjure up fantastic plot twists.

The author is an academic but I found this book easy to read as well as informative, entertaining, and astonishingly insightful. I’ve read a lot of books and articles about the crime genre, but I enjoyed this more than any other. Best of all, it left me with a great list of future reading.

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Tap Dancing on Everest by Mimi Zieman,

Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route up…

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