The Craft of Fiction with Teddy Wayne

$600

6 sessions, in-person meetings

Once a week Wednesdays, 6:30 pm - 9:00 pm April 10 to May 15, 2019

The Center for Fiction
15 Lafayette Avenue
Brooklyn, NY, USA

In addition to workshopping fiction in this six-session class, we will read published stories that focus on different elements of craft: showing versus telling, point of view, characterization, dialogue, and narrative. When we discuss the class’s creative output, we will strive to isolate these elements as much as possible, homing in on problematic areas. In addition, we will discuss questions concerning publishing. Novel excerpts are permitted. This course is open to writers with all experience levels.

About

Teddy Wayne

Teddy Wayne

Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels Apartment (forthcoming in 2020), Loner, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, and Kapitoil. He is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN/Bingham Prize, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A regular contributor to the New York Times, The New Yorker, and McSweeney’s, he has taught at Columbia University and Washington University in St. Louis. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the writer Kate Greathead, and their son.

1 .

Loner

By Teddy Wayne

Named a best book of the year by NPR, Kirkus Reviews, and BookPage • One of the most anticipated novels of the fall from New York magazine, Glamour, Lit Hub, Boston magazine, The Millions, and BookPage.

David Federman has never felt appreciated. An academically gifted yet painfully forgettable member of his New Jersey high school class, the withdrawn, mild-mannered freshman arrives at Harvard fully expecting to be embraced by a new tribe of high-achieving peers. Initially, however, his social prospects seem unlikely to change, sentencing him to a lifetime of anonymity.

Then he meets Veronica Morgan Wells. Struck by her beauty, wit, and sophisticated Manhattan upbringing, David becomes instantly infatuated. Determined to win her attention and an invite into her glamorous world, he begins compromising his moral standards for this one, great shot at happiness. But both Veronica and David, it turns out, are not exactly as they seem.

Loner turns the traditional campus novel on its head as it explores ambition, class, and gender politics. It is a stunning and timely literary achievement from one of the rising stars of American fiction.
2 .

The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

By Teddy Wayne

One of the most critically acclaimed books of the year, Whiting Award-winner Teddy Wayne’s second novel is “more than a scabrous sendup of American celebrity culture; it’s also a poignant portrait of one young artist’s coming of age” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times)—and an enduring yet timely portrait of the American dream gone awry.

In his rave on the cover of The New York Times Book Review, Jess Walter praised Wayne’s writing for its “feats of unlikely virtuosity” and the boy at its center as “a being of true longing and depth, and…a devastating weapon of cultural criticism…You’d have to be made of triple platinum not to ache for Jonny Valentine.”

With “assured prose and captivating storytelling” (Oprah.com’s Book of the Week), The Love Song of Jonny Valentine also showcases “one of the most complicated portrayals of the mother-son relationship since Room” (BookPage). Touring the country in a desperate attempt to save a career he’s not sure he even wants, Jonny is both driven by his mother’s ambition and haunted by his father’s absence, constantly searching for a familiar face among the crowds. Utterly convincing, whip-smart, yet endearingly vulnerable, with an “unforgettable” voice (Publishers Weekly, starred review), the eleven-year-old pop megastar sounds “like Holden Caulfield Jr. adrift in Access Hollywood hell” (Rolling Stone).

Called “a showstopper” (The Boston Globe), “hugely entertaining” (The Washington Post), “heartbreakingly convincing” (People), “buoyant, smart, searing” (Entertainment Weekly), and “touching and unexpectedly suspenseful” (The Wall Street Journal), this extraordinary novel has been widely embraced as a literary masterpiece and the rare “satire with a heart” (Library Journal, starred review).

2 .
3 .

Kapitoil

By Teddy Wayne

“Teddy Wayne has written a brilliant book. Karim Issar is one of the freshest, funniest heroes I’ve come across in a long time.”
— Ben Fountain, bestselling author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara

“An innovative and incisive meditation on the wages of corporate greed, the fundamental darkness of its vision lit by the author’s great comic intelligence and wit.”
— Kathryn Davis, author of The Thin Place, Hell: A Novel, and Versailles

With a fresh and singular voice, Teddy Wayne marks his literary debut with the story of one 26 year old Middle Eastern man’s attempt to live the American Dream in New York City. Like the award-winning Netherland and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Kapitoil provides an absorbing look into American culture and New York finance from an outsider’s perspective.