essay about fiction novels

Writers on Writing: 20 Best Essays on Writing from Famous Authors

By Jason Boyd

Updated August 7, 2021

What better way to learn about writing novels, short stories, or any creative work than from essays on writing from legendary writers.

Whether you’re gearing up for your first run at a novel ( NaNoWriMo approaches) or looking for a tune-up before embarking on your umpteenth creative writing project, you need inspiration.

May as well be inspired by the best. And maybe be taught a thing or two along the way!

Books vs Essays on Writing Fiction

Why did we choose essays?

Firstly, we certainly may write an article in the future on books from writers on writing. So, there’s no harm in leaving that topic to the side.

But chiefly, our concern is wanting to lend a hand that can be used right now. Right away. With speed.

An essay can be read in a sitting or on the way from one thing to the next, but a book is a time investment. We wanted the delivery to be quick.

Not only do we live in a fast paced world, it can be a bit of a waste to read an entire book about writing a book. Most writers would likely say you’re better off reading a great novel. Or writing one.

Not that we discourage books or any written work on the subject of writing. We don’t . But we wanted a solution for the busy working class person looking to learn the craft.

Someone with limited time but boundless spirit.

This is for you.

20 Essays from Famous Writers on Writing Fiction

We chose to not repeat authors, although quite a few writers that made this list penned multiple essays worth reading.

We picked our favorite and tried to mention the other noteworthy reads somewhere in their entry.

So, without further ado, let’s take a look at our selection of essays from writers on writing.

20) Quick Cuts: The Novel Follows Film Into a World of Fewer Words by E.L. Doctorow

E.L. Doctorow , noted essayist and author of Ragtime , is no stranger to Hollywood.

With many adaptations under his belt, including Ragtime and Billy Bathgate , Doctorow is well suited to discuss the differences between film and literature.

This essay, published in The New York Times , opines on the changes in literature since the advent of the motion picture.

Notable differences include quickening of pace, shortening of exposition, and more personal narratives.

It’s an especially fine read for anyone looking to find distinction between the disciplines of screenwriting and prose.

Brief Excerpt, “Quick Cuts: The Novel Follows Film Into a World of Fewer Words”

“Beyond that, the rise of film art is coincident with the tendency of novelists to conceive of compositions less symphonic and more solo voiced, intimate personalist work expressive of the operating consciousness. A case could be made that the novel’s steady retreat from realism is as much a result of film’s expansive record of the way the world looks as it is of the increasing sophistications of literature itself.” E.L. Doctorow

19) The Ecstasy of Influence by Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem , author of Motherless Brooklyn , is known for his blending of multiple genres.

It only makes sense that he should write so eloquently on the power and responsibility of using influences in original work.

This essay, published originally in Harper’s Magazine , explores the challenges artists face when composing something that pays homage or outright borrows from older works. 

Where does one draw the line between plagiarism and inspiration?

Brief Excerpt, “The Ecstasy of Influence”

“Blues and jazz musicians have long been enabled by a kind of ‘open source’ culture, in which pre-existing melodic fragments and larger musical frameworks are freely reworked. Technology has only multiplied the possibilities; musicians have gained the power to duplicate sounds literally rather than simply approximate them through allusion. In Seventies Jamaica, King Tubby and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry deconstructed recorded music, using astonishingly primitive pre-digital hardware, creating what they called ‘versions.’ The recombinant nature of their means of production quickly spread to DJs in New York and London. Today an endless, gloriously impure, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of music.” Jonathan Lethem

18) Tradition and the Individual Talent by T.S. Eliot

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet T.S. Eliot , writer of The Waste Land and Four Quartets , is as known for his literary criticism and influence as an editor than for his original work.

Thus, it makes sense to include his essay on writing in a vacuum, or rather, the impossibility of such a feat. The literary equivalent of Sir Isaac Newton ‘s phrase “ standing upon the shoulders of giants ,” Eliot’s essay actually caused quite a stir at the time. 

Much like everything in the life of T.S. Eliot.

This essay, hosted now by the Poetry Foundation and originally collected in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism , nearly creates an ouroboros effect. 

A “writers on writing” essay from a writer talking about writers writing on the heels of other writers.

Sorry, we couldn’t resist.

Brief Excerpt, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not onesided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.” T.S. Eliot

17) On Style by Susan Sontag

Legendary essayist and activist Susan Sontag , author of In America , exudes a confident personal style.

Sontag is a bit of a Renaissance woman: professor of philosophy, journalist, novelist, playwright, photographer, and much more. To boot, she did this during divisive times, starting in the early 1960s.

It makes sense that we should pay attention to her thoughts on style, especially as she argues for its close juxtaposition to artistic norms. 

In “ On Style ,” published in Against Interpretation and Other Essays , Sontag attempts to differentiate style from content.

Perhaps too academic for some beginners, this essay nonetheless helps to shake up preconceptions on the purpose of style in modern writing.

Brief Excerpt, “On Style”

“This means that the notion of style, generically considered, has a specific, historical meaning. It is not only that styles belong to a time and a place; and that our perception of the style of a given work of art is always charged with an awareness of the work’s historicity, its place in a chronology. Further: the visibility of styles is itself a product of historical consciousness. Were it not for departures from, or experimentation with, previous artistic norms which are known to us, we could never recognize the profile of a new style.” Susan Sontag

16) Reflections on Writing by Henry Miller

Author of the infamously banned Tropic of Cancer , Henry Miller blurs the line between autobiography and fiction.

“Miller’s revolution, though, was not a political one,” writes Ralph B. Sipper in the Los Angeles Times’ Miller’s Tale: Henry Hits 100 . “It was the wedding of his life and his art. Actual and imagined experiences became indistinguishable from each other.”

This aspect of the legend’s style lends itself well to Henry Miller’s overarching essay, a true reflection , about a life spent writing.

Brief Excerpt, “Reflections on Writing”

“I believe that one has to pass beyond the sphere and influence of art. Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself. Most artists are defeating life by their very attempt to grapple with it. They have split the egg in two. All art, I firmly believe, will one day disappear. But the artist will remain, and life itself will become not ‘an art,’ but art, i.e., will definitely and for all time usurp the field. In any true sense we are certainly not yet alive.” Henry Miller

15) Fairy Tale Is Form, Form Is Fairy Tale by Kate Bernheimer

Writer, editor, and critic Kate Bernheimer knows a thing or two about fairy tales.

She’s the founder and editor of the journal Fairy Tale Review , editor of numerous collections on the subject, and an author of fairy tales herself.

So, when Kate Bernheimer talks about fairy tales, you listen. Her essay “ Fairy Tale is Form, Form is Fairy Tale ” explores the underlying structure of fairy tales and its prevalence in much more than old Brothers Grimm stories. 

Brief Excerpt, “Fairy Tale Is Form, Form Is Fairy Tale”

“Perhaps if we recognize the pleasure in form that can be derived from fairy tales, we might be able to move beyond a discussion of who has more of a claim to the ‘realistic’ or the classical in contemporary letters. An increased appreciation of the techniques in fairy tales not only forges a mutual appreciation between writers from so-called mainstream and avant-garde traditions but also, I would argue, connects all of us in the act of living.” Kate Bernheimer

14) Uncanny the Singing That Comes from Certain Husks by Joy Williams

Author of State of Grace and Pulitzer-prize finalist The Quick and the Dead , novelist, essayist, and short story writer Joy Williams could certainly be considered a writer’s writer.

It makes her especially suited to answer the age old question: why do writers write?

In her essay meditating upon the impetus to write, “ Uncanny the Singing That Comes from Certain Husks ,” collected first in the anthology Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction , Williams offers several perspectives.

While there are no clear, definitive answers, burgeoning writers may find solace in the seemingly ubiquitous search for meaning.

Brief Excerpt, “Uncanny the Singing That Comes from Certain Husks” by Joy Williams

“The writer doesn’t trust his enemies, of course, who are wrong about his writing, but he doesn’t trust his friends, either, who he hopes are right. The writer trusts nothing he writes—it should be too reckless and alive for that, it should be beautiful and menacing and slightly out of his control. It should want to live itself somehow. The writer dies—he can die before he dies, it happens all the time, he dies as a writer—but the work wants to live.” Joy Williams

13) The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination by J.K. Rowling

You might say J.K. Rowling knows a thing or two about imagination.

What some casual readers–or even fans–of the Harry Potter author might not know is that Rowling faced poverty and abject failure before finding publishing success.

This combination made for the perfect 2008 commencement speech at Harvard University . Although not an essay at first, the speech became a smash hit, garnering the most views of all Harvard commencement addresses . 

And, appropriately so, it was later printed as an essay/e-book titled Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination .

Sure to inspire, and possibly soothe or reassure, the speech and resulting transcription should be read by any aspiring writer.

Brief Excerpt, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination”

“So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” J.K. Rowling

12) Write Till You Drop by Annie Dillard

Poet, essayist, memoirist, novelist, and critic Annie Dillard has a Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction to her name as well as finalist honors for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction .

Add to this a bevy of published work, “ Write Till You Drop ” is certainly a motto Annie Dillard lives by. 

In her essay, the author of Pilgim at Tinker Creek offers up directives of great relevance for every writer. That’s because the essay’s crux, made plain in the title, is an urging to write. 

Yet, the nuance of the advice is what makes this essay especially motivating and highly recommended for any writing aspirant.

Brief Excerpt, “Write Till You Drop”

“Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?” Annie Dillard

11) Why I Write by Joan Didion

National Book Award for Nonfiction winner and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography Joan Didion is a legend.

The author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Slouching Towards Bethlehem , Didion has been described as belonging to the school of New Journalism, which places an emphasis on narrative storytelling and literary techniques in order to communicate its facts.

As such an accomplished and versatile writer, Didion makes a singular subject for the age-old question of why do writers write . 

Just like any essay on the subject, Joan Didion’s take is irreplaceably useful for writers. If for no other reason than it frames the writing pursuit as a shared experience resplendent in multiple shades and colors. 

The effect being that of a warm and communal embrace.  

Brief Excerpt, “Why I Write”

“When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges. There used to be an illustration in every elementary psychology book showing a cat drawn by a patient in varying stages of schizophrenia. This cat had a shimmer around it. You could see the molecular structure breaking down at the very edges of the cat: the cat became the background and the background the cat, everything interacting, exchanging ions. People on hallucinogens describe the same perception of objects. I’m not a schizophrenic, nor do I take hallucinogens, but certain images do shimmer for me.” Joan Didion

10) That Crafty Feeling by Zadie Smith

Author Zadie Smith bears nearly too many awards to count.

Beginning with White Teeth , her debut novel that took the critical world by storm, Zadie Smith established herself as one of the most noteworthy writers of the modern generation.

How appropriate then, that she spoke to the craft of writing in “ That Crafty Feeling ,” her lecture for students of the Columbia University writing program in March 2008. Smith later collected the speech in essay form in her book Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays .

In her essay, Smith explores many aspects of the writing process, making it a must-read for the sheer fact of learning the variances writers take to arrive at the written word.

Brief Excerpt, “That Crafty Feeling”

“Some writers won’t read a word of any novel while they’re writing their own. Not one word. They don’t even want to see the cover of a novel. As they write, the world of fiction dies: no one has ever written, no one is writing, no one will ever write again. Try to recommend a good novel to a writer of this type while he’s writing and he’ll give you a look like you just stabbed him in the heart with a kitchen knife. It’s a matter of temperament. Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra—they’ll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even. I am one of those. My writing desk is covered in open novels.” Zadie Smith

9) The Poetic Principle by Edgar Allan Poe

Legendary American poet, critic, editor, and author Edgar Allan Poe knows how to move you.

In “ The Poetic Principle ,” the author of The Raven and The Fall of the House of Usher breaks down exactly how he achieves this feat.

The essay is a must-read for writers not because one should necessarily follow Edgar Allan Poe’s prescription as a kind of formula. 

Instead, it should serve as an example that artistic work doesn’t have to be of a purely ecstatic origin. 

Writing can be a calculated affair, in part, aimed toward achieving a desired effect.

