Best Books for Writers

The latest volume of the Under Discussion series published by the University of Michigan Press celebrates the life and work of Pulitzer Prize–winning author Forrest Gander. This collection of essays includes insights and interviews from a wide range of poets, novelists, critics, and translators, including Charles Altieri, Stephanie Burt, Julia Fiedorczuk, Jorie Graham, Dan Beachy-Quick, Srikanth Reddy, and Jeanette Winterson. The essays cover Gander’s poetry, fiction, and translations, as well as themes in his work, such as the natural world, love, companionship, loss, and renewal. His influence on other writers and his collaborative spirit are evident in these reflections. “He is distinctive, I think, in the extent to which he brings into the form and substance of his poetry the work of other artists,” writes editor Robert Baker in the introduction. “It’s as though his books conjured an open field of creative interdependence, where receptivity and activity, attention and invention, are palpably conjoined. One might say that all his work takes place in this air of permeable life, permeable art.” 

“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.  

Collected for the first time in one volume, Language as Liberation compiles Toni Morrison’s lectures from her tenure as a professor at Princeton University as she explores and interrogates the American literary canon. Morrison examines the works of American authors, such as Ernest Hemingway, Carson McCullers, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Gertrude Stein, and Mark Twain, and how the American conception of race is both reflected and invented in these works. With an introduction from Morrison’s Princeton comparative literature colleague Claudia Brodsky, this book displays the brilliance of Morrison, as a thinker, reader, and writer. “The originality of Morrison’s thinking, with respect to the composition of specifically American fiction, lies, by contrast, in its theoretical and practical contention that imagination and race do not contradict but rather supplement each other within the constitution of a constitutively divided nation’s literature,” writes Brodsky. 

Although he is best known for his novels and essay collections, which have remained in print, James Baldwin’s single book of poetry, Jimmy’s Blues, is the only book to fall out of print. This collection, published by Beacon Press in 2014, includes all nineteen poems from his original book of poetry and all the poems from his little-known, limited-edition volume, Gypsy. With an introductory essay by Nikky Finney, this book celebrates Baldwin as a poet with his lyrical insights on race, gender, class, and identity that remain as poignant as the day they were written. “Baldwin wrote poetry throughout his life. He wrote with an engaged, layered, facile hand,” writes Finney. “His language: informal, inviting; his ideas from the four corners of the earth, beginning, always with love.” 

In the Art of Brevity, Grant Faulkner, author of Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo (Chronicle Books, 2017) and the cofounder of 100 Word Story, guides readers through the inner workings of short fiction. Describing the book as a “meditation on the aesthetic of brevity,” Faulkner walks through the art of excision, compression, and breath that a writer will learn when creating stories of less than a thousand words. “The short form requires a deeper humility from the writer,” says Faulkner. “You’re writing not to draw attention to yourself, as some works do with verbal flourishes or stylistic panache, but to serve the story in all of its nuances, searching for exactly the right word to work in such a tiny space. A short-short exists on a different plane.” Among the twenty-four chapters in the book are: “The Freedom of Constraints,” “The Fullness of Omission,” and “Is It Poetry or Prose?” Each chapter ends with a writing exercise, inviting readers to try out all of the different forms of flash fiction and observe what elements truly matter in a story. 

In this book on craft, former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass dismantles the idea of a poem down to its barest building blocks, from the one-line haiku to the villanelle and sonnet. “A single line is a naked thing. It is both light and heavy. It is, obviously, the basic unit of all lyric forms,” begins the first chapter. Examining poems by Catullus and Allen Ginsberg, Issa and Czeslaw Milosz, among others, Hass investigates the ancient roots of the poetic impulse, taking a wide-ranging look at the form and its creations.  

Edited by U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze, this is the first anthology of poetry translation published in association with the Library of Congress during a laureate’s appointment, part of Sze’s signature project “Words Bridging Worlds.” Covering nearly two millennia of poetry and featuring twenty-three poems drawn from thirteen languages, Sze guides readers through key works showcasing multiple translations of the same source poems and original poems written by translators in order to display the creative art and depth of translation. The collection is organized into zones that interconnect and highlight works of Surrealism, classical Greek poetry, visual poetry, and Asian poetry. “A good translation appeals to our ears, eyes, and heart; it is a singular endeavor and a humanizing act that makes the ancient contemporary, the foreign accessible and the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual music of the human interior universal,” writes Sze in the introduction. Transient Worlds is an invitation to “revel in the power of words” and to craft your own translations and poems inspired by the act of translation.  

“At the heart of this anthology is the belief that poetry is open to everyone but also the recognition that substantial progress within it takes years of apprenticeship, of experimenting, of trying, of failing,” begins the introduction to this volume of craft essays edited by Abayomi Animashaun. With over sixty contributors, from emerging to established poets, the topics range from how to begin a poem to muses, form, workshops and community, and publishing. This collection of voices offers inspiration, practical tips and advice, and writing prompts to poets at any stage of their career. The book may also be a great addition for anyone teaching poetry. 

One needn’t be a writer to appreciate the essays in Jesmyn Ward’s collected nonfiction, filled as they are with insights and observations about the two-time National Book Award–winning author’s childhood and upbringing in rural Mississippi, her experience raising a Black son in the United States, and the personal tragedies that have impacted her life. But the book holds special treasures for writers looking for examples of how art, and writing in particular, helps us survive. The collection features Ward’s “Why Fiction Matters” address at the Library of Congress in 2023, the speech she delivered at Toni Morrison’s memorial in 2019, her Eudora Welty lecture “You Tell Your Story: You Survive,” and essays about authors such as Octavia Butler and Ta-Nehisi Coates. “Writers were magic-workers,” she writes in the introduction about a realization she had in the library of her elementary school. Readers of On
Witness and
Respair will know the feeling.  

Each of the ten sections of this book of craft essays edited by poet Diane Lockward focuses on a poetic concept, covering topics such as diction, etymology, sound, tone, point of view, and revision. The thirty micro craft essays by acclaimed poets, including Natasha Sajé, Maggie Smith, and Diane Seuss, are each followed by prompts and model poems with the idea that “the craft of poetry can be taught and its best teacher is a good poem.” In addition, the Top Tips lists compiled by accomplished poets are filled with inspiring words of advice and wisdom. Throughout the book, the lessons provide a helpful review and challenge for any writer wishing to push beyond the basics.  

From the author of three inventive novels, including Life Is Everywhere (Graywolf Press, 2022), as well as collections of poems, short stories, and essays, comes a unique book that is at once a compendium of intriguing writing exercises (“Write about a character who invents her own readers”), a collection of questions (“Who is writing this book?”), and a “diary of contemplation and imagination.” At home alongside Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit and Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, Three Six Five presents fresh ways of thinking about writing and the endless possibilities it contains. “Locate the shadows nearest you,” Ives writes in No. 65 of an entire year’s worth of entries and encourages writers to describe them, first in terms of their qualities, then: “What do these shadows hide or reveal? What is inside them?” For writers with a love of play and a spirit of discovery, Three Six Five offers encouragement and inspiration for a year of literary exploration.