I grew up in the Scottish countryside, reading passionately. When adults asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, the answer came from my latest book: a nun, an outlaw, a queen, or an explorer. Not until I was in my twenties did I realise that I wanted to be the person behind the covers of a book, not between them. My early stories, written between waitressing shifts, were bafflingly bad. Gradually I began to understand that the fiction I loved was driven by a hidden machinery. I now teach at the Iowa Writersâ Workshop and have been lucky enough to explore this idea with many talented students.
Salesses reminds us that âcraft is a set of expectations,â and I love that he makes me question those expectations in fruitful ways. Jane Eyre does get to marry Rochester but at some cost. Salesses writes with warmth and wit about the western canon and about other literary traditions. I finished the book with a terrific reading list and new thoughts about my own writing and reading.
This national bestseller is "a significant contribution to discussions of the art of fiction and a necessary challenge to received views about whose stories are told, how they are told and for whom they are intended" (Laila Lalami, The New York Times Book Review).
The traditional writing workshop was established with white male writers in mind; what we call craft is informed by their cultural values. In this bold and original examination of elements of writingâincluding plot, character, conflict, structure, and believabilityâand aspects of workshopâincluding the silenced writer and the imagined readerâMatthew Salesses asks questions to invigorate these familiar concepts.âŚ
As a boy, Baxter stood at the window of his mid-western home and looked out at the empty street. He went on to fill that street with stories. In Wonderlands he talks about how those stories were made in terms of craftâhe writes vividly about requests, lists, dreams, ghostsâand the events in his own life that shaped his fiction, including a long period of failure. An deeply companionable book.
Searching and erudite new essays on writing from the author of Burning Down the House.
Charles Baxterâs new collection of essays, Wonderlands, joins his other works of nonfiction, Burning Down the House and The Art of Subtext. In the mold of those books, Baxter shares years of wisdom and reflection on what makes fiction work, including essays that were first given as craft talks at the Bread Loaf Writersâ Conference.
The essays here range from brilliant thinking on the nature of wonderlands in the fiction of Haruki Murakami and other fabulist writers, to how request moments function in a story.âŚ
She spent years following the path reserved for highborn men. When sheâs thrust back into a subservient role, how will she forge her own destiny?
When Princess Andrada tries to become the heir to her fatherâs throne, she fails and is sentenced to death. To avoid execution, her father marriesâŚ
This book of essays is part master class, part memoir. Febos writes with laser intelligence about her journey from addict to sex worker to academic. How do we write about our most intimate moments? What happens when such writing is misunderstood, or dismissed? I grew up in rural Scotland, where no one ever talked about sex or longing, and I was dazzled, and inspired by Febosâs examples of what could be put on the page.
Memoir meets craft master class in this âdaring, honest, psychologically insightfulâ exploration of how we think and write about intimate experiencesââa must read for anybody shoving a pen across paper or staring into a screen or a past" (Mary Karr)
In this bold and exhilarating mix of memoir and master class, Melissa Febos tackles the emotional, psychological, and physical work of writing intimately while offering an utterly fresh examination of the storytellerâs life and the questions which run through it.  How might we go about capturing on the page the relationships that have formed us? HowâŚ
Le Guin is a star in fictionâs firmament but in this book sheâs also a wonderfully modest practitioner of the art of writing. She discusses the sound of your prose, naming characters, repetition, and point of view. I found her chapter on crowding and leaping especially helpful. Crowding is when you follow Keatsâ advice to load every rift with ore; leaping is when you skillfully leave things outâtwo invaluable skills in fiction, and in life.
From the celebrated Ursula K. Le Guin, "a writer of enormous intelligence and wit, a master storyteller" (Boston Globe), the revised and updated edition of her classic guide to the essentials of a writer's craft.
Completely revised and rewritten to address modern challenges and opportunities, this handbook is a short, deceptively simple guide to the craft of writing.
Le Guin lays out ten chapters that address the most fundamental components of narrative, from the sound of language to sentence construction to point of view. Each chapter combines illustrative examples from the global canon with Le Guinâs own witty commentary andâŚ
From Pulitzer Finalist Laurie Sheck (A Monster's Notes), a new speculative literary fiction in the spirit of Italo Calvino, Umberto Ecco and Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto that enacts an incisive and moving exploration into what it means to be human in the age of AI and increasing inhumanism.âŚ
Peter Turchi is an amazing guide to writing which is to say he is an amazing guide to reading. This book explores fiction in terms of power dynamics, imagery, digressionsâthink Tristram Shandyâand story-telling, (among other topics). Turchi argues passionately for the pleasures of close reading. I especially love his chapter on characters who tell storiesâwhy do they tell them, what if we want them to shut up?   Â
In (Don't) Stop Me If You've Heard This Before, Peter Turchi combines personal narrative and close reading of a wide range of stories and novels to reveal how writers create the fiction that matters to us. Building on his much-loved Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, Turchi leads readers and writers to an understanding of how the intricate mechanics of storytelling-including shifts in characters' authority, the subtle manipulation of images, careful attention to point of view, the strategic release of information, and even digressing from the (apparent) story-can create powerful effects.
Using examples from Dickens, Chekhov, and Salinger,âŚ
âA smart, unpretentious guide to âwriting the life, shaping the novelâ âŚ. Would-be writers will find this book both useful and inspiring, while general readers can simply enjoy Liveseyâs keen insights and engaging prose.â Kirkus Reviews
"She plunged her blade into his chest, feeling it grind along his ribs..."
Outcast swordfighter, Kyer Halidan, was abandoned in a cornfield at age three. Now, twenty years on, sheâs searching for answers: Who left her there? And why?
Kyer doesnât suffer fools, and when she kills a man inâŚ
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctorâand only womanâon a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