Brief Excerpt, “The Poetic Principle”

“Thus, although in a very cursory and imperfect manner, I have endeavored to convey to you my conception of the Poetic Principle. It has been my purpose to suggest that, while this Principle itself is , strictly and simply, the Human Aspiration for Supernal Beauty , the manifestation of the Principle is always found in an elevating excitement of the Soul — quite independent of that passion which is the intoxication of the Heart — or of that Truth which is the satisfaction of the Reason.” Edgar Allan Poe

8) Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses by Mark Twain

One might call Mark Twain something of an authority on the craft of writing.

American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name of Mark Twain , earned the honorific of “father of American literature” by William Faulkner himself.

This all contributes to the fact that no one has ever been as thoroughly dragged through the mud and put on a mocking display as Fenimore Cooper.  

The deed was done by Mark Twain’s own hand in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn author’s critical essay “ Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses .”

In what amounts to a public tar and feathering, Twain deconstructs Cooper’s writing down to the level of individual word choice.

The essay illustrates many do’s via its adamant don’ts. Not to mention the tiny bit of schadenfreude contained in Cooper’s literary trial. 

Brief Excerpt, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”

“Cooper’s word-sense was singularly dull. When a person has a poor ear for music he will flat and sharp right along without knowing it. He keeps near the tune, but is not the tune. When a person has a poor ear for words, the result is a literary flatting and sharping; you perceive what he is intending to say, but you also perceive that he does not say it. This is Cooper. He was not a word-musician. His ear was satisfied with the approximate words. I will furnish some circumstantial evidence in support of this charge.” Mark Twain

7) Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully – in Ten Minutes by Stephen King

Whether you’re a fan or not, there are two undeniable facts about Stephen King . He can write like a whirlwind, and he’s successful at it.

Stephen King has penned more than 60 books, including The Stand and The Dark Tower series, and created his very own multiverse . Among other accolades, he’s received the National Medal of Arts from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Book Foundation awarded him the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. 

Oh, and his net worth is estimated to reside somewhere around $400 million . Plus, he’s sold more than 350 million copies of his books worldwide. A success, we’d say, even if some critics dislike him .

In addition to writing one of the most-sought books on the writing life and process, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft , he’s written numerous essays. In the field of writers on writing, he’s nearly overqualified.

Seems he’s well qualified for the essay “ Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully – in Ten Minutes ,” which out of all the essays on our list wins the prize for most enticing title.

As fans of Stephen King, we recommend you gobble up anything he has to say on the profession. But regardless, like the title says, it’s only 10 minutes long.

Brief Excerpt, “Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully – in Ten Minutes”

“You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.” Stephen King

6) Why I Write by George Orwell

Legendary author Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell , stands firmly in the great pantheon of 20th century writers.

Author of 1984 and Animal Farm , one might think Orwell’s reason for writing is solely to correct societal wrongs or fight injustices.

First printed in Gangrel (Summer 1946) and later collected in Such, Such Were the Joys , Orwell’s essay “ Why I Write ” details his motivations to write. 

Written at first as a response to an editor’s query, the essay serves as both a personal one and an objective observation of the impetus to create.

“I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life. Nevertheless the volume of serious — i.e. seriously intended — writing which I produced all through my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages.” George Orwell

5) Where Do You Get Your Ideas? by Neil Gaiman

When one of today’s greatest originators of fresh concepts tells you that ideas are just one “small component” of writing, you listen.

Neil Gaiman , author of American Gods , The Sandman , Stardust , Coraline , and more, holds a mountain of awards. Among them, the Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker awards. Not to mention a Newbery and Carnegie medal. 

And Book of the Year in the British National Book Awards for The Ocean at the End of the Lane .

Written on his own blog, Neil Gaiman’s essay on where he gets his ideas answers the age-old, and somewhat frustrating, question that every writer inevitably gets.

There are no glib answers (okay, maybe a few). He shares his process with sincerity, and packages it partly in a little story, because that’s just what good writers do.

Brief Excerpt, “Where Do You Get Your Ideas?”

“The Ideas aren’t the hard bit. They’re a small component of the whole. Creating believable people who do more or less what you tell them to is much harder. And hardest by far is the process of simply sitting down and putting one word after another to construct whatever it is you’re trying to build: making it interesting, making it new.” Neil Gaiman

4) Despite Tough Guys, Life Is Not the Only School for Real Novelists by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

If ever there was a writer’s writer, it’s Kurt Vonnegut Jr. When he gives advice, you listen.

The legendary literary and science fiction author, writer of Slaughterhouse-Five , Vonnegut taught at the esteemed University of Iowa’s writer’s workshop in addition to The City College of New York and Harvard University. 

It was in defense of creative writing programs and teachers everywhere that he wrote his essay, “ Despite Tough Guys, Life Is Not the Only School for Real Novelists .”

Not to disparage the school of hard knocks. Quite the opposite. 

Kurt Vonnegut instead shows another way of looking at creative writing instructors. 

As an extension of a writer’s best friend–a good editor.

Brief Excerpt, “Despite Tough Guys, Life Is Not the Only School for Real Novelists”

“Much is known about how to tell a story, rules for sociability, for how to be a friend to a reader so the reader won’t stop reading, how to be a good date on a blind date with a total stranger.” Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

3) Thoughts on Writing by Elizabeth Gilbert

Elizabeth Gilbert knows writing.

Author of numerous works and amazing TED Talks presenter, Gilbert is everything a writer could want to be. 

She writes fiction, non-fiction, books about writing, globe trots while freelancing for magazines, and is a journalist. As of late, she’s transformed into a teacher of sorts, sharing her knowledge far and wide, and one of the leaders in the topic of writers on writing.

Her published material includes Pilgrims (Pushcart Prize winner and finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award), Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (199 weeks on The New York Times Bestseller List and turned into a movie starring Julia Roberts ), and Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear (where she shares the wealth).

To say her essay, “ Thoughts on Writing ,” published on her own blog, is worth the time of any aspiring writer–of any form, medium, or genre–is a drastic understatement.

Brief Excerpt, “Thoughts on Writing”

“As for discipline – it’s important, but sort of over-rated. The more important virtue for a writer, I believe, is self-forgiveness. Because your writing will always disappoint you. Your laziness will always disappoint you.” Elizabeth Gilbert

2) The Nature of the Fun by David Foster Wallace

A literary giant in the making cut short by suicidal depression, David Foster Wallace is counted among many of today’s brilliant creative minds.

Author of Infinite Jest , a novel that every intelligentsia claims to have read, although few have managed to conquer its substantial length, Wallace talked extensively about the subject of craft. As a teacher and pundit, he’s let his thoughts be known. 

And for writers on writing, he’s often considered a preeminent expert on the topic.

However, “ The Nature of the Fun ” answers that basic question posed to nearly every writer throughout history–why do you write? 

For Wallace, the answer is in surprisingly stark contrast to everything else in the tragic writer’s life.

Brief Excerpt, “The Nature of the Fun”

“In the beginning, when you first start out trying to write fiction, the whole endeavor’s about fun. You don’t expect anybody else to read it. You’re writing almost wholly to get yourself off. To enable your own fantasies and deviant logics and to escape or transform parts of yourself you don’t like. And it works – and it’s terrific fun. Then, if you have good luck and people seem to like what you do, and you actually start to get paid for it, and get to see your stuff professionally typeset and bound and blurbed and reviewed and even (once) being read on the a.m. subway by a pretty girl you don’t even know it seems to make it even more fun.” David Foster Wallace

1) Not Knowing by Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme is almost certainly not a name you know.

Although there are exceptions, even the most devout of readers overlook the absurdist and surrealist stylings of the postmodern short story writer and teacher. 

Funny, considering such eye catching titles as Sixty Stories and Forty Stories .

However, Barthelme was a regular on the pages of The New Yorker , as well as other literary magazines of his time. He even founded one– Fiction .

But don’t fret that you don’t know him. As Barthelme indicates in “ Not Knowing ,” his essay on the creative process, lack of knowledge can lead to invention. 

That’s just one reason we recommend this for your reading list, which includes our sincere hope that you also pick up some of Barthelme’s fiction.

Brief Excerpt, “Not Knowing”

“The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.” Donald Barthelme

Writers on writing and essays on writing are almost a sub-genre in itself.

For writers out there, be careful that you don’t get sucked into the habit of consuming one diatribe after another, hoping to find eternal wisdom, without actually writing yourself. 

It can be alluring, to soak in the soup of published authors, to feel like you’re holding conversations with the greatest minds. Afterall, for some aspiring writers, it’s the end goal of getting published. However, one must start with the actual writing itself, so don’t dawdle too long.

Of course, we hope that these relatively short essays won’t keep you for long. And they’re just meaty enough to be satiating.

Now, get to writing! (including dropping into the comments to share your own writing advice)

Jason Boyd is a science fiction author, geek enthusiast, and former cubicle owner. When not working on his MA in Creative Writing, he's trying to figure out how magnets work.

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• Knowledge Base
• How to write a literary analysis essay | A step-by-step guide

How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay | A Step-by-Step Guide

Published on January 30, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on August 14, 2023.

Literary analysis means closely studying a text, interpreting its meanings, and exploring why the author made certain choices. It can be applied to novels, short stories, plays, poems, or any other form of literary writing.

A literary analysis essay is not a rhetorical analysis , nor is it just a summary of the plot or a book review. Instead, it is a type of argumentative essay where you need to analyze elements such as the language, perspective, and structure of the text, and explain how the author uses literary devices to create effects and convey ideas.

Before beginning a literary analysis essay, it’s essential to carefully read the text and c ome up with a thesis statement to keep your essay focused. As you write, follow the standard structure of an academic essay :

• An introduction that tells the reader what your essay will focus on.
• A main body, divided into paragraphs , that builds an argument using evidence from the text.
• A conclusion that clearly states the main point that you have shown with your analysis.

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Table of contents

Step 1: reading the text and identifying literary devices, step 2: coming up with a thesis, step 3: writing a title and introduction, step 4: writing the body of the essay, step 5: writing a conclusion, other interesting articles.

The first step is to carefully read the text(s) and take initial notes. As you read, pay attention to the things that are most intriguing, surprising, or even confusing in the writing—these are things you can dig into in your analysis.

Your goal in literary analysis is not simply to explain the events described in the text, but to analyze the writing itself and discuss how the text works on a deeper level. Primarily, you’re looking out for literary devices —textual elements that writers use to convey meaning and create effects. If you’re comparing and contrasting multiple texts, you can also look for connections between different texts.

To get started with your analysis, there are several key areas that you can focus on. As you analyze each aspect of the text, try to think about how they all relate to each other. You can use highlights or notes to keep track of important passages and quotes.

Language choices

Consider what style of language the author uses. Are the sentences short and simple or more complex and poetic?

What word choices stand out as interesting or unusual? Are words used figuratively to mean something other than their literal definition? Figurative language includes things like metaphor (e.g. “her eyes were oceans”) and simile (e.g. “her eyes were like oceans”).

Also keep an eye out for imagery in the text—recurring images that create a certain atmosphere or symbolize something important. Remember that language is used in literary texts to say more than it means on the surface.

Narrative voice

Ask yourself:

• Who is telling the story?
• How are they telling it?

Is it a first-person narrator (“I”) who is personally involved in the story, or a third-person narrator who tells us about the characters from a distance?

Consider the narrator’s perspective . Is the narrator omniscient (where they know everything about all the characters and events), or do they only have partial knowledge? Are they an unreliable narrator who we are not supposed to take at face value? Authors often hint that their narrator might be giving us a distorted or dishonest version of events.

The tone of the text is also worth considering. Is the story intended to be comic, tragic, or something else? Are usually serious topics treated as funny, or vice versa ? Is the story realistic or fantastical (or somewhere in between)?

Consider how the text is structured, and how the structure relates to the story being told.

• Novels are often divided into chapters and parts.
• Poems are divided into lines, stanzas, and sometime cantos.
• Plays are divided into scenes and acts.

Think about why the author chose to divide the different parts of the text in the way they did.

