Best Books for Writers

This volume published by Penguin Classics collects early essays by renowned Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges with his reflections on becoming a writer and the art of literature. Included are essays translated into English for the first time, including his groundbreaking essay on magical realism “Stories From Turkestan.” There are also sections on the craft of poetry, fiction, and translation, as well as one titled “The Critic at Work” with his thoughts on the work of authors such as T. S. Eliot, Herman Melville, and Virginia Woolf. Not only is this an excellent handbook for writers finding their own voice, this collection is a peek into Borges’s evolution as a writer. 

“The way we attend to the world changes the world we perceive, and the world we perceive changes the way we attend.” In this craft book, Lucy Alford shifts away from the conventional perspective of poetic form as the product of technical devices and focuses on understanding the effects of poetry through the lens of the writer’s attention, making the case that the most integral aspect of creating poetry revolves around refining relationships to attention. Alford’s close readings and analyses of work by authors, including Al-Khansā’, A. R. Ammons, Charles Bukowski, Anne Carson, Paul Celan, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Audre Lorde, Stéphane Mallarmé, Harryette Mullen, and Claudia Rankine, demonstrate the uniqueness of attention required and produced by poetry, and offers writers a fresh angle with which to approach their own work. 

This collection of essays about writing and navigating the literary world by writers of color offers wisdom, insight, support, and advice on how to carve out a more expansive space for diverse voices. The book is divided into sections focusing on themes such as literary gatekeeping, the tyranny of grammar, identities, personal narratives, rejection, and healing. Wesley Brown, Ching-In Chen, Sherrie Fernandez Williams, Marline Gonzalez, Hei Kyoung Kim, and Sagirah Shahid are among the authors of lyric essays that are paired with inspiring and generative writing exercises to help open up ideas as well as reflection and understanding. “I believe who we are influences our writing, just as who we are may defy those who think they have power over our writing,” writes Quan Lee in the introduction. “I wanted a textbook that considers the relevance of race, class, gender, age, and sexual identity; culture and language; and that by so doing, on some level, facilitates healing.” 

In this slim volume, translated from the French by Edward Gauvin, readers are welcomed into the mind of the award-winning Belgian novelist and filmmaker as he reflects on his decision to start writing, “one I made abruptly, on a Paris bus,” and the writers he admires, including Beckett, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and Proust. Within the essay, Toussaint describes his writing process and pastimes in detail, as well as the dots connecting many of his narratives and themes. Through it all, he is encouraging and his vigor to write is infectious. “That’s all there is to writing a book: this alternation between phases of gush and perseverance,” writes Toussaint. “Beside these scenes written in urgency are moments when all forward progress stops, when the winds have fallen, and we are irreparably becalmed. That is when we must persevere, hang on, grit our teeth, keep not getting there, for urgency keeps moving forward, keeps working underground, building up energy.” 

Edited by George Abraham and Noor Hindi, this anthology gathers the voices of Palestinian poets in grief, defiance, and resistance. Divided into ten sections, the themes include ecopoetics, love poems, protest poetry, and ars poetica. Intergenerational, multilingual, and transnational voices fill the pages with a long list of contributors: Heba Abu Nada, Refaat Alareer, Hala Alyan, Mahmoud Darwish, Mohammed El-Kurd, Fady Joudah, A. D. Lauren-Abunassar, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, among others. “From this project’s inception, we knew it would require many years of labor, spent both researching our literary pasts and holding the words of our living artists with the care they deserve,” write the editors in the introduction. “Amidst times we can only describe as catastrophic, the only way forward is a practice of mutual care, for each other, our community, our planet.” 

Curated and edited by Kweli Journal’s founder, Laura Pegram, this anthology of short stories celebrates the journal’s fifteenth anniversary and champions the voices of BIPOC writers in contemporary literature. The stories explore memory, identity, culture, and the ways in which language can empower and strengthen us. The storytellers of this collection include acclaimed writers, such as Naima Coster, Nicole Dennis-Benn, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Daphne Palasi Andreades, and Susan Muaddi Durraj. “The joy of reading a collection of stories like this one is in the accumulation of encounters, which in the case of this anthology all center on the short story and Kweli—‘truth’ in Swahili,” writes Edwidge Danticat in the foreword of the book. “The stories in this collection serve as windows into diverse communities while inviting readers of all backgrounds to engage with and appreciate the richness of our cultures.” 

In this craft book, poet and professor Gregory Orr offers an in-depth analysis and meditation on the time-tested ways in which reading, writing, and listening to lyric poetry can be instrumental in processing, healing, and transcending trauma and suffering. Orr selects examples and anecdotes from ancient Chinese, Egyptian, Inuit, and Japanese cultures, and brings in the work of poets—such as Emily Dickinson, Stanley Kunitz, D. H. Lawrence, Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman, and Richard Wilbur—to demonstrate the transformative power of the form. “Human culture ‘invented’ or evolved the personal lyric as a means of helping individuals survive the existential crises represented by extremities of subjectivity and also by such outer circumstances as poverty, suffering, pain, illness, violence, or loss of a loved one,” writes Orr in the introduction. “This survival begins when we ‘translate’ our crisis into language.”  

The six essays in this profound collection by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer (Grove Press, 2015) were delivered originally as the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton Lectures and reflect on what the outsider means to literary writing. Nguyen explores the idea of being an outsider through literary, historical, political, and familial lenses. Considering the writers who influenced his writing, Nguyen investigates the works of Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, William Carlos Williams, Maxine Hong Kingston, and others, while addressing concerns about the writer’s responsibility in a time of violence and the burdens and pleasures of the “minor” writer in society. “If my literary dreams began in the innocence of boyhood, with an uncomplicated love for enrapturing stories,” he writes, “my transformation into a writer was only possible through recognizing the complex power of stories and how they had shaped my own otherness, both the kind imposed on me by forces beyond my control and the otherness already hidden inside.” 

This collection from poets and scholars Dora Malech and Laura T. Smith celebrates sonnets by American poets throughout history into the present. Written by poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Jericho Brown, Lucille Clifton, Marilyn Hacker, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, Patricia Smith, Diane Seuss, Gertrude Stein, and Phillis Wheatley, these sonnets exemplify the various styles and voices expressed in this delicate form. In addition, the critical essays in the second half of the book offer studies on the methodologies, historical and theoretical perspectives, and reverence of the American sonnet. “American sonneteers early and late often write as if they are asserting the right to belong—or aren’t sure they want to belong—to the history of the sonnet, explicitly weaving their own landscape, politics, and interiority into the tradition,” write the editors in the introduction. “And while some in each generation have held the sonnet up as either the crowning jewel or an irrelevant relic of a poetic past, others have continued to plumb and sound its ongoing present.” 

The author of three books of creative nonfiction, including Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing (Random House, 2020), with more than a decade of experience teaching the craft of memoir, Elissa Altman poses important questions that any writer with a personal story to tell must confront: “Who am I to tell my story? And how can we grant ourselves permission to write the stories we’re compelled to tell when we’ve been told we shouldn’t?” Through an exploration of her own story, which started with what she calls a “non-secret secret” about her father that had a profound effect on her and her family, “binding us together for the entirety of our lives,” Altman offers a compassionate, inspiring literary guide to transcending the fear and shame that can all too often keep important stories from being written. Read “The Choice to Create,” a chapter from Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create.