Best Books for Writers

“These collected writings, passed down to each of us, hold the power of information. Each of us holds to our chest what solidifies our understanding of our place in this world. What can a body do with such an understanding?” writes Mahogany Browne in the foreword to this collection of writings by Audre Lorde, reissued for Penguin Classics as a part of the Penguin Vitae series. Known for her groundbreaking writings on race, gender, and sexuality, the fifteen essays and speeches in this book, including “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” and “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” do the difficult work of connecting one’s written work to the intersections of identity and social change. This influential text is not only a must-have for any writer for its incisive and lyrical prose but an essential text for anyone seeking to connect with another. 

“This structure—this architecture—is the essential drama of the poem’s composition,” argues Ellen Bryant Voigt about syntax in this timeless installment from The Art Of series published by Graywolf Press and edited by Charles Baxter. “With poetry as with music, the first step toward mastery is recognition.” With thorough discussions of prosody and syntax, Voigt parses out line by line the music of poetic language in works by Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Stanley Kunitz, and others, examining what it is they deploy technically that allows meaning to come together. At times overwhelming with detail, this influential craft book carries a glossary in the back with key prosody terms, making it an indispensable book for all writers to return to, again and again, as they hone the music of their language. 

“I sometimes think I was born reading,” writes Vivian Gornick in Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader, a collection of essays that tracks the books the critic and memoirist has read over and over again, helping to shape her storied life and prolific writing career. Through incisive and intimate writing, Gornick finds herself identifying with opposing characters in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, and considering the veracity of memory through Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, as well as discussing the prose of writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, Natalia Ginzburg, and Doris Lessing. Part memoir and literary criticism, Gornick’s book is a reminder of the importance of reading for a writer’s life and how it helps one “feel the power of Life with a capital L.” 

Composed of short form pieces from the sixteenth century to the present, this anthology edited by Alan Ziegler gives readers a sense of the long tradition of the form and how authors across generations continue to influence one another. Arranged chronologically by the year of each author’s birth, there are prose poems, short-short stories, brief essays, fragments, and more from writers such as Louise-Sébastien Mercier, William Blake, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Octavio Paz, Lydia Davis, Kimiko Hahn, and Claudia Rankine. Ziegler, who instituted a Short Prose Forms class at Columbia University in 1989, encourages writers to think past genre: “Perhaps space constriction lends itself to work that subverts expectations, or maybe when writers work in a renegade form they feel free to throw caution to the winds of imagination.” 

“It should go without saying that the more one knows how to do, the more one can do,” writes Lewis Turco in this fifth edition of The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics. This go-to reference guide has been revised to aid the contemporary reader and writer, and includes classic rules of scansion, a Form-Finder index, and new examples and terms for all forms of poetry and verse. Heralded for Turco’s engaging style, this companion, sometimes referred to as “the poet’s bible,” defines, explains, and contextualizes basic concepts so any writer looking to challenge their writing can step up to the task. 

“Read these poems to yourself in the middle of the night,” advises Edward Hirsch in How to Read a Poem. “These poems have come from a great distance to find you.” With accessible language and encyclopedic knowledge, Hirsch offers a guide on how to enjoy reading poetry, proposing the possibility of forming an intimate relationship with the genre through moving commentary on works by Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Celan, Osip Mandelstam, and Walt Whitman, among others. Throughout these essays, Hirsch places the reader in the shoes of a great adventurer set to embark on a new journey, reminding them of the reason one becomes a reader of literature in the first place: “Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.” 

“This is a book of being and becoming. It is about being a poet. It is also about the long process of becoming one,” writes Eavan Boland in the preface of A Journey With Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet. These essays offer a rare view of the intimate and lifelong journey of becoming a poet, a process that “doesn’t stop because the being has been achieved” but that continues and shifts along with the writing. Beginning with personal narratives that offer striking imagery and meditations, Boland places focus on women poets and their work over the last century, including Charlotte Mew and Sylvia Plath, interweaving incisive analysis with testimonies of personal significance. The Irish poet, who died in 2020, pays homage to the craft of poetry and the writers who helped her find her place amongst contemporary literature’s most celebrated poets. 

With a mix of memoir and progressive teaching tools, Felicia Rose Chavez calls to create a classroom that exposes the invisible and physical forces of power that have dominated the traditional writing workshop for decades. Inspired by June Jordan’s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint (Routledge, 1995), Chavez offers a step-by-step guide on how to deconstruct biases and build community through a democratic teaching model that fosters “engagement, mindfulness, and generosity.” With chapter titles such as “Owning the Language of Craft,” “Teaching Writers to Workshop,” and “Promoting Camaraderie and Collective Power,” this book can help transform the worldview of how writing should be taught and liberate the minds of reader, writers, and educators. 

“For about twenty-five years I have been copying sentences into the back pages of whatever notebook I happen to be using,” writes Brian Dillon in the introduction to Suppose a Sentence, a meditative collection of essays on sentences in literature that have captivated the critic and author of Essayism. The book follows an addictive format of featuring a single sentence—from authors such as James Baldwin, Joan Didion, John Dunne, and Shakespeare—and then using the essay to mull on aspects about Dillon’s reading experience, each essay short and complex, as well as personal and enriching. Suppose a Sentence satisfies the writer as much as the reader of literature, as Dillon makes a case, again and again, for the moving and lasting power of the sentence.   

First published in 1958, Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space asks readers to consider the emergence of the poetic image and its metaphorical relationship to the intimate spaces of the home. Guided by lyrical and philosophical arguments, this examination on art, poetry, and consciousness itself challenges readers to think back to the domestic spaces that shape one’s dreams and memories: rooms, cellars, drawers, chests, wardrobes, corners, and nests, among other places. Sure to unlock imagination and encourage examination, this book is a guide full of inspiration for any writer. As Bachelard writes, “We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.” 

Although it was written prior to COVID-19 and published just as the pandemic was spreading around the globe, Fenton Johnson’s meditation on accepting and celebrating one’s solitude is a timely look at the lives and works of eleven writers and artists he calls “solitaries,” a term borrowed from Trappist monk and mystic Thomas Merton. In chapters devoted to Emily Dickinson, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry James, Henry David Thoreau, Eudora Welty, Walt Whitman, and others, Johnson, an emeritus professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona who serves on the faculty of Spalding University’s low-residency MFA program, explores the alchemy that transforms isolation and loneliness into creative solitude. 

Based on a class he has taught for years at Syracuse University, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is George Saunders at his best: funny, frank, rigorous yet accessible, and most of all humane. Paired with the full text of the author’s favorite stories by Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, and Nikolai Gogol, these essays explore not only how fiction works and why fiction written up to 185 years ago (in the case of Gogol’s “The Nose”) is as relevant now as it has ever been, but also how writing can change a reader’s life and become a fundamental part of one’s moral and ethical beliefs. As Saunders writes: “The part of the mind that reads a story is also the part of the mind that reads the world; it can deceive us, but it can also be trained to accuracy; it can fall into disuse and make us more susceptible to lazy, violent, materialistic forces, but it can also be urged back to life, transforming us into more active, curious, alert readers of reality.”