Best Books for Writers

The best-selling author of nine novels, including the 2002 Pulitzer Prize–winning Empire Falls, collects a dozen new essays exploring how life and art inform each other and how the stories we hold dear shape both our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. In the first half of the collection, simply titled “Life,” Russo offers intimate reflections on family and love, including “Triage,” in which he describes the terror of seeing his seven-year-old grandson in critical condition with a collapsed lung. The essays in the second section, “Art,” deal more directly with the writer’s craft, as in “The Lives of Others,” in which Russo tackles the thorny issue of appropriation, and “Words and Their Arrangement,” in which he asserts that “while it’s possible to be careless with language and be a successful writer, it’s not possible to be a great one, for the simple reason that words matter.” 

In this step-by-step guide to understanding and using the basic building blocks of storytelling, John Truby expands on his first book, The Anatomy of Story. Using his decades of teaching experience with novelists and screenwriters, Truby focuses in on the history of storytelling and how different genres can impact an audience. In each chapter he analyzes a specific genre—including horror, action, memoir, science fiction, thriller, and love story—and reveals the ways in which a writer can combine elements of different genres to craft powerful and engaging stories. “Stories don’t just serve as forms of entertainment; they encapsulate everything from the basic organizing principles of the world to how we should live our lives in it,” writes Truby in the introduction. “We humans are essentially storytelling animals.” 

This extensive volume of feminist literature edited by Roxane Gay includes selected writings by ancient, historic, and more recent feminist voices such as Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, Sara Ahmed, Dorothy Allison, Anna Julia Cooper, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mona Eltahawy, Leslie Feinberg, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Eileen Myles, and the Guerrilla Girls. Through this nine-part anthology, Gay presents multicultural perspectives, ecofeminism, feminism and disability, feminist labor, gender perspectives, and Black feminism. Through The Portable Feminist Reader, readers have the opportunity to explore the state of American feminism in all its complexity and history, and the ways in which feminist thought and literature continue to expand. “More than anything, this feminist reader is not a fortress; it is not an end point,” writes Gay in the introduction. “It is the beginning of what I hope will be a vibrant and vigorous conversation about historical and contemporary feminist thought. This is a text that embraces contradiction and complexity.” 

“Since early adolescence I have wanted to live the life of a poet,” writes Fanny Howe in the introduction of her book of essays. Her essays form a collage of recollected memories and imaginative explorations of topics including travel, language, childhood and family, historical events and figures, love and relationships, philosophy and religion—all integral components of her life as a poet. Writers will be inspired by Howe’s intensely lyrical reflections on the creative minds and thinkers who have influenced her and the questions, experiences, and forces that have propelled her work.  

In this revised and updated edition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1998 handbook, writers will learn how to read and revise their own work following a discussion of the basic components of prose. The ten chapters included cover everything from punctuation to point of view​, and are interspersed with examples from classic works of literature and writing exercises that put into practice Le Guin’s tips on craft. “The judgment that a work is complete...can be made rightly only by a writer who’s learned to read her own work,” she writes. “To make something well is to give yourself to it, to seek wholeness, to follow spirit. To learn to make something well can take your whole life. It’s worth it.”  

In this anthology, award-winning poet Robert Pinsky demonstrates how one learns to write poetry by first learning to read it. Divided into four sections—Freedom, Listening, Form, and Dreaming Things Up—Pinsky presents his mentors’ work to encourage the reader to take a practical approach, with informed pleasure and sharp interest in the craft. Included are exemplary works from poets such as Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, and William Carlos Williams. “A guide like this book aims to make useful hints and suggestions for the journey,” writes Pinsky in the preface. “For me, this anthology will succeed if it encourages the reader to emulate it by replacing it, or supplementing it.”  

The thirty-two essays included in this collection were published in the magazine, Creative Nonfiction, which debuted in 1994 when the literary genre was still met with skepticism. The magazine helped writers explore the personal essay and bring the genre recognition with its contributors pioneering what would come to be known as the “fourth genre.” This anthology includes contributors from the magazine’s seventy-eight issues, award-winning and contemporary authors such as Brian Boome, Carolyn Forche, Elizabeth Fortescue, Anne McGrath, John McPhee, Adrienne Rich, Richard Rodriguez, Charles Simic, and John Edgar Wideman. “Creative nonfiction was, in many ways, a release,” writes Creative Nonfiction’s founder and editor Lee Gutkind in the introduction. “It allowed and encouraged writers of poetry and fiction to cross genres, reach for new ideas, and find fresh ways of expression.” 

The author of two dozen suspense novels leads readers through her writing process, revealing the steps she took to start and finish her 2008 novel, Careless in Red, from conceiving the characters and developing the voice to outlining the plot and building the scenes. In Mastering the Process, George returns to the form she established in her 2004 book, Write Away: One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life, in which she illustrates her points using exemplary works by E. M. Forster, Ernest Hemingway, Alice Hoffman, John Irving, Stephen King, Barbara Kingsolver, Harper Lee, and Toni Morrison. This time she sticks to one consistent model—the book she wrote herself using a process she has followed for many of her novels. The result is a behind-the-scenes look at a bestselling author’s decisions as they are made throughout the creative process. 

In this guidebook on creative research and how to use it to lend authenticity to works of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, author and professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington speaks to the hard work and thrill of research. Helpful chapters guide writers through the steps of preparing a research plan, fact-checking, interviewing subjects, and using “memory, imagination, and personal expertise.” Gerard demystifies the research process with approachable steps to shine a light on the art which often unearths surprises and fuels imagination. “Research can take you to that golden intersection where the personal meets the public, the private crosses the universal, where the best literature lives,” writes Gerard. “It is deeply rooted in the writer’s heart, yet blossoms out into a larger thing that includes the world.”   

“Instinct alone isn’t enough. To produce a work of art, technique must also be brought to bear. When instinct and technique merge seamlessly, I call the result cunning,” writes Peter Selgin, author and professor at Georgia College & State University, in this craft book “for serious writers of all levels.” The comprehensive guide includes practical advice and exemplary passages that cover essential elements of the writing process from inspiration and ideas, to point of view and dialogue, to structure and revision.  

In this intergenerational collection, contemporary poets of multiple languages and lands illuminate the meaning of the Asian American and Pacific Islander identity. Contributors to this anthology divided into five sections—“Talk Story,” “Mourn,” “Pronounce,” “Fight,” and “Love”—include Marilyn Chin, Sarah Gambito, Sarah Kay, Ed Bok Lee, David Mura, Joshua Nguyen, Patrick Rosal, Teresia Teaiwa, Haunani-Kay Trask, and Shelley Wong. “Gathered from a range of contemporary schools and movements, these poems move, push, pulse,” write the editors in the introduction. “They are alive: gathered heat, heat gathering, and gathered into a motely but—we must insist—beautiful We.”