Best Books for Writers

In American Journal, published by Graywolf Press in association with the Library of Congress, former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith selects and introduces fifty poems that examine and pay tribute to the diversity of experiences that make up the United States—stories from rural and urban communities, the grief and losses of war, the triumph of immigrants, and lessons learned from history. Taking its title from a poem by Robert Hayden, the first African American appointed as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, this anthology includes the work of Jericho Brown, Natalie Diaz, Aracelis Girmay, Joy Harjo, Marie Howe, Layli Long Soldier, and Natasha Trethewey, among others. This timely anthology welcomes readers to connect to poetry through storytelling, as Smith states in the introduction: “This is why I love poems: they invite me to sit down and listen to a voice speaking thoughtfully and passionately about what it feels like to be alive.” 

In Follow the Story, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist James B. Stewart lays out techniques on writing nonfiction from conception to publication, covering wide-ranging topics such as research, structure, description, dialogue, humor, and endings that can be used for a variety of genres, including fiction and narrative nonfiction. Lauded by many in the literary community, this book on the craft of nonfiction guides writers through every aspect of telling a compelling story and offers a reminder that writing, as Stewart says, “may be absorbing, satisfying, even exhilarating, but it is hard work.”

ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness, winner of the 2014 Believer Poetry Award, collects twenty-three writing exercises and their resulting poems that involve rituals with the senses that push the attention of writers to the political and ecological effects of the body. Writers are brought out of the quotidian and encouraged to sharpen their senses and connect to the world around them with pointed reminders: “As much as 80 percent of human communication is nonverbal, remember this detail.” Through this book, CAConrad, who teaches workshops on (Soma)tic poetry and ecopoetics, inspires and encourages risk and imagination. “Take the quiet with you to write your poem.”

In this updated and illustrated edition of Raymond Queneau’s 1947 modernist masterpiece, translated from the French by Barbara Wright, an ordinary story of an encounter on a Parisian bus is retold in ninety-nine different ways in the tradition of the Oulipean literary group. From a metaphorical retelling to an “abusive” retelling, where the events are condemned, to a sonnet and a tanka, this anniversary edition includes new exercises by Jonathan Lethem, Ben Marcus, and Lynne Tillman, adding to Queneau’s innovative and instructive exploration of language’s possibilities.

“It’s a fascinating enterprise, this business of trying to tell the truth about the world through writing that is at once factual and literary,” write editors Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard in the introduction to this book focused on the wide-ranging genre of creative nonfiction. With over thirty essays and an accompanying reader, Writing Creative Nonfiction collects insight on vital elements of writing craft from esteemed writers, including Annie Dillard, Martín Espada, Phillip Lopate, Brenda Miller, and Judith Ortiz Cofer. Forms from the critical essay to the lyric essay, and the academic biography to journalism are covered, and there are prompts and exercises to engage anyone interested in learning more about the genre. 

This anthology of trans and genderqueer poetry and poetics gathers a wide range of poets from across aesthetics and backgrounds, and celebrates their poems and poetic statements that reflect on their individual relationships to language, activism, and identity. A historic and long overdue achievement, this collection of fifty-five poets includes Samuel Ace, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, kari edwards, Joy Ladin, Dawn Lundy Martin, Eileen Myles, and John Wieners. 

Based on Joyce Carol Oates’s writing seminar at Princeton University, this anthology collects numerous types of narratives—including short stories and their early drafts, poems, short plays, myths, and folktales—and recommends in its introduction “to read widely, to read with enthusiasm, to read for pleasure, to read with an eye for another’s craft.” By providing models of rich storytelling, Oates instructs and inspires writers to challenge their work, and includes an afterword on the writing workshop with supplementary prompts and advice. 

“You cannot possibly know right now how much your work is going to impact someone, someday.” In this guide for creatives, Beth Pickens writes with candor and wisdom about the power, pleasure, and responsibility of creating art, providing inspiring assignments, practical strategies, and skills and techniques designed to sustain writers through a lifetime of creativity. “Your work—the work you’re making right now and the work you haven’t dreamt of yet—is going to impact the people who need to experience it.”

“Telling Lies for Fun and Profit is the equivalent of a house call from the family doctor. Whatever my condition, whatever the nature of my creative symptoms that day, I know I can count on a sympathetic ear and an effective remedy. Whether he’s talking about plot, character motivation, point of view, or revisions, his suggestions are practical and his guidance is dependable.” In the introduction to this 1994 edition of Lawrence Block’s handbook, Sue Grafton writes about the book’s innumerable lessons, and the value of revisiting its insights, advice, and wisdom about dealing with the obstacles many writers face repeatedly over the course of years of creative practice: motivation, priorities, commitment, work habits, writer’s block, hopelessness and faith, and failure and success. 

“The novella-in-flash takes the best of both of its namesakes’ lengths, blending the extreme brevity of the flash with the longer—albeit still brief—arc of the novella,” write editors Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney in the introduction to My Very End of the Universe, a unique collection of five exemplary works of this hybrid genre. Each of the five novellas—by Chris Bower, Margaret Patton Chapman, Tiff Holland, Meg Pokrass, and Aaron Teel—is composed of stand-alone flash pieces and accompanied by a short essay by the author about craft elements specific to the form. Each piece embodies the strengths of this unique genre and how it “mixes the quick and the sustained into a single whole that may—if a reader wishes—be perused in one pass, but which coheres into a unity that will linger in the mind.” 

“I believe my existence would be a jumble without recourse to writing, especially the writing of poetry,” writes former poet laureate of Vermont Sydney Lea in this collection of essays, part of the Writers on Writing series, that spans over thirty years. Lea’s explorations of topics, including the process of creating a poem, the function of literary criticism, nature writing, the practical concerns of a writer’s life, and his analyses on the work of Williams Wordsworth and Robert Frost, reveal the power of poetry to assist in discovering one’s place in the world. “Whatever their quality,” Lea writes, “my poems provide the means to discover otherwise unknowable connections among my soul’s responses.”

“What I am after is ‘enough’—enough to set the writing gears going, which may not be very much. Sometimes just a pinch of information is enough.” In this book, Julia Cameron, the author of the Artist’s Way, shares her insights and experiences to help writers delve deep within themselves to find inspiration for creative work. The personal essays are accompanied by exercises that prompt reflective thinking designed for writers in need of motivation and renewal.