Further Reading

Here’s a list of recommended works of nonfiction and fiction:

CREATIVE NONFICTION

wild by Cheryl Strayed
Blood, Bones and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton
The Secret Knowledge by David Mamet
The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright
The Florist’s Daughter by Patricia Hampl
Killing Pablo by Mark Bowden
1776 by David McCullough
The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
Fresh Air Fiend by Paul Theroux
Hiroshima by John Hersey
Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell
Dakota by Kathleen Norris
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Liar’s Club by Mary Karr
Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr
The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
The White Album by Joan Didion
Coming into the Country by John McPhee
Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman
The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger
Into Thin Air by John Krakauer
Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez
Father Joe by Tony Hendra

FICTION

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
My Antonia, The Professor’s House by Willa Cather
A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
The Hunters by James Salter
The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor
A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Complete Works of Shakespeare
The Iliad by Homer
The Odyssey by Homer

Join Our Email List

Join our email newsletter and get a free 12-lesson course in narrative writing, from story ideas, drafting, editing, to how to get happily published.

"*" indicates required fields

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth.

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.

Anne Lamott

Get it down. Take chances.

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.

William Faulkner

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world.

It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.

V.S. Naipaul

Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you.

Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.

Barbara Kingsolver

Pleasure in a good novel…

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

Jane Austen

One false word, one extra word…

One false word, one extra word, and somebody's thinking about how they have to buy paper towels at the store.

Patricia Marx

…with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always.

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced…the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always.

Ernest Hemingway

The difference between the right word and the almost right word…

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

Mark Twain

Writing a novel is a terrible experience.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.

Flannery O’Connor

The forms of things unknown and the the poet’s pen…

And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.

William Shakespeare (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

Just follow your hero.

First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!

Ray Bradbury

Literature is nothing but carpentry.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

There are only two or three human stories.

Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years.

Willa Cather