Best Books for Writers

What started as a blog to chart the process of translating Chilean author Diamela Eltit’s novel Never Did the Fire (Charco Press, 2022), turned into a book by translator Daniel Hahn describing the challenges he met along the way and the care that’s put into literary translation. Covering three and a half months, the entries were written in real time and include rough first drafts, painstaking edits, and discussions about the book title. Hahn does not aim to be instructional, but rather hopes to share with humility the work of producing translation and to enhance the pleasure of reading translated literature. “Translation does not develop smoothly, predictably, neatly—or at least, it doesn’t for me—and what might seem an occasionally shambolic diary is a more honest representation, I think, than something that suggests premeditation, predictability and order,” writes Hahn. “Progress is something halting; but you can be reassured, the translation will get done in the end.” 

First published in 1969, this collection of Flannery O’Connor’s essays and lectures is curated by the author’s lifelong friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. A mix of published articles and essays alongside previously unpublished essays and lectures, O’Connor’s distinct style and wit permeate throughout each piece. The volume begins with “The King of the Birds,” her well-known essay on raising peacocks at her home in Georgia, and the sections following include essays and lectures on regional writing, teaching literature, and the writer and religion—all with valuable lessons for any writer and admirer of literature. “A story that is any good can’t be reduced, it can only be expanded,” writes O’Connor in “Writing Short Stories.” “A story is good when you continue to see more and more in it, and when it continues to escape you.” 

What began as a book club, then a podcast about a year of Indigenous reading, is now a book of essays by Patty Krawec, author of Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future. In Bad Indians Book Club, Krawec examines work written from the perspective of “Bad Indians,” marginalized writers who “return to themselves through histories told by those who have a different stake in those stories” and who “tell our own stories, even when they aren’t pretty.” With a foreword written by novelist Omar El Akkad, the essays explore works by Octavia Butler, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Natalie Diaz, David Treuer, and many others, as well as works about history, science, and gender. “You need to think about your own grounding, belonging, the places you are from and who you bring with you so that you understand the relationships you form with the books that you read,” writes Krawec. 

Evolving from the event series of the same name created and hosted by Maria Popova, founder of the website The Marginalian, each essay in this collection focuses on an enchanting facet of science—entropy and dark matter, symmetry and the singularity, octopus intelligence, and the evolution of flowers—and is paired with a poem reflecting its subject by an array of poets, including Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Maya Angelou, Sylvia Plath, Tracy K. Smith, and Marie Howe. Throughout the book are colorful illustrations by artist Ofra Amit. “Poetry and science—individually, but especially together—are instruments for knowing the world more intimately and loving it more deeply,” writes Popova in the introduction. “We need science to help us meet reality on its own terms, and we need poetry to help us broaden and deepen the terms on which we meet ourselves and each other.” 

“When I write a book I surrender not to the liberal travels of my restless thoughts but to the design of the work itself,” writes Natalie Goldberg in the follow-up to her books Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind. Goldberg leads writers through the steps of the creative process that come after inspiration—directing energy and focus to transform raw material into completed work for publication—and provides helpful anecdotes and insights about editing, advice about essential craft elements, and reminds us to celebrate the act of writing. “Writing a book is my one chance to experience freedom, to cut loose by succumbing to the discipline of form.” 

This anthology collects nearly a thousand poems published in the New Yorker over the last century. The magazine’s poetry editor Kevin Young curates a selection of influential and memorable poems from acclaimed writers such as Kaveh Akbar, John Ashbery, Sandra Cisneros, e. e. cummings, Louise Glück, Amanda Gorman, Langston Hughes, W. S. Merwin, Czesław Miłosz, Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Plath, Tracy K. Smith, and Derek Walcott. Organized into sections honoring times of day (“Morning Bell,” “Lunch Break,” “After-Work Drinks,” “Night Shift”), as well as the decades of the last century, the voices of poets intertwine beyond time and space. There is also a handy author index and title index in the back. “Good poems make the everyday extraordinary and turn the extraordinary into a daily occurrence,” writes Young in the introduction. “Those poems that make an impression do so because they uncover something for a reader, through language and music, form and freedom, something that we might not anticipate or know we need.” 

Written by two novelists who also teach creative writing, The Lab takes as its premise the idea that great writing doesn’t start with form but rather with the unquenchable drive to create—and that writers should be encouraged to take risks and experiment before accepting a formal container into which they will write. Davison and LaPlante, who is also the author of The Making of a Story: A Norton Guide to Creative Writing (Norton, 2010) as well as the previous Best Books pick Write Yourself Out of a Corner: 100 Exercises to Unlock Creativity (Norton, 2023), offer ninety exercises that challenge writers to play with genre, try a hybrid form, or make up an entirely new one.  

Best-selling novelist Chuck Palahniuk takes readers behind the scenes of the writing life in this blend of memoir and guidebook filled with practical advice, anecdotes, and the kind of insights readers might expect from the author of Fight Club, Choke, and Haunted. In a chapter titled “Establishing Your Authority,” for example, he writes: “To create a story in which the reader never thinks to criticize the characters, kill the mother or father before the first page.” At its heart Consider This is a tribute to those who taught Palahniuk himself, including novelist Tom Spanbauer whose unconventional writing workshop in Portland, Oregon provided an essential space for the author to improve his writing. 

In this craft book, novelist and professor Madison Smartt Bell provides thorough and insightful analyses of twelve short stories—by former students and established writers including Percival Everett, Ernest J. Gaines, Mary Gaitskill, and William T. Vollmann—to demonstrate and model different techniques for crafting narrative to create powerful storytelling. For each story, Bell dissects basic elements such as plot, character, tone, point of view, and dialogue, and then offers endnotes on language, subject matter, and style for a complete take that will help writers develop their own voice. 

Published in 1986, Patterns of Poetry is an encyclopedia of the forms used by poets throughout history and begins with an introduction from author, editor, and translator Miller Williams linking history with the continued evolution of literature. “It is the nature of the arts—including literature—that they shape themselves to social changes, whether these are major upheavals altering the lives of a population in midcourse or slower shifts in the social climate, hardly perceptible to those who live through them,” he writes. “How a form relates to the life of the age in which it emerges, or reemerges, is among the central questions a student of the arts must explore.” From blank verse to hymnal measure, from haiku to the sonnet, each form is introduced with a explanation of its origin and schematics, followed by exemplary poems from various poets. The book also includes a glossary, bibliography, additional sample poems, as well as an essay on the line as the prosodic unit. 

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.”