Best Books for Writers

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.

This book is an engaging primer on the art of writing flash fiction. David Galef covers the origins, evolution, and subcategories of the form that include vignettes, prose poems, character sketches, fables, lists, twist stories, surrealism, and metafiction. Each chapter is full of practical tips, techniques, and editing strategies specific to flash fiction, as well as inspiring prompts and exemplary stories by authors such as Donald Barthelme, Colette, Roxane Gay, Yusef Komunyakaa, Bharati Mukherjee, Sei Shōnagon, Alice Walker, and John Edgar Wideman.

“This collection of short chapters emphasizes the ways in which a strong poetic voice is connective, binding the speaker and the reader into a conversation compelling enough to be called a relationship,” Tony Hoagland writes in the introduction to his posthumously published guide to crafting the poetic voice. In twelve concise sections, the award-winning poet offers an intimate manual with chapters on worldliness, vernacular, speech register, material imagination, audience, and more. The appendix is replete with exercises and prompts for instructors and writers who want to put their new skills into practice.

“Memory is rarely whole or factually correct....What we remember is a reconstruction of image and feeling that suits our needs and purposes.” Author and psychotherapist Maureen Murdock begins this two-part book by exploring the mutability of memory and its powerful connection to identity, drawing upon her own experiences with a mother struggling with Alzheimer’s disease and examining works of memoir by authors such as Isabel Allende, J. M. Coetzee, and Mary Karr. The second part of the book acts as a primer guiding writers through the practical elements of craft with writing exercises and chapters including “Getting Started,” “Universality,” and “Emotional Truth and the Voice of the Narrator.”

Each of the ten sections of this book edited by poet Diane Lockward focuses on a poetic concept, covering topics including diction, etymology, sound, tone, point of view, and revision. There are thirty micro craft essays by acclaimed poets such as Natasha Sajé, Maggie Smith, and Diane Seuss, each in turn followed by writing prompts and model poems. The craft pointers provide a helpful review and challenge for writers wishing to push beyond the basics, and the Top Tips lists are compiled by poets who share their most inspiring words of advice and wisdom.