Best Books for Writers

This anthology collects twenty-four essays by contemporary women poets whose careers were influenced by the women who came before them. Selections include Beth Ann Fennelly on Denise Duhamel, Katy Lederer on Lyn Hejinian, Aimee Nezhukumatathil on Naomi Shihab Nye, Eleni Sikelianos on Alice Notley, and Tracy K. Smith on Lucie Brock-Broido, with poems by both the mentors and mentees following the essays. The book demonstrates the powerful, varied, and complex ways in which mentorship takes form and poetic traditions move between generations and within a community.

Curated by editors Eleanor Wilner and Maurice Manning, this book of thirty-five essays—by poets such as Tony Hoagland, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Linda Gregerson, A. Van Jordan, Thomas Lux, and C. Dale Young—discusses the unexpected sources of poetic discovery, unique approaches to revision, and offers personal insights into the writing process. “The venture of this collection is to look, from the many vantages that the poets in this eclectic anthology chose to look, at what it was—knowing that a poem can’t be conceived in advance of its creation—that nevertheless helped their poems to emerge or connected them over time.”

“Making a sentence sing is a way of making others more likely to listen and ourselves more likely to be understood. A good sentence gives order to our thoughts and takes us out of our solitudes.” English professor Joe Moran provides a guide to the construction of effective sentences, covering integral considerations such as word order, nouns and verbs, plain words, and long sentences. With examples from the Bible and Shakespeare to Orwell and Diana Athill, and with support from scientific studies on what attracts readers, writers of all genres will find Moran’s tips and examples practical and helpful in developing their skills.

This anthology collects nearly one hundred examples of short creative nonfiction by acclaimed authors such as Andrei Codrescu, Rita Dove, Joy Harjo, Bhanu Kapil, Li-Young Lee, Barry Lopez, Naomi Shihab Nye, Michael Ondaatje, and Cynthia Ozick. Writers will be inspired by the diversity of themes, styles, and sensibilities found in the pieces—ranging from a few paragraphs to two thousand words—which demonstrate the wide scope and emotional potential of the form.

The second edition of this handbook, originally published in 1987 by the nonprofit Teachers & Writers Collaborative, guides writers through more than seventy traditional and modern poetic forms and terms including the abstract poem, the cinquain, the ghazal, the macaronic verse, the tanka, and the villanelle. Each entry contains a definition and history, a variety of exemplary passages, and helpful prompts and hints for usage.

In this book, writer, editor, and teacher William Zinsser provides the guidance and tools to excavate one’s past for the “small, self-contained incidents” that can be transformed into memoir. Zinsser draws upon the work of authors such as Annie Dillard, Mary Karr, and Henry David Thoreau, and presents personal examples from his own life to offer advice and insight into key issues of memoir writing, including how to select the best anecdotes and memories, writing about places and people, and placing trust in the creative process and one’s instincts. 

Award-winning poet and critic Stephanie Burt, who was the subject of a 2016 installment of Reviewers & Critics by Michael Taeckens, offers an accessible introduction to reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry, from Shakespeare’s sonnets to “non-book forms of poetry” shared via social media. “Don’t Read Poetry is for readers hunting sharp, nimble thinking about culture, comprehension, and poems,” writes National Book Award–winning poet Terrance Hayes. “Whether discussing an ancestral Hawai’ian language, a canonical poet like Langston Hughes, or contemporary poets like Rodrigo Toscano and Jennifer Chang, Stephanie Burt manages to illuminate ‘the difficult process of turning paired marks into words.’ Don’t read poetry, she suggests, read poems.”

The tenth edition of Janet Burroway’s classic 1982 book guides fiction writers of all levels through the entire creative process, with updated exemplary passages and advice from contemporary authors, and sections on current issues such as distraction, appropriation, different genres, and young adult fiction. Chapters focus on characterization, setting, plot and structure, point of view, and revision, and each closes with a list of suggested readings and writing prompts that allow for further study.

Divided into two parts, the first half of this guide focuses on syntax, covering parts of speech and the grammar of phrases and clauses. The second half concentrates on usage and propriety, exploring topics such as dangling participles, Oxford commas, language myths, and sentence fragments. June Casagrande’s guidance is humorous and straightforward, and provides writers with clarification of the ever-evolving nature of words, and the confidence to use language more intentionally in their creative work.

“Modernist poetry’s reputation for difficulty leads many readers to overlook the fact that poets of the modern era are continually joking, mocking, and making puns,” Rachel Trousdale writes in the introduction to this book highlighting humor. In this collection of ten essays, professors and scholars of modern poetry discuss humor as a “structurally central” and “constitutive part” of poetry citing work by Elizabeth Bishop, Phyllis McGinley, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and others. The essays focus on the different ways humor can connect, alienate, push boundaries, or demonstrate how a writer approaches a particular audience.

Published in hardcover by Knopf last May, the bestselling novelist’s essay collection, now in a paperback edition, contains insights into Russo’s life as a writer, teacher, and reader. While the nine pieces that make up the collection hold the same warmth, generosity, compassion, and humor that have drawn readers to his previous books, including the novels Everybody’s Fool and That Old Cape Magic and the memoir Elsewhere, it is Russo’s insightful record of the writing life, with all the usual markers of rejection, failure, revision, and hard work, as well as his sober take on the business of publishing that are the real draw for writers.

“Literary influence...is the story of a writer’s deliberate attempt to find and make something like a literary home,” writes the poet, professor, and former director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in the preface to this collection. Writers seeking to make a literary home of their own will be inspired by Collier’s illuminating essays, written over the course of twenty years, which explore how he has been influenced by authors including Louise Bogan, Jorge Luis Borges, William Meredith, and Walt Whitman.