Best Books for Writers

In this anthology that expands the boundaries of what is labeled “American,” editors Jerome Rothenberg and Javier Taboada gather pieces from all parts of the Western Hemisphere and the European and Indigenous languages within going back several millenia for an expansive collection of what they call an American “omnipoetics.” The book is divided into four chronological sections—from early Columbian times to the contemporary—and five thematic sections moving across language and geographical boundaries. The final anthology from the late Rothenberg, this book is a journey through time celebrating the freedom of poetry. “There is a need for a kind of omnipoetics that tests the range of our threatened natures wherever found and looks toward an ever-greater assemblage of words and thoughts as a singular buttress against those forces that would divide and dimmish us,” write the editors in the introduction. “It is this sense that we are attempting here an omnipoetics of the American hemisphere, as an experimental instance of what might be attempted further on a worldwide scale, toward what one of us once described as “an anthology of everything.” 

Written between 1933 and 1959, the notebooks of French novelist and philosopher Albert Camus have been published in this book as one comprehensive volume for the first time. The notebooks offer insight into his process as a writer with exploratory notes about works such as The Stranger and The Fall, as well as his thoughts on politics, his travels, health issues, frustrations, and his relationships with friends and rivals. His handwritten notebooks were likely typed by his secretary and some volumes were reviewed by Camus who “really wasn’t one for first drafts” and “liked rewriting as much as the initial writing itself,” according to biographer Olivier Todd. Expertly translated by Ryan Bloom, extensive footnotes are included to provide context for the entries. “The guiding principle throughout is the recognition that, even if Camus did edit some of his notebooks, they ultimately remain informal writings—notes and jottings and drafts—and they should, no matter the language, read as such,” writes Bloom in the introduction. 

In Talking to Writers, interviews from thirty years of the annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea are collected and introduced by host and director of Point Loma Nazarene University’s journalism program Dean Nelson. Renowned writers—such as Billy Collins, Anthony Doerr, Nick Hornby, Jane Smiley, Amy Tan, Amor Towles, and Alice Walker—discuss their motivations, struggles, discipline, and ways they get ideas. The responses from questions posed by Nelson offer encouragement and inspiration as authors open up about their own beginnings, struggles, and victories. “I started the Symposium to model, inspire, and celebrate great writing. Interviewing these writers was a way for me to say to our audience, and now to you, ‘ aspire to this,’” writes Nelson in the introduction. “If you don’t consider yourself a writer now, you’ll have a change of heart as you read these conversations.” 

This anthology of dark tales celebrates stories of Indigenous peoples’ survival and imagination, and features poems and short stories from emerging and established authors, such as Kelli Jo Ford, Kate Hart, Brandon Hobson, Tommy Orange, Mona Susan Power, Morgan Talty, and D.H. Trujillo. Edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., the introduction by Blackfoot Native American author Stephen Graham Jones contextualizes the stories of ghosts, curses, hauntings, monstrous creatures, family legacies, and more. “For these next 392 pages, let these twenty-six writers take you by the hand, lead you into the darkness at the heart of—let me put some quotation marks around it—‘America,’” writes Jones. 

In this guidebook on how to write about grief, British poet and novelist Sam Meekings moves through his own reflections of his grief after the sudden loss of his brother to offer tools for both writing and healing. While encouraging readers to take control of their own stories, the book includes theories from the worlds of neuroscience, neurology, psychology, and creative writing to encompass steps on a journey of discovery, transformation, and renewal. The book offers practical tips on how to get started with writing prompts, as well as suggestions for the revision process. Along the way is a self-assessment check-in and recommended reading and resources for support. “I am inviting you to come with me, to write along with me, to learn to do the same thing: to use writing to forge a way through grief,” writes Meekings. “To both honor and record the wonder-filled memories of the person you are mourning, and to rediscover the person you are and can be.” 

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.