With this translation of Marinella’s Exhortations to Women and to Others if They Please we can now read another crucial text from her extensive body of work, one that signals a radical ideological shift from her best known text, The Nobility and Excellence of Women; we can thus enjoy a fuller picture of the author and her opinions. Only three copies of Exhortations have been located in any library, and in the absence of a critical edition this translation will prove to be a point of reference for scholars and students alike. Benedetti’s thorough introduction situates Marinella and her works within early seventeenth-century Venetian culture and the Counter-Reformation more broadly, in a way that is profoundly influenced by philology and is also theoretically sound.
—Maria Galli Stampino
Associate Professor of French and Italian
University of Miami

In this funny and perceptive collection, novelist and essayist Robert Cohen shares his thoughts on the writing process and then puts these prescriptions into practice—from how to rant effectively as an essayist and novelist (“The Piano has been Drinking”), how to achieve your own style, naming characters (and creating them), how one manages one’s own identity with being “a writer” in time and space, to the use of reference and allusion in one’s work. Cohen is a deft weaver of allusion himself. In lieu of telling the reader how to master the elements of writing fiction, he shows them through the work of the writers who most influenced his own development, including Bellow, Lawrence, Chekhov, and Babel. Rooted in his own experiences, this collection of essays shows readers how to use their influences and experiences to create bold, personal, and individual work. While the first part of the book teaches writing, the essays in the second part show how these elements come together.