Best Books for Writers

Published by Brandeis University Press as part of its Mandel Lectures in the Humanities, this book of essays by acclaimed Irish novelist Colm Tóibín celebrates and studies the work of James Baldwin. Each of the five essays examines a book of Baldwin’s, with both personal and critical viewpoints from Tóibín, who admires and relates to the renowned writer and his life. In the first essay, Tóibín compares Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain with James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, finding connections between the two authors as young men living abroad in self-imposed exile. Other essays dive into Baldwin’s novels Giovanni’s Room and Another Country. “What gives these pieces such life after all these years is the way in which Baldwin’s intelligence and prose style match each other,” Tóibín writes. On James Baldwin serves as a tribute to the legendary author in his centenary year while offering an analysis of how great fiction is written. 

Plaiting personal address with unconnected scenes across literary history, Opacities invites writers to coexist beside dead giants and to dream of different texts, including one that “lasts your whole life.” Sofia Samatar, whose memoir, The White Mosque (Catapult, 2022), was a finalist for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, imbues each page with a voice that is as lyrical as her evocations are sweeping. Aided by vignettes of Marguerite Duras, Franz Kafka, Bhanu Kapil, and many others, Samatar presents a writing practice that is necessarily intertextual. As she considers “the ghostliness of collage,” Rainer Maria Rilke appears directly before the reader, “writing the words of phantoms” as Samatar does, before “a wave roll[s] toward him out of the distant past.” Navigating the role of the author— compelled, anonymous, or indistinguishable from the text itself—Opacities is a meditative map of the spectrum of literary desires and anxieties. 

What do we mean when we say we “know” a fictional character? When is a metaphor successful? In this updated and expanded edition of James Wood’s How Fiction Works, the book critic and author addresses various techniques of storytelling and offers a study of the magic of fiction. Through chapter titles such as Narrating, Character, Form, Dialogue, and Sympathy and Complexity, Wood discusses the techniques of fiction as well as offers a history of the novel form. “When this book was first published in 2008, it was sometimes seen as a defense of classic realism,” writes Wood in the preface to this tenth anniversary edition. “I hope this revised version makes clearer, ten years later, that on the contrary, I’m wary of conventional realism but drawn to a kind of deep realism, which I do believe runs through the novelistic tradition. Far from wanting to defend realism—and anyway, it needs no defense—I want to interrogate it.”  

In this collection of more than one hundred poems, sixty poets from around the world explore the life and art of poetry, finding mystery, paradox, and fullness through their works. “Often the loudest arguments on behalf of poetry are made in prose. Meanwhile, the more convincing arguments are sung in poems,” writes editor Michael Wiegers in the introduction. Drawing widely from Copper Canyon’s backlist of poetry books, contributors include Kay Boyle, Hayden Carruth, Norman Dubie, Jim Harrison, Carolyn Kizer, W. S. Merwin, Pablo Neruda, and Ruth Stone.  

In this guidebook on grammar, language columnist June Casagrande focuses on “sentence mechanics” and how “words line up and change form to make sentences.” Divided into two parts, the first half of the book takes a deep dive into syntax, covering parts of speech, the grammar of phrases and clauses, as well as nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, and prepositions. The second half concentrates on usage and propriety, exploring topics such as dangling participles, Oxford commas, language myths, and sentence fragments. Casagrande’s guidance in this book is humorous and straightforward, providing writers with clarification of the ever-evolving nature of words and the confidence to use language more intentionally in their creative work.  

In this anthology of essays and poems, originally published in 1998, Jamaica Kincaid assembles over thirty writers to contribute pieces on the plants they love. Daniel Hinkley writes about hellebores, Hilton Als considers marigolds, Marina Warner remembers the Guinée rose, Henri Cole reflects on irises and peonies in his poem, and Michael Pox’s essay “My Grandmother and Her Peonies” hits on a repeated theme of how favorite plants are often intertwined with the memories of loved ones. The essays and poems and excerpts from gardeners included in this book are arranged to “give the illusion of a garden,” writes Kincaid in the introduction, “a garden of words and images made of words, and flowers turned into words.”  

