Best Books for Writers

“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.  

This anthology of flash fiction collects eighty-six short shorts by authors from six continents, including Petina Gappah, Yasunari Kawabata, Etgar Keret, Kim Young-ha, Naguib Mahfouz, Shabnam Nadiya, María Negroni, Lili Potpara, Josephine Rowe, and Juan Villoro. The range of work demonstrates the expansive potential of this abbreviated form (stories usually containing no more than 750 words), and will inspire writers to view storytelling in new ways. 

Joining titles such as Edith Grossman’s Why Translation Matters and Jay Parini’s Why Poetry Matters in Yale University Press’s Why X Matters series, the new volume by Delbanco explores questions of influence and the creative impulses toward imitation and originality. The author of more than thirty books of fiction and nonfiction, Delbanco draws on his decades of teaching experience at Bennington College, Skidmore College, Columbia University, and elsewhere—he was director of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor until 2015—to offer a kind of reading workshop, equal parts memoir, literary history, and scholarly analysis. 

Rose Metal Press’s guide gathers thirty-four short personal essays about prose poetry by practitioners and teachers of the form, including Joe Bonomo, Brigitte Byrd, Maxine Chernoff, Denise Duhamel, Ray Gonzalez, Bob Hicok, Tung-Hui Hu, David Keplinger, and Gary Young. The essays share a diverse range of experiences, influences, and styles that demonstrates the possibilities for innovation in the form, and each one is followed by two exemplary prose poems by the essayist. 

How to Grow a Novel is a comprehensive guide for writers seeking practical advice on the nuts and bolts—as well as integral but often overlooked craft elements—that go into writing fiction. Sol Stein, who died in 2019, shares indispensable insights and specific techniques and examples gained from decades of writing novels and plays, and editing the work of authors such as W. H. Auden, James Baldwin, Elia Kazan, George Orwell, Lionel Trilling, and Simone Weil. 

“The way we attend to the world changes the world we perceive, and the world we perceive changes the way we attend.” 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. 

Roy Peter Clark’s “writing book about writing books” collects tips culled from over fifty different guides to writing, including books by E. M. Forster, Natalie Goldberg, Donald Hall, Stephen King, Anne Lamott, John McPhee, Strunk and White, Kurt Vonnegut, and James Wood. The book has six parts for different categories of storytelling strategies, each with a concise synopsis of the tool or technique discussed (complete with explanations and anecdotes), and a list of helpful reminders for implementing the advice. 

“In addition to giving writers the information they need to feel in control of their publication journey, Before and After the Book Deal is a safe house for the publishing questions many authors are too afraid to ask,” writes author Courtney Maum. Maum tackles practical pre-book deal questions such as “Am I writing the wrong book?,” “How should I submit?,” and “What if everyone says no?,” and post-deal issues including book titles, covers, author photos, sales, reviews, events, and life after the debut. The book also includes advice from over fifty authors and publishing professionals, and offers lists of helpful references and resources. 

“Embracing a seasonal approach to your creativity can change everything, because it roots you to your own innate rhythms in a way our social media-fueled, busy-as-a-badge-of-honor culture does not,” writes Nicole Gulotta in Wild Words. Broken down into ten chapters—including “The Season of Self-Doubt,” “The Season of Listening to Your Body,” and “The Season of Finishing”—this book covers self-care rituals, personal stories, and practical routines that aid writers in embracing their craft amidst all their daily duties. Guided by an approach that “allows you the spaciousness to be exceedingly gracious with yourself,” writers can learn how to enter into a new, sustainable, and healthy relationship with their creativity. 

American Audacity, part of the Writers on Writing series, is a collection of essays examining the significant role regionalism has played in literary criticism and American literature. In the book’s three sections—Northerners, Southerners, and the Union Reconsidered—Christopher Benfey writes about authors, such as James Agee, John Dos Passos, Emma Lazarus, Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty, and how their work is situated in the country’s literary tradition, providing an inspiring new perspective on how social identity informs an author’s work.