Best Books for Writers

This collection of essays includes highlights from ten years of the ​Washington Post's Writing Life column, each paired with an author biography by Marie Arana, former editor in chief of the Post's Book World section. Writers such as Julia Alvarez, John Banville, Jimmy Carter, Michael Chabon, Anita Desai, Joyce Carol Oates, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Carl Sagan ​reflect​ on the​ir​ experiences—from how they got started, to reflections looking back on a lifetime of writing—​and share valuable advice, insightful concerns, and a wide range of creative habits.

In this anthology, twenty contemporary short story writers introduce their favorite Paris Review short stories and authors. The book includes pairings such as Joy Williams's "Dimmer" introduced by Daniel Alarcón, Jane Bowles's "Emmy Moore's Journal" introduced by Lydia Davis, Jorge Luis Borges's "Funes, the Memorious" introduced by Aleksandar Hemon, and Donald Barthelme's "Seven Garlic Tales" introduced by Ben Marcus. Each introduction explores the form and craft, and the ways in which the writers have been influenced and inspired by the author they celebrate.

Thirty-six years after Bill Henderson's The Art of Literary Publishing: Editors on Their Craft (Pushcart Press, 1980) shared the insights of some of the most successful editors of the last century, such as Maxwell Perkins, John Farrar, James Laughlin, and Theodore Solotaroff, this new anthology showcases an even wider range of perspectives on the current state of literary publishing, attempting to answer some of the questions raised by Henderson's classic volume. From industry veterans to digital mavericks, including agents, editors, authors, and reviewers such as Erin Belieu, Sven Birkerts, Jessa Crispin, Gerald Howard, Richard Nash, Chris Parris-Lamb, and Daniel Slager, the voices collected in Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century offer a discussion of the role of books, bookselling, and literary publishing for the future.

"Instead of reacting to the block, I encourage you to stop and look at it. Listen to it. Touch it. Find out what its gifts are, what it's offering you." Laraine Herring presents a new perspective of writer's block, sharing strategies for transforming the feeling of being stuck into an opportunity to challenge oneself. Herring encourages writers to take a closer look at the writing process, channel creative energy through meditation and breathing exercises, and provides innovative writing techniques and prompts.

​"I have since come to believe that wabi-sabi is related to many of the more emphatic anti-aesthetics that invariably spring from the young, modern, creative soul: beat, punk, grunge, or whatever it's called next."​ ​In this book, artist and writer Leonard Koren introduces the concept of the Japanese tradition of wabi-sabi​: the beauty of incomplete, imperfect, impermanent things​.​ ​Readers and writers interested in a new perspective on artistic practice will find inspiration in Koren's application of wabi-sabi to contemporary, Western approaches to the creative process, and the focus on transcending conventional ways of observation.

​This pioneering anthology provides a thorough examination of eight different hybrid genres in contemporary literature: epistolary, flash fiction, ​lyric essay, performative, pictures made of words, poetic memoir, prose poetry, and short-form nonfiction. Readers and writers new to or experienced with hybrid forms will appreciate the exploratory scope of craft essays and exemplary work by forty-three authors including Jenny Boully, Terrance Hayes, Takashi Hiraide, Etgar Keret, and Maggie Nelson.

In this classic 1978 book of essays in the University of Michigan Press's Poets on Poetry series, William Stafford explores the craft of writing as a process of discovery, and encourages writers to think deeply and to keep an open mind. Readers will be inspired by Stafford's clear and direct approach to being patient and welcoming of new ideas and creative modes.

For this collection of more than a dozen essays on creative nonfiction, editors Sean Prentiss and Joe Wilkins requested a wide range of contributing writers, including Joy Castro, Brenda Miller, and Dinty W. Moore, to explore their own questions about the definitions and boundaries of the genre. Beginning and experienced writers, as well as those simply curious to learn more about these writers' perspectives, will find inspiring new ways to challenge and deepen their understanding of the art of personal essay and memoir.

From the author of the quintessential writers handbook Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within—a thirtieth-anniversary edition of which was also published by Shambhala in February—comes a collection of twenty-two essays about what it takes to have a long writing life. The "great spring" of the title refers to "the great rush of energy that arrives when you think no life will ever come again." Drawing from decades of writing, teaching, and practicing Zen, Goldberg shares the experiences through which she found herself and her voice.

Less a digest on technique, form, or reading, poet Glyn Maxwell’s On Poetry is an extended, lyrical meditation on what makes poetry tick from within—think more organism than machine. As funny as it is surprising, the book moves through chapters with titles like “Pulse,” “Chime,” and “Space,” striking with simplicity and clarity at some of the fundamental elements of poetry’s greatness.

The product of fifteen years directing Whitman College's Visiting Writers Reading Series, Katrina Roberts has gathered into one anthology the wisdom shared by the authors who have joined the series. The volume collects tips and wisdom, confessions and secrets, and inspiration and prompts from over eighty poets, fiction writers, and memoirists.