True Notebooks (First Edition)

Salzman, Mark

ISBN 10: 0375413081 / ISBN 13: 9780375413087

Published by Knopf, New York, 2003

About this Item

New York, Knopf, 2003. First edition. First printing . Hardbound. Fine in a fine jacket. A clean tight copy. Tiny soiling to side edge. Publisher's price intact on front jacket flap ($24.00). Comes with archival-quality mylar jacket protector. Smoke-free. Shipped in well padded box.

Seller Inventory # Literature-Salzman

Bibliographic Details

• Title: True Notebooks (First Edition)
• Publisher: Knopf, New York
• Publication Date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375413081
• ISBN 13: 9780375413087
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine

About this title

Synopsis

When Mark Salzman is invited to visit a writing class at Central Juvenile Hall, a lockup for Los Angeles’s most violent teenage offenders, he scrambles for a polite reason to decline. He goes—expecting the worst—and is so astonished by what he finds that he becomes a teacher there himself. True Notebooks is an account of Salzman’s first years teaching at Central. Through it, we come to know his students as he did: in their own words.

At times impossible and at times irresistible, they write with devastating clarity about their pasts, their fears, their confusions, their regrets, and their hopes. They write about what led them to crime and to gangs, about love for their mothers and anger toward their (mostly absent) fathers, about guilt for the pain they have caused, and about what it is like to be facing life in prison at the age of seventeen. Most of all, they write about trying to find some reason to believe in themselves—and others—in spite of all that has gone wrong.
Surprising, charming, upsetting, enlightening, and ultimately hopeful—driven by the insight and humor of Salzman’s voice and by the intelligence, candor, and strength of his students, whose writing appears throughout the book—True Notebooks is itself a reward of the self-expression Mark Salzman teaches: a revelatory meditation on the process, power, and meaning of writing.

About the Author

Mark Salzman is the author of Iron & Silk, an account of his two years in China; Lost in Place, a memoir; and the novels The Laughing Sutra, The Soloist, and Lying Awake. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the filmmaker Jessica Yu, and their daughter, Ava.