There are also less formal structural elements to take into account. Does the story unfold in chronological order, or does it jump back and forth in time? Does it begin in medias res —in the middle of the action? Does the plot advance towards a clearly defined climax?

With poetry, consider how the rhyme and meter shape your understanding of the text and your impression of the tone. Try reading the poem aloud to get a sense of this.

In a play, you might consider how relationships between characters are built up through different scenes, and how the setting relates to the action. Watch out for  dramatic irony , where the audience knows some detail that the characters don’t, creating a double meaning in their words, thoughts, or actions.

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Your thesis in a literary analysis essay is the point you want to make about the text. It’s the core argument that gives your essay direction and prevents it from just being a collection of random observations about a text.

If you’re given a prompt for your essay, your thesis must answer or relate to the prompt. For example:

Essay question example

Is Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” a religious parable?

Your thesis statement should be an answer to this question—not a simple yes or no, but a statement of why this is or isn’t the case:

Thesis statement example

Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” is not a religious parable, but a story about bureaucratic alienation.

Sometimes you’ll be given freedom to choose your own topic; in this case, you’ll have to come up with an original thesis. Consider what stood out to you in the text; ask yourself questions about the elements that interested you, and consider how you might answer them.

Your thesis should be something arguable—that is, something that you think is true about the text, but which is not a simple matter of fact. It must be complex enough to develop through evidence and arguments across the course of your essay.

Say you’re analyzing the novel Frankenstein . You could start by asking yourself:

Your initial answer might be a surface-level description:

The character Frankenstein is portrayed negatively in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein .

However, this statement is too simple to be an interesting thesis. After reading the text and analyzing its narrative voice and structure, you can develop the answer into a more nuanced and arguable thesis statement:

Mary Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as.

Remember that you can revise your thesis statement throughout the writing process , so it doesn’t need to be perfectly formulated at this stage. The aim is to keep you focused as you analyze the text.

Finding textual evidence

To support your thesis statement, your essay will build an argument using textual evidence —specific parts of the text that demonstrate your point. This evidence is quoted and analyzed throughout your essay to explain your argument to the reader.

It can be useful to comb through the text in search of relevant quotations before you start writing. You might not end up using everything you find, and you may have to return to the text for more evidence as you write, but collecting textual evidence from the beginning will help you to structure your arguments and assess whether they’re convincing.

To start your literary analysis paper, you’ll need two things: a good title, and an introduction.

Your title should clearly indicate what your analysis will focus on. It usually contains the name of the author and text(s) you’re analyzing. Keep it as concise and engaging as possible.

A common approach to the title is to use a relevant quote from the text, followed by a colon and then the rest of your title.

If you struggle to come up with a good title at first, don’t worry—this will be easier once you’ve begun writing the essay and have a better sense of your arguments.

“Fearful symmetry” : The violence of creation in William Blake’s “The Tyger”

The introduction

The essay introduction provides a quick overview of where your argument is going. It should include your thesis statement and a summary of the essay’s structure.

A typical structure for an introduction is to begin with a general statement about the text and author, using this to lead into your thesis statement. You might refer to a commonly held idea about the text and show how your thesis will contradict it, or zoom in on a particular device you intend to focus on.

Then you can end with a brief indication of what’s coming up in the main body of the essay. This is called signposting. It will be more elaborate in longer essays, but in a short five-paragraph essay structure, it shouldn’t be more than one sentence.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often read as a crude cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific advancement unrestrained by ethical considerations. In this reading, protagonist Victor Frankenstein is a stable representation of the callous ambition of modern science throughout the novel. This essay, however, argues that far from providing a stable image of the character, Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as. This essay begins by exploring the positive portrayal of Frankenstein in the first volume, then moves on to the creature’s perception of him, and finally discusses the third volume’s narrative shift toward viewing Frankenstein as the creature views him.

Some students prefer to write the introduction later in the process, and it’s not a bad idea. After all, you’ll have a clearer idea of the overall shape of your arguments once you’ve begun writing them!

If you do write the introduction first, you should still return to it later to make sure it lines up with what you ended up writing, and edit as necessary.

The body of your essay is everything between the introduction and conclusion. It contains your arguments and the textual evidence that supports them.

Paragraph structure

A typical structure for a high school literary analysis essay consists of five paragraphs : the three paragraphs of the body, plus the introduction and conclusion.

Each paragraph in the main body should focus on one topic. In the five-paragraph model, try to divide your argument into three main areas of analysis, all linked to your thesis. Don’t try to include everything you can think of to say about the text—only analysis that drives your argument.

In longer essays, the same principle applies on a broader scale. For example, you might have two or three sections in your main body, each with multiple paragraphs. Within these sections, you still want to begin new paragraphs at logical moments—a turn in the argument or the introduction of a new idea.

Robert’s first encounter with Gil-Martin suggests something of his sinister power. Robert feels “a sort of invisible power that drew me towards him.” He identifies the moment of their meeting as “the beginning of a series of adventures which has puzzled myself, and will puzzle the world when I am no more in it” (p. 89). Gil-Martin’s “invisible power” seems to be at work even at this distance from the moment described; before continuing the story, Robert feels compelled to anticipate at length what readers will make of his narrative after his approaching death. With this interjection, Hogg emphasizes the fatal influence Gil-Martin exercises from his first appearance.

Topic sentences

To keep your points focused, it’s important to use a topic sentence at the beginning of each paragraph.

A good topic sentence allows a reader to see at a glance what the paragraph is about. It can introduce a new line of argument and connect or contrast it with the previous paragraph. Transition words like “however” or “moreover” are useful for creating smooth transitions:

… The story’s focus, therefore, is not upon the divine revelation that may be waiting beyond the door, but upon the mundane process of aging undergone by the man as he waits.

Nevertheless, the “radiance” that appears to stream from the door is typically treated as religious symbolism.

This topic sentence signals that the paragraph will address the question of religious symbolism, while the linking word “nevertheless” points out a contrast with the previous paragraph’s conclusion.

Using textual evidence

A key part of literary analysis is backing up your arguments with relevant evidence from the text. This involves introducing quotes from the text and explaining their significance to your point.

It’s important to contextualize quotes and explain why you’re using them; they should be properly introduced and analyzed, not treated as self-explanatory:

It isn’t always necessary to use a quote. Quoting is useful when you’re discussing the author’s language, but sometimes you’ll have to refer to plot points or structural elements that can’t be captured in a short quote.

In these cases, it’s more appropriate to paraphrase or summarize parts of the text—that is, to describe the relevant part in your own words:

The conclusion of your analysis shouldn’t introduce any new quotations or arguments. Instead, it’s about wrapping up the essay. Here, you summarize your key points and try to emphasize their significance to the reader.

A good way to approach this is to briefly summarize your key arguments, and then stress the conclusion they’ve led you to, highlighting the new perspective your thesis provides on the text as a whole:

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
• Post hoc fallacy
• Appeal to authority fallacy
• False cause fallacy
• Sunk cost fallacy

College essays

• Choosing Essay Topic
• Write a College Essay
• Write a Diversity Essay
• College Essay Format & Structure
• Comparing and Contrasting in an Essay

 (AI) Tools

• Grammar Checker
• Paraphrasing Tool
• Text Summarizer
• AI Detector
• Plagiarism Checker
• Citation Generator

By tracing the depiction of Frankenstein through the novel’s three volumes, I have demonstrated how the narrative structure shifts our perception of the character. While the Frankenstein of the first volume is depicted as having innocent intentions, the second and third volumes—first in the creature’s accusatory voice, and then in his own voice—increasingly undermine him, causing him to appear alternately ridiculous and vindictive. Far from the one-dimensional villain he is often taken to be, the character of Frankenstein is compelling because of the dynamic narrative frame in which he is placed. In this frame, Frankenstein’s narrative self-presentation responds to the images of him we see from others’ perspectives. This conclusion sheds new light on the novel, foregrounding Shelley’s unique layering of narrative perspectives and its importance for the depiction of character.

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How to Write an Essay about a Novel – Step by Step Guide

Writing about literature used to scare the heck out of me. I really couldn’t wrap my mind around analyzing a novel. You have the story. You have the characters. But so what? I had no idea what to write.

Luckily, a brilliant professor I had as an undergrad taught me how to analyze a novel in an essay. I taught this process in the university and as a tutor for many years. It’s simple, and it works. And in this tutorial, I’ll show it to you. So, let’s go!

Writing an essay about a novel or any work of fiction is a 6-step process. Steps 1-3 are the analysis part. Steps 4-6 are the writing part.

Step 1. create a list of elements of the novel .

Ask yourself, “What are the elements of this book?”

Well, here is a list of elements present in any work of fiction, any novel:

Here is a table of literary elements along with their descriptions. 

In this step, you simply pick 3-6 elements from the list I just gave you and arrange them as bullet points. You just want to make sure you pick elements that you are most familiar or comfortable with.

For example, you can create the following list:

This is just for you to capture the possibilities of what you can write about. It’s a very simple and quick step because I already gave you a list of elements. 

Step 2. Pick 3 elements you are most comfortable with

In this step, we’ll use what I call The Power of Three . You don’t need more than three elements to write an excellent essay about a novel or a book. 

Just pick three from the list you just created with which you are most familiar or that you understand the best. These will correspond to three sections in your essay. 

If you’re an English major, you’ll be a lot more familiar with the term “metaphor” than if you major in Accounting. 

But even if you’re a Math major, you are at least probably already familiar with what a story or a character is. And you’ve probably had a takeaway or a lesson from stories you’ve read or seen on screen.

Just pick what you can relate to most readily and easily. 

For example, you can pick Characters , Symbols , and Takeaways . Great!

You Can Also Pick Examples of an Element 

Let’s say that you are really unfamiliar with most of the elements. In that case, you can just pick one and then list three examples of it.

For example, you can pick the element of Characters . And now all you need to do is choose three of the most memorable characters. You can do this with many of the elements of a novel.

You can pick three themes , such as Romance, Envy, and Adultery. 

You can pick three symbols , such as a rose, a ring, and a boat. These can represent love, marriage, and departure. 

Okay, great job picking your elements or examples of them. 

For the rest of this tutorial, I chose to write about a novel by Fedor Dostoyevskiy, The Brothers Karamazov. This will be our example. 

It is one of the greatest novels ever written. And it’s a mystery novel, too, which makes it fun. 

So now, let’s choose either three elements of this novel or three examples of an element. I find that one of the easiest ways to do this is to pick one element – Characters – and three examples of it. 

In other words, I’m picking three characters. And the entire essay will be about these three characters.

Now, you may ask, if I write only about the characters, am I really writing an essay about the novel? 

And the answer is, Yes. Because you can’t write about everything at once. You must pick something. Pick your battles. 

And by doing that, you will have plenty of opportunities to make a statement about the whole novel. Does that make sense? 

Just trust the process, and it will all become clear in the next steps. 

Let’s pick the three brothers – Alexei, Dmitriy, and Ivan. 

And don’t worry – I won’t assume that you have read the book. And I won’t spoil it for you if you’re planning to. 

So we have the three brothers. We’re ready to move on to the next step.

Step 3. Identify a relationship among these elements

In this step, you want to think about how these three elements that you picked are related to one another. 

In this particular case, the three brothers are obviously related because they are brothers. But I want you to dig deeper and see if there is perhaps a theme in the novel that may be connecting the elements.

And, yes, I am using another element – theme – just to help me think about the book. Be creative and use whatever is available to you. It just so happens that religion is a very strong theme in this novel. 

What do the three brothers have in common? 

• They have the same father.
• Each one has a romantic interest (meaning, a beloved woman).
• All three have some kind of a relationship with God. 

These are three ways in which the brothers are related to one another. All we need is one type of a relationship among them to write this essay. 

This is a religious novel, and yes, some of the characters will be linked to a form of a divinity. In this case, the religion is Christianity.

Note: there are many ways in which you can play with elements of a novel and examples of them. Here’s a detailed video I made about this process:

Let’s see if we can pick the best relationship of those we just enumerated.  

They all have the same father. 

This relationship is only factual. It is not very interesting in any way. So we move on to the next one.

They all have women they love.

