Books like Pictures of Houses with Water Damage — picked by fans

I love all aspects of Los Angeles from approximately 1911 to around 1950. This doesn’t just include the actors, directors, and studios but also those working behind the scenes who made the movies come to life. This book involves the writers who composed the scenarios (the early name for screenplays) that ended up becoming the films made by the studios. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald was most famous for his novels in the 1920s, but his personal problems (a wife committed to an expensive mental hospital and a daughter to raise) caused him to have to look for work as a writer for MGM, but he was not successful due to his drinking. 

O’Nan delves masterfully into Fitzgerald’s complicated relationship with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham and his alcoholism, and it addresses his multiple terrifying heart attacks.

This book truly belongs among the top picks for Hollywood literature. 

This is the quintessential short story collection by a minimalist who doesn’t write just to write. I love the fact that the stories are not contrived. He doesn’t force anything.

The characters, the setting, and the story just interact and produce real, believable results. Hemingway doesn’t stretch credulity, the ridiculous, or the fantastic, yet transports you to his world with a few efficient lines.

It was Hemingway’s Boat, with its discursive Shandean style, that set the tone for my book. It was the only way I knew to tell a story that was so uniquely decentralized, so rollickingly exploratory, but I couldn’t begin to rival Paul Hendrickson, who remains the master of the tangential truth, digging deeper into the soul of the man than any Hemingway biography I have ever read – by focusing on his boat. At one point in my Phillips biography, after wandering off-course for 60 pages and finally coming back to the narrative moment I had abandoned, I wrote, “For all of my faith in extended digression I hope I haven’t stretched the limits of reader patience too much by now. Let me just pick up the thread.” But this is nothing compared to Paul Hendrickson’s masterful command of seemingly structureless story-telling, the non-fiction equivalent of some of Alice… show more.

Philip Greene is probably the world’s greatest living cocktail historian (how cool is that?). I am personally grateful to him for correcting and guiding my own work. Greene has written several excellent cocktail books. In To Have and Have Another, he canvases Hemingway’s personal preferences as well as the drinks featured in his writings. I hope that Greene one day does something similar with Evelyn Waugh and his novels, though it may fill several volumes.

Where does persuasive writing start? Whether you’re writing fiction, journalism, or a business message, good sentences are the key. Write good sentences and you write well in all fields. Bad sentences doom your writing. This tight 76-page book shows how to achieve simple, clear sentences, and at the same time build in power and even drama. Euchner moves on to cover paragraphs: how to find the focus of each and create logical, one-idea units. This is the book I wish I’d been given somewhere along the line in school, or later—it would have saved me a lot of trial-and-error! Like Euchner, I believe you need not study grammar rules to write well—that route has always put me to sleep.

I knew very little about Ernest Hemingway before I read the book, so didn’t approach it as a fan of him wanting to know more.

The book came highly recommended, and I was intrigued by the women that surrounded this controversial figure. Mrs Hemingway covers parts of the lives of each of his four wives, each so differently and wonderfully told. We see Hadley, Fife, Martha, and Mary in relation to Hemingway, but there’s no doubt that this novel is all about them, their thoughts and emotions. It’s brilliantly written and masterfully conveys a sense of the time period too.

As Cyril Connolly himself writes, "What follows are the doubts and reflections of a year, a word-cycle in three or four rhythms; art, love, nature and religion: an experiment in self dismantling..." This fragmentary method of writing, with quotes, aphorisms, epigrams, allusions, from a litany of great writers, thinkers, and diarists, with sudden reflections on love, the loss of love, spirituality, desire, literature, art, and psychology are the collected musings of Cyril Connolly, first published in 1944 in Horizon, the magazine he was founder and editor for.  My favourite parts of his writing are the plentiful poetic depictions of the scene, usually with the aid of perspicacious and evocative lists, revealing the interior life of the poetic author: "Dead leaves, coffee grounds, grenadine, tabac Maryland, mental expectation - perfumes of the Nord-Sud; autumn arrival at Pigalle..." 

This book is a literary sketch or prayer book, overflowing with ideas and… show more.

At age 15, I was captivated by Ernest Hemingway and his depiction of Paris in the 1920s. This book today reignites the enchantment of those years. Hemingway's profound influence shaped my aspirations as a writer. Through his eyes, I can vividly see Paris's cafés, salons, and vibrant social scenes, which ultimately became the backdrop of my dreams.

This book, rich with lovemaking, drinking, writing, betting at the track, and the bohemian lifestyle of so many young artists in Paris, reawakens my desire to immerse myself in that world. Hemingway's narrative voice and his novels continue to speak to me in a language that feels intimately mine, reminding me of the undying impact of his work on my life and aspirations.

It’s one thing to advocate for simple, clear writing—and another to do it consistently. For the most inspiring demonstration of these principles look to Ernest Hemingway. Read even one of his short stories, or any of his novels or reportage, for in-action proof of how convincing we can be by using the most basic English: short everyday words derived from English’s early Anglo-Saxon history, and unadorned, straightforward sentences. Note how the most profound ideas, emotions, and subtle interactions can be communicated with spare language, nearly absent of descriptive words. How to generate this kind of impact with the writing most of us do every day is a central goal of my own book. TIP: a helpful online resource for simplifying copy is found at…Hemingway.com. 

This groundbreaking anthology helped define flash fiction for American readers.

With contributions from the greats—Ernest Hemingway, Joyce Carol Oates, Grace Paley, Raymond Carver, Tobias Woolf, and more—these tiny narratives often pack the emotional force of a full novel.

A perfect introduction to what flash fiction can achieve when it delivers the whole arc—character, conflict, resolution—in a breath.