Best Books for Writers

This anthology of trans and genderqueer poetry and poetics gathers a wide range of poets from across aesthetics and backgrounds, and celebrates their poems and poetic statements that reflect on their individual relationships to language, activism, and identity. A historic and long overdue achievement, this collection of fifty-five poets includes Samuel Ace, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, kari edwards, Joy Ladin, Dawn Lundy Martin, Eileen Myles, and John Wieners. 

Based on Joyce Carol Oates’s writing seminar at Princeton University, this anthology collects numerous types of narratives—including short stories and their early drafts, poems, short plays, myths, and folktales—and recommends in its introduction “to read widely, to read with enthusiasm, to read for pleasure, to read with an eye for another’s craft.” By providing models of rich storytelling, Oates instructs and inspires writers to challenge their work, and includes an afterword on the writing workshop with supplementary prompts and advice. 

“You cannot possibly know right now how much your work is going to impact someone, someday.” In this guide for creatives, Beth Pickens writes with candor and wisdom about the power, pleasure, and responsibility of creating art, providing inspiring assignments, practical strategies, and skills and techniques designed to sustain writers through a lifetime of creativity. “Your work—the work you’re making right now and the work you haven’t dreamt of yet—is going to impact the people who need to experience it.”

“Telling Lies for Fun and Profit is the equivalent of a house call from the family doctor. Whatever my condition, whatever the nature of my creative symptoms that day, I know I can count on a sympathetic ear and an effective remedy. Whether he’s talking about plot, character motivation, point of view, or revisions, his suggestions are practical and his guidance is dependable.” In the introduction to this 1994 edition of Lawrence Block’s handbook, Sue Grafton writes about the book’s innumerable lessons, and the value of revisiting its insights, advice, and wisdom about dealing with the obstacles many writers face repeatedly over the course of years of creative practice: motivation, priorities, commitment, work habits, writer’s block, hopelessness and faith, and failure and success. 

“The novella-in-flash takes the best of both of its namesakes’ lengths, blending the extreme brevity of the flash with the longer—albeit still brief—arc of the novella,” write editors Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney in the introduction to My Very End of the Universe, a unique collection of five exemplary works of this hybrid genre. Each of the five novellas—by Chris Bower, Margaret Patton Chapman, Tiff Holland, Meg Pokrass, and Aaron Teel—is composed of stand-alone flash pieces and accompanied by a short essay by the author about craft elements specific to the form. Each piece embodies the strengths of this unique genre and how it “mixes the quick and the sustained into a single whole that may—if a reader wishes—be perused in one pass, but which coheres into a unity that will linger in the mind.” 

“I believe my existence would be a jumble without recourse to writing, especially the writing of poetry,” writes former poet laureate of Vermont Sydney Lea in this collection of essays, part of the Writers on Writing series, that spans over thirty years. Lea’s explorations of topics, including the process of creating a poem, the function of literary criticism, nature writing, the practical concerns of a writer’s life, and his analyses on the work of Williams Wordsworth and Robert Frost, reveal the power of poetry to assist in discovering one’s place in the world. “Whatever their quality,” Lea writes, “my poems provide the means to discover otherwise unknowable connections among my soul’s responses.”

“What I am after is ‘enough’—enough to set the writing gears going, which may not be very much. Sometimes just a pinch of information is enough.” In this book, Julia Cameron, the author of the Artist’s Way, shares her insights and experiences to help writers delve deep within themselves to find inspiration for creative work. The personal essays are accompanied by exercises that prompt reflective thinking designed for writers in need of motivation and renewal. 

The author of two dozen suspense novels leads readers through her writing process, revealing the steps she took to start and finish her 2008 novel, Careless in Red, from conceiving the characters and developing the voice to outlining the plot and building the scenes. In Mastering the Process, George returns to the form she established in her 2004 book, Write Away: One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life, in which she illustrates her points using examples from works by Barbara Kingsolver, Harper Lee, E. M. Forster, John Irving, Toni Morrison, Stephen King, Ernest Hemingway, and Alice Hoffman. This time she sticks to one consistent model—the book she wrote herself using a process she has followed for twenty-two of her twenty-four novels. The result is a behind-the-scenes look at a bestselling author’s decisions as they are made throughout the creative process. 

“Funny Weather is populated by artists who move and excite me, who look with sharp eyes at the societies they inhabit but who also propose new ways of seeing,” writes Olivia Laing in the foreword to this collection of essays, letters, interviews, and criticism that meditates on the work of artists and writers such as John Ashbery, Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Hockney, Chris Kraus, Deborah Levy, Hilary Mantel, Maggie Nelson, Georgia O’Keeffe, Sally Rooney, and David Wojnarowicz. Laing provides an inspiring perspective of the significance of creative work: as a tool for resistance and reparation. “What drives all these essays is a long-standing interest in how a person can be free, and especially in how to find a freedom that is shareable, and not dependent on the oppression or exclusion of other people.”

In this comprehensive handbook, Kevin Larimer and Mary Gannon, the two most recent editors of Poets & Writers Magazine, distill fifty years of knowledge and resources accumulated by the nonprofit organization and its magazine. Topics include practical tips about how to submit to literary magazines, writing contests, MFA programs, and literary agents; insights about self-publishing and small presses; and the connections between writing and family, friends, community, respect, and happiness. The book also features writing prompts, craft advice, and personal essays about writing by acclaimed authors such as Jennifer Acker, Jane Hirshfield, Ada Limón, George Saunders, and Ocean Vuong.  

“There must be a crack in the poet of some sort. It has to be deep, privately potent, and unmendable—and the poet must forever try to mend it.” In her first book of essays, Pulitzer Prize–winner and former U.S. poet laureate Kay Ryan includes insightful literary criticism, book reviews, and personal essays on poetry and poets—such as Emily Dickinson, Annie Dillard, Robert Frost, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marianne Moore, Marilynne Robinson, Stevie Smith, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams. Writers will be inspired by Ryan’s distinctively fresh perspectives on the roles of art and poetics in a creative life.