Each brother has a romantic interest, to use a literary term. We can examine each of the brothers as a lover. 

Who is the most fervent lover? Who is perhaps more distant and closed? This is an interesting connecting relationship to explore. 

One of them is the most passionate about his woman, but so is another one – I won’t say who so I don’t spoil the novel for you. The third brother seems rather intellectual about his love interest. 

So, romantic interest is a good candidate for a connecting relationship. Let’s explore the next connection candidate. 

They all relate to God in one way or another. 

Let’s see if we can put the brothers’ relationships with God in some sort of an order. Well, Alexei is a monk in learning. He lives at the monastery and studies Christianity. He is the closest to God.

Dmitriy is a believer, but he is more distant from God due to his passionate affair with his woman. He loses his head many times and does things that are ungodly, according to the author. So, although he is a believer, he is more distant from God than is Alexei.

Finally, Ivan is a self-proclaimed atheist. Therefore, he is the farthest away from God.

It looks like we got ourselves a nice sequence, or progression, which we can probably use to write this essay about this novel. 

What is the sequence? The sequence is: 

Alexei is the closest to God, Dmitriy is second closest, and Ivan is pretty far away.

It looks like we have a pattern here. 

If we look at the brothers in the book and watch their emotions closely, we’ll come to the conclusion that they go from blissful to very emotionally unstable to downright miserable to the point of insanity.

Here’s the conclusion we must make: 

The closer the character’s relationship with God, the happier he is, and the farther away he is from God, the more miserable he appears to be.

Wow. This is quite a conclusion. It looks like we have just uncovered one of Dostoyevskiy’s main arguments in this novel, if not the main point he is trying to make.

Now that we’ve identified our three elements (examples) and a strong connecting relationship among them, we can move on to Step 4.

Step 4. Take a stand and write your thesis statement

Now we’re ready to formulate our thesis statement. It consists of two parts:

• Your Thesis (your main argument)
• Your Outline of Support (how you plan to support your main point)

By now, we have everything we need to write a very clear and strong thesis statement. 

First, let’s state our thesis as clearly and succinctly as possible, based on what we already know:

“In his novel Brothers Karamazov , Dostoyevskiy describes a world in which happiness is directly proportional to proximity to God. The closer to God a character is, the happier and more emotionally stable he is, and vice versa.”

See how clear this is? And most importantly, this is clear not only to the reader, but also to you as the writer. Now you know exactly what statement you will be supporting in the body of the essay. 

Are we finished with the thesis statement? Not yet. The second part consists of your supporting points. And again, we have everything we need to write it. Let’s do it.

“Alexei’s state of mind is ultimately blissful, because he is a true and observant believer. Dmitriy’s faith is upstaged by his passion for a woman, and he suffers a lot as a result. Ivan’s renunciation of God makes him the unhappiest of the brothers and eventually leads him to insanity.”

Guess what – we have just written our complete thesis statement. And it’s also our whole first paragraph. 

We are ready for Step 5. 

Step 5. Write the body of the essay

Again, just like in the previous step, you have everything you need to structure and write out the body of this essay.

How many main sections will this essay have? Because we are writing about three brothers, it only makes sense that our essay will have three main sections.

Each section may have one or more paragraphs. So, here’s an important question to consider:

How many words or pages do you have to write? 

Let’s say your teacher or professor wants you to write 2,000 words on this topic. Then, here is your strategic breakdown:

• Thesis Statement (first paragraph) = 100 words
• Conclusion (last paragraph) = 100 words
• Body of the Essay = 1,800 words

Let me show you how easy it is to subdivide the body of the essay into sections and subsections.

We already know that we have three sections. And we need 1,800 words total for the body. This leads us to 600 words per main section (meaning, per brother). 

Can we subdivide further? Yes, we can. And we should.

When discussing each of the brothers, we connect two subjects: his relationship with God AND his psychological state. That’s how we make those connections. 

So, we should simply subdivide each section of 600 words into two subsections of 300 words each. And now all we need to do is to write each part as if it were a standalone 300-word essay.

Does this make sense? See how simple and clear this is?

Writing Your Paragraphs

Writing good paragraphs is a topic for an entire article of its own. It is a science and an art.

In essence, you start your paragraph with a good lead sentence in which you make one point. Then, you provide reasons, explanations, and examples to support it. 

Here is an article I wrote on how to write great paragraphs .

Once you’ve written the body of the essay, one last step remains. 

Step 6. Add an introduction and a conclusion 

Introductions and conclusions are those little parts of an essay that your teachers and professors will want you to write. 

Introduction

In our example, we already have a full opening paragraph going. It’s our thesis statement. 

To write an introduction, all you need to do is add one or two sentences above the thesis statement. 

Here is our thesis statement:

“In his novel Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevskiy describes a world in which happiness is directly proportional to proximity to God. The closer to God a character is, the happier and more emotionally stable he is, and vice versa. Alexei’s state of mind is ultimately blissful, because he is a true and observant believer. Dmitriy’s faith is upstaged by his passion for a woman, and he suffers a lot as a result. Ivan’s renunciation of God makes him the unhappiest of the brothers and eventually leads him to insanity.”

As you can see, it is a complete paragraph that doesn’t lack anything. But because we need to have an introduction, here is a sentence with which we can open this paragraph:

“Dostoyevskiy is a great Russian novelist who explores the theme of religion in many of his books.”

And then just proceed with the rest of the paragraph. Read this sentence followed by the thesis statement, and you see that it works great. And it took me about 30 seconds to write this introductory sentence. 

You can write conclusions in several different ways. But the most time-proven way is to simply restate your thesis. 

If you write your thesis statement the way I teach, you will have a really strong opening paragraph that can be easily reworded to craft a good conclusion. 

Here is an article I wrote (which includes a video) on how to write conclusions .

Congratulations!

You’ve made it to the end, and now you know exactly how to write an essay about a novel or any work of fiction!

Tutor Phil is an e-learning professional who helps adult learners finish their degrees by teaching them academic writing skills.

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Last updated on May 31, 2022

The 40 Best Books About Writing: A Reading List for Authors

About the author.

Reedsy's editorial team is a diverse group of industry experts devoted to helping authors write and publish beautiful books.

About Dario Villirilli

Editor-in-Chief of the Reedsy blog, Dario is a graduate of Mälardalen University. As a freelance writer, he has written for many esteemed outlets aimed at writers. A traveler at heart, he can be found roaming the world and working from his laptop.

For this post, we’ve scoured the web (so you don’t have to) and asked our community of writers for recommendations on some indispensable books about writing. We've filled this list with dozens of amazing titles, all of which are great — but this list might seem intimidating. So for starters, here are our top 10 books about writing:

• On Writing by Stephen King
• The Kick-Ass Writer by Chuck Wendig
• Dreyer’s Englis h by Benjamin Dreyer
• The Elements of Style by Strunk, White, and Kalman
• The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne
• A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders
• Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
• Mouth Full of Blood by Toni Morrison
• How to Market a Book by Ricardo Fayet
• On Writing Well by William Zinsser

But if you're ready to get into the weeds, here are 40 of our favorite writing books.

Books about becoming a writer

1. on writing by stephen king.

Perhaps the most-cited book on this list, On Writing  is part-memoir, part-masterclass from one of America’s leading authors. Come for the vivid accounts of his childhood and youth — including his extended "lost weekend" spent on alcohol and drugs in the 1980s. Stay for the actionable advice on how to use your emotions and experiences to kickstart your writing, hone your skills, and become an author. Among the many craft-based tips are King’s expert takes on plot, story, character, and more.

From the book: “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” 

2. The Kick-Ass Writer by Chuck Wendig

If you haven’t checked out Wendig’s personal blog, head over there now and bookmark it. Unfiltered, profane, and almost always right, Wendig has become a leading voice among online writing communities in the past few years. In The Kick-Ass Writer , he offers over 1,000 pearls of wisdom for authors, ranging from express writing tips to guidance on getting published. Written to be read in short bursts, we’re sure he’d agree that this is the perfect bathroom book for writers.

From the book: “I have been writing professionally for a lucky-despite-the-number 13 years. Not once — seriously, not once ever — has anyone ever asked me where I got my writing degree… Nobody gives two ferrets fornicating in a filth-caked gym sock whether or not you have a degree… The only thing that matters is, Can you write well? ” 

3. Find Your Voice by Angie Thomas

Taking advice from famous authors is not about imitation, but about finding your own voice . Take it from someone who knows: Thomas is the New York Times #1 Bestselling author of The Hate U Give , On the Come Up , and Concrete Rose . While she’s found her calling in YA literature, she has plenty of insight into finding your own voice in your genre of choice. Written in the form of a guided journal, this volume comes with step-by-step instructions, writing prompts, and exercises especially aimed at helping younger creatives develop the strength and skills to realize their vision.

From the book: “Write fearlessly. Write what is true and real to you.” 

4. The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner

Since its publication in 2000, The Forest for the Trees  has remained an essential resource for authors at various stages in their careers. As an editor, Lerner gives advice not only on producing quality content, but also on how to build your career as an author and develop a winning routine — like how writers can be more productive in their creative process, how to get published, and how to publish well .

From the book: “The world doesn't fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life.”

Perfect your book with professional help

Meet the top book editors, designers, and marketers on Reedsy

Learn how Reedsy can help you craft a beautiful book.

5. How to Write Like Tolstoy by Richard Cohen

From the book: “Great writers can be inhibiting, and maybe after one has read a Scott Fitzgerald or Henry James one can’t escape imitat­ing them; but more often such writers are inspiring.”

6. Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith

Smith is well-known for her fiction, but she is also a prolific essay writer. In Feel Free , she has gathered several essays on recent cultural and political developments and combined them with experiences from her own life and career. In “The I Who Is Not Me”, she explores how her own lived experience comes into play in her fiction writing, and how she manages to extrapolate that to comment on contemporary social contexts, discussing race, class, and ethnicity.

From the book: “Writing exists (for me) at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self. The first is never wholly mine; the second I can only ever know in a partial sense; the third is a malleable and improvised response to the previous two.”

Books about language and style 

7. dreyer’s english by benjamin dreyer.

A staple book about writing well, Dreyer’s English serves as a one-stop guide to proper English, based on the knowledge that Dreyer — a senior copy editor at Random House — has accumulated throughout his career. From punctuation to tricky homophones, passive voice, and commas, the goal of these tools should be to facilitate effective communication of ideas and thoughts. Dreyer delivers this and then some, but not without its due dosage of humor and informative examples. 

From the book: “A good sentence, I find myself saying frequently, is one that the reader can follow from beginning to end, no matter how long it is, without having to double back in confusion because the writer misused or omitted a key piece of punctuation, chose a vague or misleading pronoun, or in some other way engaged in inadvertent misdirection.”

8. The Elements of Style (Illustrated) by William Strunk, Jr., E. B. White, and Maira Kalman

A perfect resource for visual learners, this illustrated edition of The Elements of Style has taken the classic style manual to a new, more accessible level but kept its main tenet intact: make every word tell. The written content by Strunk and White has long been referred to as an outline of the basic principles of style. Maira Kalman’s illustrations elevate the experience and make it a feast for both the mind and the eye. 

From the book: “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”

9. Sin and Syntax by Constance Hale

If you’re looking to bring a bit of spunk into your writing, copy editor Constance Hale may hold the key . Whether you’re writing a work-related email or the next rap anthem, she has one goal: to make creative communication available to everyone by dispelling old writing myths and making every word count. Peppered with writing prompts and challenges, this book will have you itching to put pen to paper.

From the book: “Verbose is not a synonym for literary.”

10. The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker

Combining entertainment with intellectual pursuit, Pinker, a cognitive scientist and dictionary consultant, explores and rethinks language usage in the 21st century . With illustrative examples of both great and not-so-great linguistic constructions, Pinker breaks down the art of writing and gives a gentle but firm nudge in the right direction, towards coherent yet stylish prose. This is not a polemic on the decay of the English language, nor a recitation of pet peeves, but a thoughtful, challenging, and practical take on the science of communication. 

From the book: “Why is so much writing so bad, and how can we make it better? Is the English language being corrupted by texting and social media? Do the kids today even care about good writing—and why should we care?”

