Best Books for Writers

An acclaimed poet and critic who regularly writes reviews for the Los Angeles Times, NPR, and the New York Times Book Review, Craig Morgan Teicher assembles here a fascinating collection of essays that trace the poetic development of luminaries such as Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery, Louise Glück, W. S. Merwin, and francine j. harris, exploring how poets start out, how they learn to hear themselves, and how some of them are able to create works that stand the test of time. “I do hope,” Teicher writes, “that these investigations of various poets’ development offer other writers ways of thinking about how life and art—and how art and artists—affect one another.”

In Understanding the Essay, Patricia Foster and Jeff Porter have gathered the work of a wide range of acclaimed essayists, including James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Jamaica Kincaid, George Orwell, David Foster Wallace, and Virginia Woolf. Each writer is introduced with a contextual biography, followed by a piece by another essayist—such as Eula Biss writing about Anne Carson’s “On Trout,” Patricia Hampl writing about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up,” and Phillip Lopate writing about William Hazlitt’s “On the Pleasure of Hating”—which offers insightful analysis of a specific essay, and refreshing perspectives on the possibilities of the form.

“By giving form to devastation, the poem rescues the reader from a darkness without shape or gravity; it is an island in a free fall; it becomes his companion in grief, his rescuer, a proof that suffering can be made somehow to yield to meaning.” Louise Glück’s second book of essays is both conversational and erudite, discussing new and emerging literary figures of American poetry and topics such as originality, narcissism, and healing. The book also includes a section with introductions to the first books of poets Ken Chen, Dana Levin, Spencer Reece, Richard Siken, and others.

With Save the Cat! Writes a Novel, author Jessica Brody has reimagined Blake Snyder’s best-selling screenwriting guide Save the Cat! (Michael Wiese Productions, 2005) and adapted it for novel writing. Brody outlines fifteen essential plot points integral for structuring a compelling story, and using a wide range of examples from literature—including books by Margaret Atwood, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tana French, Stephen King, J. K. Rowling, Angie Thomas, and Alice Walker—covers topics from the ten universal story genres, to the basics of writing heroes and villains, detectives and underdogs, road trips and quests, and love and friendship.

“The critic is a reader before he is a writer, a spirited lover of literature, and criticism is one important use to which he puts his reading and his love,” William Giraldi writes in the introduction to his collection of essays on American writers, literary critics, and cultural themes spanning several decades. In the book’s three sections—American Moments, American Critics, and American Stories—Giraldi discusses Cynthia Ozick, James Baldwin, Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, Katie Roiphe, Cormac McCarthy, Allan Gurganus, and Elizabeth Spencer, among others, as well as topics such as commercial fiction, Catholic novelists, bibliophilia, and the art of hate mail.

The author or editor of seventeen books, including The Creative Writer’s Survival Guide: Advice From an Unrepentant Novelist (2010) and Vivid and Continuous: Essays and Exercises for Writing Fiction (2013), both also published by the University of Iowa Press, McNally returns with a book that mixes thoughtful advice, tips on craft, and memoir of the writing life with humor and honesty. Using his own life as a blueprint, McNally navigates thorny issues such as how to know when to quit and when to persevere as well as how to deal with depression as a creative person and ways to energize your writing through reinvention.

With The Writer’s Portable Mentor, Priscilla Long has written a comprehensive manual covering integral topics in chapters such as “Daily Writing,” “Working With Language,” “Dramatic Story Structure,” “Transitions,” and “Metaphor and Simile.” In this second edition, Long has replaced exemplary sentences and passages with revelatory new models, and updated sections to reflect how writing and publishing practices have evolved since the 2010 edition, including changes in the average length of stories, scientific findings about handwriting versus typing, and perceptions about self-publishing.

In this 2002 edition with a new introduction, California poet laureate Dana Gioia explores a range of topics on poetry’s evolving roles through his collection of essays, and considers integral craft elements with a focus on modernist poets such as Elizabeth Bishop and Robinson Jeffers. Written in lively and straightforward prose, Gioia’s insights on poetry’s marginalization, free verse versus formalism, and the merits of long narrative poetry will inspire writers to reevaluate their form and style, and examine how their work fits into contemporary society.

In A Stranger’s Journey, poet, memoirist, and critic David Mura explores the ways in which relationships to personal identity and race play an integral role in narrative expression and craft, particularly in memoir writing, using examples from authors such as Mary Karr, Maxine Hong Kingston, and ZZ Packer. Writers of all genres and levels of experience will find helpful inspiration in Mura’s guidance into using an understanding and interrogation of self as a timeless and transformative storytelling tool.

“These are not pages of criticism nor of philosophy. Nor are they merely literary pages. They are pages that have to do with one of the enlargements of life,” writes Wallace Stevens in the introduction to this 1965 edition of his collection. Throughout the seven essays, Stevens explores the expansive capabilities of poetry, connections between reality and creativity, the use of metaphors, and the role of sound and music in language. Writers will be inspired to examine and redefine their own notions of poetry and its capacity to enlarge the imagination.

“Like looking directly at the sun, looking directly at the creation of intimacy in fiction seems like a dangerous business.” This installment of Graywolf’s “Art of” series examines the various ways authors, including Joan Didion, D. H. Lawrence, Toni Morrison, and Virginia Woolf, have approached the challenge of crafting intimate relationships on the page, between friends, lovers, family members, and enemies. Writers will be inspired by D’Erasmo’s insights on methods of portraying the complexity of true connections between characters, and her emphasis on building intimacy between author and reader.

“The essays gathered in this volume contain reading suggestions and imprecations, records of enthusiasms, pieces that start with particular books and move toward the larger subject of how and what and why we read....” In this essay collection, literary critic and novelist Francine Prose examines the enduring value found in reading literature by authors including Roberto Bolaño, Jennifer Egan, George Eliot, and Mohsin Hamid, taking a closer look at the craft of writing on the sentence level. By reflecting on the specific elements of writing that can provide for powerfully transformative and transportive reading experiences, Prose offers writers an opportunity to approach their own work from new angles and with fresh inspiration.