Brooks Landon

Based on the bestselling series from The Great Courses, Building Great Sentences celebrates the sheer joy of language—and will forever change the way you read and write. Great writing begins with the sentence. Whether it’s two words (“Jesus wept.”) or William Faulkner’s 1,287-word sentence in Absalom! Absalom!, sentences have the power to captivate, entertain, motivate, educate, and, most importantly, delight. Yet, the sentence-oriented approach to writing is too often overlooked in favor of bland economy. Building Great Sentences teaches you to write better sentences by luxuriating in the pleasures of language. Award-winning Professor Brooks Landon draws on examples from masters of long, elegant sentences—including Don DeLillo, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, and Samuel Johnson—to reveal the mechanics of how language works on thoughts and emotions, providing the tools to write powerful, more effective sentences.

How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read

Building Great Sentences

A series of lectures designed to broaden understanding of how the variety of ways to construct sentences, from the smallest clause to the longest sentence, is important to enhancing appreciation of great writing and potentially improving your own.

Exploring the Writer's Craft

Brooks Landon's book is wide-ranging, thought-provoking, and near state-of-the-art. It concerns science fiction film and, toward the end, almost becomes SF in its provocative speculations on the future of such film. His study is really two books in one. The first part argues that most criticism of SF film has been inadequate because it is based on literary rather than film-specific standards. The second argues that SF film will soon become either obsolete or be totally transformed through new computer technology. What ties them together is the author's concern with what might be called the SF ethos or SF thinking, so that science fiction can be seen to encompass not only SF in print, film, TV and comic books, but has become all-pervasive in contemporary culture. At present, Landon argues that SF film may have exhausted itself as a genre but new electronic technology--computer animation, interactive narratives, and virtual reality--promises to radically transform SF film and possibly create a synthesis of the divergent trends of SF literature and film. Production technology has become the new story, one more interesting than the narrative it ostensibly supports. Landon believes we are at the threshold of a new age, similar to the pioneer years of filmmaking a hundred years ago.

Rethinking Science Fiction Film in the Age of Electronic (Re) Production

The Aesthetics of Ambivalence

Thomas Berger

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

From the Steam Man to the Stars

Science Fiction After 1900

Landon presents science fiction as a social phenomenon, a set of expectations about the future that moves beyond literary experience through a sense of mission based on the assumption that SF can be a "tool to help you think." He offers a broad overview of the stages through which SF has developed in the twentieth century as well as of the large body of criticism now devoted to this genre.

Brooks Landon

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