11. Eats, Shoots, & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss

From the book: “A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air. "Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife annual and tosses it over his shoulder. "I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up." The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation. Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

Books about story structure

12. save the cat by blake snyder.

Best known as a screenwriting manual, Save the Cat! is just as often named by authors as one of their most influential books about writing. The title comes from the tried-and-true trope of the protagonist doing something heroic in the first act (such as saving a cat) in order to win over the audience. Yes, it might sound trite to some — but others swear by its bulletproof beat sheet. More recently, there has been Save the Cat! Writes a Novel , which tailors its principles specifically to the literary crowd. (For a concise breakdown of the beat sheet, check this post out!)

From the book: “Because liking the person we go on a journey with is the single most important element in drawing us into the story.” 

13. The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne

Shawn Coyne is a veteran editor with over 25 years of publishing experience, and he knows exactly what works and what doesn’t in a story — indeed, he’s pretty much got it down to a science. The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know  outlines Coyne’s original “Story Grid” evaluation technique, which both writers and editors can use to appraise, revise, and ultimately improve their writing (in order to get it ready for publication). Coyne and his friend Tim Grahl also co-host the acclaimed Story Grid podcast , another great resource for aspiring writers.

From the book: “The Story Grid is a tool with many applications. It pinpoints problems but does not emotionally abuse the writer… it is a tool to re-envision and resuscitate a seemingly irredeemable pile of paper stuck in an attack drawer, and it can inspire an original creation.”

14. Story Structure Architect by Victoria Schmidt

For those who find the idea of improvising utterly terrifying and prefer the security of structures, this book breaks down just about every kind of story structure you’ve ever heard of . Victoria Schmidt offers no less than fifty-five different creative paths for your story to follow — some of which are more unconventional, or outright outlandish than others. The level of detail here is pretty staggering: Schmidt goes into the various conflicts, subplots, and resolutions these different story structures entail — with plenty of concrete examples! Suffice to say that no matter what kind of story you’re writing, you’ll find a blueprint for it in Story Structure Architect .

From the book: “When you grow up in a Westernized culture, the traditional plot structure becomes so embedded in your subconscious that you may have to work hard to create a plot structure that deviates from it… Understand this and keep your mind open when reading [this book]. Just because a piece doesn’t conform to the model you are used to, does not make it bad or wrong.”

15. The Writer's Journey  by Christopher Vogler

Moving on, we hone in on the mythic structure. Vogler’s book, originally published in 1992, is now a modern classic of writing advice; though intended as a screenwriting textbook, its contents apply to any story of mythic proportions. In The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers , Vogler takes a page (literally) from Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces to ruminate upon the most essential narrative structures and character archetypes of the writing craft. So if you’re thinking of drawing up an epic fantasy series full of those tropes we all know and love , this guide should be right up your alley.

From the book: “The Hero’s Journey is not an invention, but an observation. It is a recognition of a beautiful design… It’s difficult to avoid the sensation that the Hero’s Journey exists somewhere, somehow, as an external reality, a Platonic ideal form, a divine model. From this model, infinite and highly varied copies can be produced, each resonating with the essential spirit of the form.”

16. Story Genius by Lisa Cron

From the book: “We don't turn to story to escape reality. We turn to story to navigate reality.”

17. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders

More than just a New York Times bestseller and the winner of the Booker Prize, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a distillation of the MFA class on Russian short stories that Saunders has been teaching. Breaking down narrative functions and why we become immersed in a story, this is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand and nurture our continued need for fiction.

From the book: “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?”

Books about overcoming obstacles as a writer

18. bird by bird by anne lamott .

Like Stephen King’s book about writing craft, this work from acclaimed novelist and nonfiction writer Anne Lamott also fuses elements of a memoir with invaluable advice on the writer’s journey. Particularly known for popularizing the concept of “shitty first drafts”, Bird by Bird was recently recommended by editor Jennifer Hartmann in her Reedsy Live webinar for its outlook take on book writing. She said, “This book does exactly what it says it will do: it teaches you to become a better writer. [Lamott] is funny and witty and very knowledgeable.”

From the book: “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.”

19. Take Off Your Pants by Libbie Hawker 

From the book: “When it comes to the eternal quandary of pantsing or plotting, you can keep a foot in each camp. But if your goals will require you to write with speed and confidence, an effective outline will be your best friend.”

20. Writing into the Dark by Dean Wesley Smith 

And for those who eschew structure altogether, we’ll now refer you to this title  from profile science fiction author Dean Wesley Smith. Having authored a number of official Star Trek novels, he definitely knows what he’s talking about when he encourages writers to go boldly into the unknown with an approach to writing books that doesn’t necessarily involve an elaborate plan. It might not be your action plan, but it can be a fresh perspective to get out of the occasional writer’s block.

From the book: “Imagine if every novel you picked up had a detailed outline of the entire plot… Would you read the novel after reading the outline? Chances are, no. What would be the point? You already know the journey the writer is going to take you on. So, as a writer, why do an outline and then have to spend all that time creating a book you already know?”

21. No Plot, No Problem by Chris Baty

If you’re procrastinating to the point where you haven’t even started your novel yet, NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty is your guy! No Plot, No Problem  is a “low-stress, high-velocity” guide to writing a novel in just 30 days (yup, it’s great prep for the NaNoWriMo challenge). You’ll get tons of tips on how to survive this rigorous process, from taking advantage of your initial momentum to persisting through moments of doubt.

Whether you’re participating in everyone’s favorite November write-a-thon or you just want to bang out a novel that’s been in your head forever, Baty will help you cross that elusive finish line.

From the book: “A rough draft is best written in the steam-cooker of an already busy life. If you have a million things to do, adding item number 1,000,001 is not such a big deal.”

22. The 90-Day Novel by Alan Watt

And for those who think 30 days is a bit too steam cooker-esque, there’s always Alan Watt’s more laid-back option. In The 90-Day Novel , Watt provides a unique three-part process to assist you with your writing. The first part provides assistance in developing your story’s premise, the second part helps you work through obstacles to execute it, and the third part is full of writing exercises to unlock the “primal forces” of your story — in other words, the energy that will invigorate your work and incite readers to devour it like popcorn at the movies.

From the book: “Why we write is as important as what we write. Grammar, punctuation, and syntax are fairly irrelevant in the first draft. Get the story down… fast. Get out of your head, so you can surprise yourself on the page.”

23. The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

If you feel like you’re constantly in the trenches of your “inner creative battle,” The War of Art is the book for you. Pressfield emphasizes the importance of breaking down creative barriers — what he calls “Resistance” — in order to defeat your demons (i.e., procrastination, self-doubt, etc.) and fulfill your potential. Though some of his opinions are no doubt controversial (he makes repeated claims that almost anything can be procrastination, including going to the doctor), this book is the perfect remedy for prevaricating writers who need a little bit of tough love.

From the book: “Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.”

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Books about writing as a lifestyle and career

24. steal like an artist by austin kleon.

As Kleon notes in the first section of Steal Like an Artist , this title obviously doesn’t refer to plagiarism. Rather, it acknowledges that art cannot be created in a vacuum, and encourages writers (and all other artists) to be open and receptive to all sources of inspiration. By “stealing like an artist,” writers can construct stories that already have a baseline of familiarity for readers, but with new twists that keep them fresh and exciting .

From the book: “If we’re free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running away from it.”

25. Mouth Full of Blood by Toni Morrison

From the book: “A writer's life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.”

26. Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

No matter what stage you’re at in your writing career, Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones will help you write more skillfully and creatively. With suggestions, encouragement, and valuable advice on the many aspects of the writing craft, Goldberg doesn’t shy away from making the crucial connection between writing and adding value to your life. Covering a range of topics including taking notes of your initial thoughts, listening, overcoming doubt, choosing where to write, and the selection of your verbs, this guide has plenty to say about the minute details of writing, but excels at exploring the author life.

From the book: “Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”

27. Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury

What does it take to become a great author? According to the beloved writer Ray Bradbury, it takes zest, gusto, curiosity, as well as a spirit of adventure. Sharing his wisdom and experiences as one of the most prolific writers in America , Bradbury gives plenty of practical tips and tricks on how to develop ideas, find your voice, and create your own style in this  thoughtful volume . In addition to that, this is also an insight into the life and mind of this prolific writer, and a celebration of the act of writing. 

From the book: “Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a land mine. The land mine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces back together. Now, it's your turn. Jump!”

28. The Kite and the String by Alice Mattison

One of the most common dilemmas an author faces is the struggle between spontaneity and control. Literary endeavors need those unexpected light-bulb moments, but a book will never be finished if you rely solely on inspiration. In The Kite and the String , Mattison has heard your cry for help and developed a guide for balancing these elements throughout the different stages of writing a novel or a memoir. Sure, there may be language and grammar rules that govern the way you write, but letting a bit of playfulness breathe life into your writing will see it take off to a whole new level. On the other hand, your writing routine, solitude, audience, and goal-setting will act as the strings that keep you from floating too far away. 

From the book: "Don’t make yourself miserable wishing for a kind of success that you wouldn’t enjoy if you had it."

29. How to Become a Successful Indie Author by Craig Martelle

This one’s for all the indie authors out there! Even if you’ve already self-published a book, you can still learn a lot from this guide by Craig Martelle, who has dozens of indie books — “over two and a half million words,” as he puts it — under his belt. With patience and expertise, Martelle walks you through everything you need to know: from developing your premise to perfecting your writing routine, to finally getting your work to the top of the Amazon charts.

From the book: “No matter where you are on your author journey, there’s always a new level you can reach. Roll up your sleeves, because it’s time to get to work.”

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30. How to Market a Book by Ricardo Fayet 

From the book: “Here’s the thing: authors don’t find readers; readers find books . [...] Marketing is not about selling your book to readers. It’s about getting readers to find it.”

31. Everybody Writes by Ann Handley

The full title of Handley’s all-inclusive book on writing is actually Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content — which should tell you something about its broad appeal. Not only does Handley have some great ideas on how to plan and produce a great story, but she also provides tips on general content writing, which comes in handy when it’s time to build your author platform or a mailing list to promote your book . As such, Everybody Writes is nothing like your other books on novel writing — it’ll make you see writing in a whole new light.

From the book: “In our world, many hold a notion that the ability to write, or write well, is a gift bestowed on a chosen few. That leaves us thinking there are two kinds of people: the writing haves — and the hapless, for whom writing well is a hopeless struggle, like trying to carve marble with a butter knife. But I don’t believe that, and neither should you.” 

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Books on writing poetry 

32. madness, rack, and honey by mary ruefle.

With a long history of crafting and lecturing about poetry, Ruefle invites the reader of Madness, Rack, and Honey to immerse themselves into its beauty and magic. In a powerful combination of lectures and musings, she expertly explores the mind and craft of writers while excavating the magical potential of poetry. Often a struggle between giving and taking, poetry is, according to Ruefle, a unique art form that reveals the innermost workings of the human heart.

From the book: “In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single lifespan, to watch the great impersonal universe at work again and again”

33. Threads by Sandeep Parmar, Nisha Ramayya, and Bhanu Kapil

If you’re looking for something that explores the philosophical aspects of writing, Threads asks big questions about writing and the position of the writer in an industry that has largely excluded marginalized voices. Where does the writer exist in relation to its text and, particularly in the case of poetry, who is the “I”? Examining the common white, British, male lens, this collection of short essays will make it hard for you not to critically consider your own perceptions and how they affect your writing process.

From the book: “It is impossible to consider the lyric without fully interrogating its inherent promise of universality, its coded whiteness.”

34. The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner

Despite its eye-catching title, this short essay is actually a defense of poetry. Lerner begins with his own hatred of the art form, and then moves on to explore this love-hate dichotomy that actually doesn’t seem to be contradictory. Rather, such a multitude of emotions might be one of the reasons that writers and readers alike turn to it. With its ability to evoke feelings and responses through word-play and meter, poetry has often been misconceived as inaccessible and elitist; this is a call to change that perception. 