In Ancestors, part of the Boston Review’s Arts in Society anthology series, contributing writers respond to the question posed by guest editors Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Ed Pavlić, and Ivelisse Rodriguez: “What does it look like if you summon the presence of the ancestors into your art?” Divided into three sections, “Origins,” “Ruptures & Transformations,” and “Onward,” the poems and stories in this collection reflect what it means to be human, from our beginnings, to what events shape us, to how we carry our ancestors with us into the future. Contributors include a range of authors from across the globe, such as Bennet Bergman, Duana Fullwiley, José B. González, Terrance Hayes, Tyehimba Jess, Cheswayo Mphanza, Sonia Sanchez, Izumi Suzuki, Ocean Vuong, and Binyavanga Wainaina. “We feel certain that readers will take from the book an enriched sense of what it means to be human living in a time, among other times, and to be part of a lineage, among other lineages, to have questions inherited from the past—as well as other ‘beyonds’—that shape our lives and will, no doubt, continue to shape the future on which we leave our impress,” write the editors. 

In this seventh book in the Bagley Wright Lecture Series, Lisa Jarnot examines what it means to be a woman in a male-centered experimental tradition, to have white privilege, and live a life in poetry. Through these earnest, autobiographical essays, Jarnot investigates traditional and experimental forms of poetry and questions about the power of poetry to unite communities while acknowledging systemic racism and American exceptionalism. Jarnot considers poetry as a prophetic art and explores the writers that led her to her calling. “It seems to me that the inspiration behind poems is often a feeling that something is desperately wrong, or that something is desperately right, and out of one or the other of these emergencies, something must be said,” writes Jarnot. 

First published in 1967, this revised and expanded third edition of Jerome Rothenberg’s groundbreaking anthology includes newly gathered and translated texts, further expanding this collection of global poetry. The over four hundred poems move across time and continents, from “primitive” and archaic spiritual works to avant-garde and experimental poetry. Over the decades, the book continues to inspire generations of poets, artists, musicians, and readers. Anne Waldman calls the volume “a seminal world wisdom text, a vibrating compendium of poetry and exegesis that reanimates poetry’s efficacy in the world.” In the preface to this edition, Rothenberg addresses the current divisions in the world and emphasizes the vital importance of preserving these texts and languages so that they are not lost. He writes, “To confront this implicit, sometimes rampant ethnic cleansing, even genocide, there is the need for a kind of omnipoetics that test the range of our threatened humanities wherever found & looks toward an ever greater assemblage of words & thoughts as a singular buttress against those forces that would divide & diminish us.” 

This poetry anthology is an expansion of the Poetry Unbound podcast hosted by Pádraig Ó Tuama, in which each episode is a close examination of a single poem. Fifty poems from contemporary poets, including Margaret Atwood, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Ilya Kaminsky, Ada Limón, Layli Long Soldier, and Ocean Vuong, have been chosen for the way they speak about the human experience and reckon with self-acceptance, history, independence, parenthood, identity, joy, and resilience. Each poem is introduced with a short essay about why the poem was chosen, and an essay following the poem reflects on the poet’s craft and choice of language and form. “I chose these fifty poems because together they help us to see what can happen when we pay attention to our lives,” writes Ó Tuama in the introduction. “When a poem lands in your life, it really lands, adding new richness and texture to your world.” 

Three decades of writing and teaching culminate in this new craft book by Steve Almond, the author of a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, including All the Secrets of the World (Zando, 2022) and the New York Times best-seller Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto (Melville House, 2014). With chapters dedicated to the basics—plot, character, chronology—the book makes space to interrogate “the comic impulse” and “obsession” as well as the more personal, intangible aspects of writing. Which feeling is stronger: your urge to tell the truth or your fear of the consequences? How can you write “egoless prose”? To answer questions like these, Almond layers anecdotes from his childhood alongside his experiences with writer’s block and his observations of students. In his candid, non-moralizing style, Almond examines writing from all angles, breathing new life into truisms about the writing process and the interior life of the storyteller. Read an excerpt from the book here.