From the book: “All I ask the haters — and I, too, am one — is that they strive to perfect their contempt, even consider bringing it to bear on poems, where it will be deepened, not dispelled, and where, by creating a place for possibility and present absences (like unheard melodies), it might come to resemble love.”

35. Poemcrazy by Susan G. Wooldridge

If you’ve ever felt that the mysterious workings of poetry are out of your reach and expressly not for you, Wooldridge is here to tell you that anyone who wants to can write poetry. An experienced workshop leader, she will help you find your inner voice and to express it through the written word . Giving you advice on how to think, use your senses, and practice your writing, Wooldrige will have you putting down rhyme schemes before you know it. 

From the book: “Writing a poem is a form of listening, helping me discover what's wrong or frightening in my world as well as what delights me.”

36. Writing Better Lyrics by Pat Pattison

From the book: “Don't be afraid to write crap — it makes the best fertilizer. The more of it you write, the better your chances are of growing something wonderful.”

Books about writing nonfiction

37. on writing well by william zinsser.

Going strong with its 30th-anniversary edition, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction is an evergreen resource for nonfiction writers which breaks down the fundamental principles of written communication. As a bonus, the insights and guidelines in this book can certainly be applied to most forms of writing, from interviewing to camp-fire storytelling. Beyond giving tips on how to stay consistent in your writing and voice, how to edit, and how to avoid common pitfalls, Zinsser can also help you grow as a professional writer, strengthening your career and taking steps in a new direction. 

From the book: “Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.”

38. Essays by Lydia Davis

Ironically enough, this rather lengthy book is a celebration of brevity. As one of the leading American voices in flash-fiction and short-form writing, Davis traces her literary roots and inspirations in essays on everything, ranging from the mastodonic work of Proust to minimalism. In both her translations and her own writing, she celebrates experimental writing that stretches the boundaries of language. Playing with the contrast between what is said and what is not, this collection of essays is another tool to the writing shed to help you feel and use the power of every word you write.

From the book: “Free yourself of your device, for at least certain hours of the day — or at the very least one hour. Learn to be alone, all alone, without people, and without a device that is turned on. Learn to experience the purity of that kind of concentration. Develop focus, learn to focus intently on one thing, uninterrupted, for a long time.”

39. Essayism by Brian Dillon

In this volume , Dillon explores the often overlooked genre of essay writing and its place in literature’s past, present, and future. He argues that essays are an “experiment in attention” but also highlights how and why certain essays have directly impacted the development of the cultural and political landscape, from the end of the Middle Ages until the present day. At its heart, despite its many forms, subject areas, and purposes, essayism has its root in self-exploration. Dip in and out of Dillon’s short texts to find inspiration for your own nonfiction writing.

From the book: “What exactly do I mean, even, by 'style'? Perhaps it is nothing but an urge, an aspiration, a clumsy access of admiration, a crush.”

40. Naked, Drunk, and Writing by Adair Lara

From the book: “Write it down. Whatever it is, write it down. Chip it into marble. Type it into Microsoft Word. Spell it out in seaweeds on the shore. We are each of us an endangered species, delicate as unicorns.”

With a few of these books in your arsenal, you’ll be penning perfect plots in no time! And if you’re interested in learning more about the editing process, check our post on books on editing next!

ZUrlocker says:

11/03/2019 – 19:46

I'm familiar with several of these books. But for new authors, I urge you caution. It is very tempting to read so many books about writing that you never get around to writing. (I did this successfully for many years!) So I will suggest paring it down to just two books: Stephen King on Writing and Blake Snyder Save the Cat. Snyder's book is mostly about screenwriting, so you could also consider Save the Cat Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody. Best of luck!

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Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

How Reading Fiction Can Shape Our Real Lives

I started college in the fall of 2003, when I was seventeen years old. I’d spent the last year dissecting news articles with my AP Government class on the U.S.’s escalating tensions with Iraq. War had moved beyond theory and into inevitability—yet I didn’t know how to express my horror and had even less of an idea of what to do with it. Then, six months after the first time the U.S. invaded Fallujah, I read Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried .

In this award-winning novelization of his experiences as a soldier in the Vietnam War, O’Brien tells the story of Rat Kiley and Curt Lemon. Rat and Curt are best friends—inseparable—until the moment when, during a game of catch, Curt steps on a hidden landmine and dies instantaneously. The abruptness of the incident and its placement in the middle of a scene of languor tells one kind of truth about the arbitrariness of war. But what struck me most—what motivated me to find out what I could do instead of merely understand—is the scene that comes after.

The narrator, who is also a soldier in Curt and Rat’s unit, tells the reader that shortly after Curt’s death, they stumble upon a baby water buffalo. Rat strokes its nose—and then shoots it in its right front knee, its back, twice in its flanks. Piece by piece, he tears the buffalo apart. The narrator tells us:

Advertisement X Keep Up with the GGSC Happiness Calendar Give and receive love this month Now and then, when I tell this story, someone will come up to me afterward and say she liked it… That as a rule she hates war stories… but this one she liked. The poor baby buffalo, it made her sad… What I should do, she’ll say, is put it all behind me. Find new stories to tell. I won’t say it but I’ll think it… You dumb [expletive] . Because she wasn’t listening. It wasn’t a war story. It was a love story.

The story of Rat and Curt didn’t just illuminate to me that the human costs of war extend far beyond death—it allowed me to feel the anguish of it, albeit a tiny fraction of it. From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to 1984 , novels have been used for generations as a way to urge readers to confront real-world sociopolitical issues. And it works—I know because I’m proof.

There’s scientific evidence to back me up, too.

In a recent article entitled “ Sitting Still and Reading: Rethinking the Role of Literary Fiction in Civics Education ,” literary scholar Annie Schultz argues for the importance of teaching literature alongside simulations of civic practices. She claims engaging students in civic activities, like community organizing or Model United Nations, should be paired with “literary representations of existential journeys to political consciousness.” That, through doing so, “reading and thinking can become emancipatory activities.” Indeed, an ever-growing body of research shows fiction has the proven capacity to make readers more open-minded, empathetic, and compassionate —capacities critical to ensuring we come out the other side of a global pandemic and a culture of militarized white supremacy with greater societal equity.

Why? Perhaps because a reader sits with a novel for hours, days, weeks—far longer than when consuming any other art form. This concentrated time gives a reader an embodied experience of the other, increasing their awareness and appreciation for differing perspectives.

Canadian cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley, who has been researching the effects of fiction on psychology for decades, found that the neural mechanisms the brain triggers to process narratives are similar to some of their real-life counterparts. For example, when reading the word “kick” or about someone pulling a cord, the same areas of the brain related to physically kicking or grasping are activated. One study found that one of the most important features of whether or not reading a passage of fiction simulated the default network of the brain—the network believed to support the human capacity to engage in rumination and simulate hypothetical scenes, spaces, and states of mind—was “whether or not they described a person or a person’s mental content.” In other words, being exposed to a character’s thought processes encouraged a deeper level of reflection than when reading abstract or “non-social passages.” The intimacy of a reader’s relationship with a fictional narrator’s interior dialogue is perhaps one of its most singular characteristics—a process Schultz describes as turning “the inner lives of oppressed characters outward.”

Fourteen years after first reading O’Brien’s book, I found myself back at my undergrad alma mater. I was teaching a writing class and used that same chapter of The Things They Carried —the one with the story about Rat and Curt. In the book, the narrator never self-identifies themselves by either name or gender, but a young cis male student claimed he knew the narrator was male because the narrator didn’t wax poetic about their emotions. When I asked him what character he felt expressed the most emotion in the piece, he paused and said, “Huh—Rat. A man.” It seems likely that this insight opened a door in the student’s mind—and perhaps he was able to let go of his idea that men couldn’t express a lot of emotion. One group of researchers argue that in “reading the written work of others, you enter their minds. In coming to terms with the mind of another, you can come to better discover your own.” In doing so, we can discover new perspectives through which to understand ourselves and others. Schultz concludes her article: “We do not ask students to limit their thinking to that which is acceptable within the languages and systems in place but, rather, to narrate their own histories and selves as a way to create themselves and society by extension.”

Greater Good Chronicles

Years ago, I stumbled upon Plato’s Apology —his account of Socrates’ defense while on trial for “corrupting the youth of Athens”—in a used bookstore. Socrates explained he was trying to disprove the Oracle of Delphi’s proclamation that he was the wisest of all men—yet, after every interaction he had with men he was told were wise, he determined they were not. It was this exposure of false wisdom (and, I imagine, hubris) that earned him the admiration of the Athenian youth.

One of the groups Socrates discounts is the poets. In his disputation, he says, “Not by wisdom do poets write poetry but by a sort of genius and inspiration.” His claim was that poets couldn’t be wise because their work was rooted in imagination, but I—and maybe the jury who found him guilty and sentenced him to death—believe the opposite to be true. The invented, fictive space is where truth can be found precisely because it doesn’t claim to hold it. Rather, fictional narratives provide the reader with an experience on which to reflect and discern meaning.

When readers read fiction, they know they are encountering human-constructed characters, settings, and situations. This necessary suspension of disbelief—of having to entertain the possibility of other realities—means readers of fiction aren’t merely learning to understand the world as it is, but, also, how to imagine a different one. And it is this act of imagining that makes alternative futures possible—a future without endless, violent conflict, for example.

A white paper published in 2017 by the National Academies of Science goes so far as to make the argument that narratology—“the study of narrative, narrative structure, and narrative discourse”—and narrative psychology—an understanding of “how narrative influences cognitive processes”—should be an interest of national security. The paper was published in response to a policy brief distributed by the Department of Defense which focuses “on a critical and enduring challenge in warfare—the need to understand relevant actors’ motivations and the underpinnings of their will .” The authors of the white paper write:

If there is doubt about the value of narrative… to national security, it only takes one look beneath the events displayed in the daily news…: somewhere prior to the action garnering international attention, communication happened that resonated with an audience, who found more reasons to act than not.

That is a point that becomes only more salient with every passing day, in 2020.

I am not trying to claim that O’Brien’s book single-handedly transformed me into an anti-war activist, but it did force me to sit with the unspeakable brutality of one war and reflect on its implications for a new one. It inspired me to continue seeking out news on the ongoing occupation of Iraq, to start writing political commentary for my college newspaper, to take a class on the Vietnam War, to visit Vietnam with a remarkable professor who is himself a Vietnam vet, to join anti-war marches in Philadelphia, to organize my first demonstration on the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Fallujah with an Iraq War vet in the spring of my senior year.

My first job after college was as the National Media Coordinator for Iraq Veterans Against the War (now called About Face: Veterans Against the War ), a national nonprofit made up of post-9/11 service members fighting against American militarism. Since then, I’ve exclusively worked in the fields of communications and community organizing for mission-driven nonprofits and organized labor for more than twelve years. When a friend recently told me he only reads nonfiction because he (like Socrates!) prefers to read something “real,” I couldn’t help but think he got it wrong. Fiction isn’t the antithesis to reality—it helps shape it. In her new book of essays, Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction , Arundhati Roy opens by recalling a conversation with her editor. When he asked her what she thought of when she thought of the word “Azadi” (Urdu for “freedom”), she said, “[W]ithout a moment’s hesitation, ‘A novel.’”

Roy continues, “A novel, to me, is freedom with responsibility.” And that, I think, is what makes fiction a revolutionary tool—it doesn’t just provide readers with the capacity to imagine different futures, but, crucially, the very real people in them.

About the Author

Francesca Lo Basso

Francesca Lo Basso is a narrative strategist, writer, and community organizer with more than twelve years of experience working for mission-driven nonprofits and organized labor. Most recently, her creative nonfiction pieces have been published in Toho magazine and in an anthology of micro-essays entitled Conversations with Men . She currently works for education justice nonprofit Big Picture Philadelphia , which provides holistic, student-centered learning at two Philadelphia area high schools. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Kingston University in London and a BA in English and Philosophy from La Salle University.

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The Art of Fiction

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• Internet Archive - "The Art of Fiction"

The Art of Fiction , critical essay by Henry James , published in 1884 in Longman’s Magazine . It was written as a rebuttal to “ Fiction as One of the Fine Arts,” a lecture given by Sir Walter Besant in 1884, and is a manifesto of literary realism that decries the popular demand for novels that are saturated with sentimentality or pessimism. It was published separately in 1885.

In The Art of Fiction , James disagrees with Besant’s assertions that plot is more important than characterization, that fiction must have a “conscious moral purpose,” and that experience and observation outweigh imagination as creative tools. James argues against these restrictive rules for writing fiction, responding that “no good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.”

• Self-Improvement

The Surprising Power of Reading Fiction: 9 Ways it Make Us Happier and More Creative

Former Director of People @ Buffer

“There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.” ― Doris Lessing

One of the most inspiring perks we’re lucky enough to have at Buffer is a free Kindle for each teammate (and her family!) and as many free Kindle books as you like, no questions asked.

When we share what we’re reading at Buffer on our Pinterest page or in our Slack community , the selections often tend to skew more toward non-fiction—you can generally find teammates reading books that help us improve at our jobs, understand our world better and become more productive , for example.

What’s interesting—and maybe a bit counterintuitive—is that reading fiction can provide many of those same self-improvement benefits , even while exploring other worlds through stories that exist only in the mind.

In fact, the practice of using books, poetry and other written words as a form of therapy has helped humans for centuries. Fiction is a uniquely powerful way to understand others, tap into creativity and exercise your brain.

The next time you feel even a tiny bit guilty for picking up a work of fiction instead of a self-help book, consider these 9 benefits of reading fiction.

1. Empathy: Imagining creates understanding

To put yourself in the shoes of others and grow your capacity for empathy, you can hardly do better than reading fiction.  Multiple studies have shown that imagining stories helps activate the regions of your brain responsible for better understanding others and seeing the world from a new perspective.

When the psychologist Raymond Mar analyzed 86 fMRI studies, he saw substantial overlap in the brain networks used to understand stories and the networks used to navigate interactions with other individuals.

“…In particular, interactions in which we’re trying to figure out the thoughts and feelings of others. Scientists call this capacity of the brain to construct a map of other people’s intentions ‘theory of mind.’ Narratives offer a unique opportunity to engage this capacity, as we identify with characters’ longings and frustrations, guess at their hidden motives and track their encounters with friends and enemies, neighbors and lovers.”

That’s because when we read about a situation or feeling, it’s very nearly as if we’re feeling it ourselves. As Fast Company reports :

Two researchers from Washington University in St. Louis scanned the brains of fiction readers and discovered that their test subjects created intense, graphic mental simulations of the sights, sounds, movements, and tastes they encountered in the narrative. In essence, their brains reacted as if they were actually living the events they were reading about.

2. Disengagement: Reading is most effective for stress

Your brain can’t operate at maximum capacity 24/7—far from it. We all need periods of disengagement to rest our cognitive capabilities and get back to peak functionality.

Tony Schwartz talks about this as one of the most overlooked elements of our lives: Even the fastest racing car can’t win the race with at least one or two great pit stops. The same holds true for ourselves. If we don’t have “pit-stops” built into our days, there is now chance we can race at a high performance.

And reading fiction is among the very best ways to get that disengaged rest. The New Yorker reports that:

Reading has been shown to put our brains into a pleasurable trance-like state, similar to meditation, and it brings the same health benefits of deep relaxation and inner calm. Regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than non-readers.

Research at the University of Sussex shows that reading is the most effective way to overcome stress, beating out other methods like listening to music or taking a walk.

Within 6 minutes of silent reading, participants’ heart rates slowed and tension in their muscles eased up to 68%. Psychologists believe reading works so well because the mind’s concentration creates a distraction that eases the body’s stress.

3. Sleep: Regular readers sleep better

In fact, the kind of relaxed disengagement that reading creates can become the perfect environment for helping you sleep .

Creating a sleep ritual is a great way to build up a consistent sleep pattern. One of the key things is to have the last activity completely disengage you from the tasks of the rest of your day .

Buffer’s CEO, Joel, has a ritual in the evening of going for a short walk and, upon returning, going straight to bed and reading a fiction book. He reports that it helps him disengage from the work he’s done in the day and get the sleep he needs to wake up refreshed and ready for the next day.

Serial optimizer Tim Ferriss also believes in the power of reading before bed—fiction only:

“Do not read non-fiction prior to bed, which encourages projection into the future and preoccupation/planning. Read fiction that engages the imagination and demands present-state attention. Recommendations for compulsive non-fiction readers include Motherless Brooklyn and Stranger in a Strange Land .”

4. Improved relationships: Books are a ‘reality simulator’

Life is complicated. Oftentimes, interpersonal relationships and challenges don’t have the simple resolutions we might like. How can we become more accepting of this reality? By using fiction to explore ideas of change, complex emotions and the unknown.

Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, proposed to the New York Times that reading produces a kind of reality simulation that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.”

Fiction, Dr. Oatley notes, “is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.”

Writer Eileen Gunn suggests that reading science fiction, in particular , helps us accept change more readily:

“What science fiction does, especially in those works that deal with the future, is help people understand that things change and that you can live through it. Change is all around us. Probably things change faster now than they did four or five hundred years ago, particularly in some parts of the world.”

5. Memory: Readers have less mental decline in later life

We know that hearing a story is a great way to remember information for the long-term.

Now there’s also evidence that readers experience slower memory declined later in life compared to non-readers. In particular, later-in-life readers have a 32 percent lower rate of mental decline compared to their peers.

In addition to slower memory decline, those who read more have been found to show less characteristics of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a 2001 study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .

6. Inclusivity: Stories open your mind

Can reading Harry Potter make us more inclusive, tolerant and open-minded? One study says yes. (A butterbeer toast for everyone!)

The study, published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, tested whether the novels of Harry Potter could be used as a tool for improving attitudes toward stigmatized groups.

After 3 experiments in which students read passages of the books about discrimination, the students showed changed attitudes about everything from immigrants to gay students.

Mic reports that “the researchers credited the books with improving readers’ ability to assume the perspective of marginalized groups. They also claimed that young children, with the help of a teacher, were able to understand that Harry’s frequent support of “mudbloods” was an allegory towards bigotry in real-life society.”

There’s no doubt that books can open your mind. This great, short TED talk by Lisa Bu shows just how much:

7. Vocabulary: Fiction readers build more language

We all want the kind of vocabulary that can help us express ourselves and connect with others .

Fiction can help you get there. A 2013 Emory University compared the brains of people after they read fiction (specifically, Robert Harris’ Pompeii over nine nights) to the brains of people who didn’t read.

The brains of the readers showed more activity in certain areas than those who didn’t read—especially the left temporal cortex, the part of the brain typically associated with understanding language.

The website testyourvocab.com analyzed millions of its test-takers to discover the somewhat expected conclusion that reading more builds a bigger vocabulary. What was less expected was how much of a difference the type of reading made: Fiction readers were significantly more likely to have a larger vocabulary:

The study noted : “That fiction reading would increase vocabulary size more than just non-fiction was one of our hypotheses — it makes sense, after all, considering that fiction tends to use a greater variety of words than non-fiction does. However, we hadn’t expected its effect to be this prominent.”

8. Creativity: Fictions allows for uncertainty (where creativity thrives!)

In the movies, we often long for a happy ending. Have you noticed that fiction can be much more ambiguous?

That’s exactly what makes it the perfect environment for creativity. A study published in Creativity Research Journal asked students to read either a short fictional story or a non-fiction essay and then measured their emotional need for certainty and stability.

Researchers discovered that the fiction readers had less need for “cognitive closure” than those who read non-fiction , and added:

“These findings suggest that reading fictional literature could lead to better procedures of processing information generally, including those of creativity.”

9. Pleasure: Reading makes you happier

All the above factors are great. But the very biggest reason I try to read every single day? I love it. It makes me happy, and I’m not alone—a survey of 1,500 adult readers in the UK found that 76% of them said reading improves their life and helps to make them feel good .

Other findings of the survey are that those who read books regularly are on average more satisfied with life, happier, and more likely to feel that the things they do in life are worthwhile.

It’s fascinating to me to think about how much has changed in American life and media during the years in the chart below, published by Pew. Somehow reading for pleasure has been able to hang in there throughout—even with the advent of the Internet, smart phones and so many more attention-zapping inventions.

It must be doing something good for us!

Over to you!

Can you tell a difference in yourself when you take some time out to read fiction? What are some of your favorite books or genres for reading?

I’d love to hear all your thoughts and recommendations in the comments!

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Works of prose are typically divided into one of two categories: fiction vs. nonfiction. A work of fiction might resemble the real world, but it certainly did not happen in real life. Nonfiction, on the other hand, should not contain any fiction, as the writer’s credibility comes from the truthfulness of the story.

Any writer of fiction vs. nonfiction will use different skills and strategies to write in each genre. Yet, fiction and nonfiction are more alike than you might realize. Additionally, there are many works of prose that fall somewhere in between the fiction vs. nonfiction binary.

This article examines, in detail, the writing strategies available to prose writers of fiction and nonfiction. It also examines the fiction vs. nonfiction binary, and offers insight into the role that “truth” plays in both genres of literature.

But first, let’s uncover what writers mean when they categorize a work of prose as fiction vs. nonfiction. What is the difference between fiction and nonfiction?

Fiction vs. Nonfiction: Definitions

Let’s begin by defining each of these categories of literature. The main difference between fiction and nonfiction has to do with “what actually transpired in the real world.”

“Fiction” refers to stories that have not occurred in real life. Fiction may resemble real life, and it may even pull from real life events or people. But the story itself, the “what happens in this text,” is ultimately invented by the author.

“Nonfiction,” on the other hand, refers to stories that have occurred in real life. The story may have happened in the author’s life, in the life of someone the author has interviewed, or in the life of a historical figure. It also describes works of journalism, science writing, and other forms of “reality-based” writing.

To further complicate things, writers might categorize something as being either “ creative nonfiction ” or, simply, “nonfiction.” This article discusses strategies for writing both, but with an emphasis on creative nonfiction, such as memoir and personal essays, as those skills apply to most forms of prose.

Fiction vs. Nonfiction: A way of categorizing literature based on whether it happened in the real world (nonfiction) or didn’t (fiction).

Now, while these two categories exist, it’s worth noting that certain genres of writing sit somewhere in the middle. Some genres that straddle the fiction vs. nonfiction border are:

• Autobiographical fiction (also known as autofic). An example is The Idiot by Elif Batuman.
• Speculative nonfiction , or writing in which invented truths are not at odds with what transpired in real life.
• Historical fiction, which typically involves the accurate retelling of real life historical events, with fictional characters and plots woven through that history.

But wait, how can a work of literature be both true and not true? We’ll explore that paradox later in this article. First, let’s explore the possibilities of fiction and nonfiction.

Fiction vs. Nonfiction: Examples of Each Category

The following genres can be classified as types of fiction:

• Short stories.
• Plays and screenplays (though these can also be nonfiction).
• Literary fiction.
• Categories of genre fiction – including mystery, thriller, romance, horror, and other types of speculative fiction , like magical realism or urban fantasy .
• Fables, fairy tales, and folklore.
• Narrative poetry .

Meanwhile, these are different types of nonfiction:

• Personal essays.
• Biographies and autobiographies.
• Books about history.
• Periodicals.
• Lyric essays .
• Journalism, articles, food writing , travel writing, and other forms of feature writing.
• Scholarly articles.

Learn more about different types of nonfiction here:

https://writers.com/types-of-nonfiction

Characteristics of Fiction vs. Nonfiction

As you can see above, fiction and nonfiction are both expansive categories of literature. So, it’s impossible to describe all of fiction or nonfiction as being any particular thing. If I were to say “all fiction is about stories that haven’t actually happened,” that isn’t true, because genres like autofic and historical fiction exist.

Nonetheless, there are a few differences and similarities that can generally be stated about fiction vs. nonfiction. The differences include:

• Whether the story is made up or real.
• How the writer creates a plot for the story.
• The role research plays in telling the story.
• How themes are explored within the story.

Fiction vs. Nonfiction: Did It Actually Happen?

As we’ve already mentioned, the main difference between fiction and nonfiction is whether or not the story occurred in real life. In nonfiction, the story did occur in the real world; in fiction, it did not.

Fictional stories can be rooted in real-life events, but the scenes, plotline, and characters are invented by the author, even if they’re based on real people.

You might think of a couple of exceptions here. Historical fiction, for example, is often based on real historical events, such as Civil War stories. While the setting for the story happened in real life, and might even involve real historical figures, there are also fictional characters in the story, and the majority of scenes and plot points were fictionalized as well. If historical fiction interests you, check out our interview with Jack Smith on his novel If Winter Comes .

Another exception, in all seriousness, is fanfiction. Yes, Harry Styles fanfiction does involve a living, real life person. But the author is making assumptions, assigning character traits, and inventing plot points for Harry Styles that did not actually occur in the real world.

The point: fiction writers can (and always do!) borrow from real life. They might even tell their own stories as though they were fiction. Even in those instances, there are always details that are added, embellished, or altered to tell a more engaging story, so the stories themselves are still fictional.

Fiction vs. Nonfiction: What’s the Plot?

Fiction writers use plot as scaffolding for a story. By plot, we mean the way that the events of a story are organized from start to finish. Our article on plot structures offers different ways that fiction writers have used plot to tell their stories.

This is true even of literary fiction, which is typically defined as realistic fiction in which the characters’ decisions drive the story forward, and the characters themselves form the story. (This is a somewhat problematic distinction between genre fiction, but we discuss that in our article on literary fiction vs. genre fiction .) In those stories, plot is centered around the conflict in the story itself.

In nonfiction, the author’s goal is to organize what actually transpired in the real world into a cogent plot. For many writers, that means telling the story in a linear fashion, with careful attention to the most salient details and how they’re presented to the reader.

Of course, many creative nonfiction writers do tell stories non-linearly, particularly in genres like the braided essay, lyric essay, and hermit crab essay.

Fiction vs. Nonfiction: The Role of Research

Most prose writers will have to do some amount of research to craft effective works of fiction and nonfiction. Memoirists may be able to tell their story entirely without research, but anything to verify the accuracy of information counts as research, such as looking up old emails, the streets and locations of certain events, etc. Rarely can one’s memory suffice to tell an entire story.

Fiction writers integrate their research into the story. Let’s say your story is set in New York, a city you’ve visited, but never lived in. You have a character that lives in Bushwick, which is served by the L, M, J, and Z trains. You may need to research that, and when that research is integrated into the story, you’ll write that your character “took the L train.” (In other words, you will not write “I discovered that Bushwick is served by the L train, which my character took into Manhattan.”)

In nonfiction, research informs the story, and is directly cited in the text. Let’s say your story involves New York rent and the aforementioned L train. You might be writing about the time that the city almost shut down the L train—they needed to do repairs to the tunnel beneath the East River connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn. When it was announced that this service was going to be suspended, rents drastically dropped in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a recently gentrified neighborhood, and many people locked in historically low rents. People were very upset about this sudden closure, and the L service was later not suspended, meaning, ironically, a bunch of people got cheap rents without losing train service.

This is the kind of story that a journalist might write about. Or, you might be someone who locked in that cheap rent, and it’s part of the story of your time living in Williamsburg. In any case, if it’s nonfiction, you’ll want to cite it directly in the text. A journalist might cite people that they interviewed, or a city historian might cite this article and this article . Someone writing creative nonfiction might not need to add a citation, but they would still want to research and communicate the details here so that the reader has context for their story.

To summarize: fiction writers integrate research into their stories, while nonfiction writers cite research to bolster and verify their stories.

Fiction vs. Nonfiction: How Themes are Explored

Theme refers to the overarching ideas presented and explored throughout the story.

Fiction writers explore themes implicitly; for them, the theme of a story is rarely stated. If, for example, the theme of a story is “justice,” then the fiction writer might explore who receives justice, who doesn’t, and how that justice (or lack thereof) is doled out. However, the fiction writer will not say “this character did not receive justice” explicitly—that’s for the reader to understand and form their own opinion about.

Nonfiction writers typically state their themes more openly. In a memoir or essay, the writer might explore why justice was or was not given to them, what factors went into that decision, and what it means to live a life after being (or not being) dispensed justice.

Some nonfiction writers might explore themes without stating them, or even without realizing they’re exploring them. But, because the nonfiction writer wants to convey what it was like to be the subject of the story, they will inevitably explore, and therefore openly state, the deeper parts of the story itself. This includes the author’s emotions, background, external circumstances, and the themes and conclusions that they drew from their experiences.

Similarities Between Fiction and Nonfiction

Despite the above differences, fiction and nonfiction have many similarities, too. In brief, these similarities include:

• The interplay of plot, characters, and settings to explore themes and ideas. While the people of nonfiction stories might not be considered “characters,” they are people presented in a certain way, and with a certain intent, on the page.
• Utilizing prose to tell a story. Fiction and nonfiction writers can both experiment with this: novelists have included poetry in their stories, and essayists, particularly lyric essayists and hermit crab essayists, often play with the prose form.
• The desire to entertain, inform, enlighten, challenge, and/or move the reader.

Fiction vs. Nonfiction Venn Diagram

What is the difference between fiction and nonfiction? The below Venn Diagram summarizes what’s similar and different about the two genres. Virtually all things in the world of literature have exceptions, so while the below is not true 100% of the time, it’s a good place to start teasing out the difference between fiction and nonfiction.

The Role of “Truth” in Fiction and Nonfiction

The primary difference between fiction and nonfiction is whether or not the story happened in the real world. Yet, we’ve already mentioned three example genres in which fact and fiction can coexist peacefully. So, how much does “truth” matter in fiction vs. nonfiction?

Certainly, most works of nonfiction must be entirely factual. Memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, scholarly works, books about history, and journalism must all adhere to what actually transpired in the real world. When works of nonfiction fabricate details, someone is bound to figure that out eventually, and the ensuing scandal probably isn’t worth it.

At the same time, there’s something to be said about “truth” as a multifaceted concept. One person’s truth can be different than another’s; two people can both have honest, differing interpretations about the exact same event. What matters more than truth, if anything, is honesty.

When memoirists publish their work as memoirs, they assert to the reader that what transpired in the text actually occurred in real life. (So, publishing a memoir about wandering Nazi-torn Europe and being adopted by wolves would not be true or honest, even if it’s a potent metaphor for how the author felt.)

Yet, a memoirist might include information in the novel that’s controversial, in dispute, or otherwise not verifiably true. Does that mean the author lied to their reader?

It really depends on the writer and what they wrote. Consider a few things:

• Emotional truth is sometimes at odds with factual truth. That’s not to say you should invent a metaphor and claim it actually happened. But, the brain works in weird ways, makes odd associations, and reacts to the truth strangely. As a result, your brain might distort memories to make an intense emotion make sense. What the writer conveys to the reader is still an accurate portrayal of how they experienced something, even though their memory of the event itself has been skewed..
•  Relatedly, memory is fallible. Unless you have an eidetic memory, you will inevitably forget, distort, or invent details in the memories you set on the page. Research on flashbulb memories proves that none of us remember exactly how we experience our own lives. But, often, the details we do invent have a profound psychological importance, and can still provide moving imagery and description to the story.
• All writing, particularly literature, requires some form of invention . What we mean by this is, real life is far, far messier than literature. In literature, we use plot as a way of organizing a story, and within that story, the details of settings and characters are carefully chosen to explore broader themes and ideas. This is true for both fiction and nonfiction. By asserting these craft elements into retellings of reality, we inevitably neglect certain details, or insert our biases and prejudices into the ways we frame a story. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t strive for the truth—we should—but it is to say that the entire truth may never be properly conveyed. Again, honesty matters more.

Why bring this up? Because all creative nonfiction is an exploration of the truth. And, as all writers know, the truth is far, far messier than fiction. Few truths are absolute. As such, an author’s integrity and dedication to honesty matters much more.

As for fiction, the events of the story are usually fabricated—though writers always pull details from their own lived experiences. Dostoevsky named characters after his children; Steinbeck set the majority of his stories in Central California, where he grew up; Murakami’s novels frequently feature jazz, classical music, baseball, cats, and other things of intimate importance to his life. Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being involves characters Ruth and Oliver, named after the author and her husband. The fictional characters have similar traits to the real life Ruth and Oliver.

Sometimes, a work of fiction is rooted in nonfiction, with only some elements added or fabricated. For example, our instructor Barbara Henning ’s novel Thirty Miles to Rosebud is semi-autobiographical.

And, of course, many works of fiction involve completely fictitious elements, especially in genres like fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Even for those genres, however, fiction should still try to arrive at some fundamental truth. Good fiction will inevitably (though not intentionally) teach the reader something about themselves, about others, and/or about the world around them.

Writing Fiction vs. Nonfiction

Many prose writers dabble in both fiction and nonfiction. Which should you write? Are there differences in writing one versus the other? What’s the main difference between fiction and nonfiction writing?

As we’ve discussed, the primary difference between fiction and nonfiction is whether the story occurred in real life. So, the primary difference in writing fiction vs. nonfiction comes down to the concept of “story” itself.

Our instructor Jeff Lyons argues that a story is a metaphor for the human experience . When we follow the plots of characters who must become different people to overcome certain obstacles, we see ourselves and our shared humanities reflected in those stories. To achieve this metaphor, the author must follow certain plot structures. Even in literary fiction, which often breaks the rules of plot structure, the plot must organize and enhance the story that’s being told, since plot is always what develops from the decisions that characters make.

Nonfiction, particularly creative nonfiction, also follows stories of adversity. In fact, most memoir publishers prefer to sell books about people overcoming adversity—feelgood stories sell better than ones that end on a low note. Yet, these stories aren’t metaphors, they actually happened. And, the author isn’t trying to follow a plot structure, the author is trying to organize the story details into a plot that people can follow.

And, other types of nonfiction are less concerned about plot, and more concerned about sharing information. Book length projects might have a plot, but many scholarly works and periodicals don’t need a plot, and many works of journalism follow the Inverted Pyramid . (There are, always, exceptions to these generalities.)

To summarize: Writing fiction involves crafting a story to create metaphors for the human experience. Writing nonfiction involves organizing factual information into a story that readers will best understand.

Outside of these differences, fiction and nonfiction typically utilize the same elements, at least in varying degrees. They both have characters, storylines, and themes, they both benefit from the tactics of stylish writing , and they both seek to inform, move, and captivate their readers.

Write Fiction and Nonfiction at Writers.com

Explore the distinction between fiction vs. nonfiction (and everything in between!) at Writers.com. Our fiction writing and nonfiction writing classes will help you discover your story and write it stylishly.

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The Difference between an Essay and a Novel

It's highly unlikely that you'll ever pen a best-selling essay, but you may certainly be the next best-selling author of a novel. Whether your essays and your novels will be at all similar to one another depends only on which type of essay and which type of novels you choose to write.

The purpose of an essay is to inform readers. Writing an essay means researching relevant information in order to understand the topic and be able to form an opinion or offer thoughts about it. Essays also require that you organize your thoughts, usually through some sort of written outline, and state the point of your essay in a thesis statement.

The purpose of a novel is to entertain readers through story-telling, although some very entertaining novels are also informative. Authors of novels use some of the same techniques that can be used for an essay, such as descriptive writing and using personal narratives to make a point. However, a writer penning a novel also has to consider elements like character and plot development, which makes writing a novel quite different from writing an essay.

The average essay is five to seven paragraphs long, which includes an introductory paragraph, three or more body paragraphs, and a conclusion paragraph. Each paragraph should relate back to the thesis statement in the introduction by having topic sentences that expand on the writer's main idea. Essays are very focused pieces of writing that do not stray from the original main point into other subjects.

Novels vary widely in length. Some graphic novels are only 50 pages long, while Madison Cooper's Sironia, Texas is over a million words, or around 1,731 pages long. While novels generally focus on an overarching story theme, writers can explore many different ideas and topics within one novel.

There are four basic types of essay: persuasive (arguing a point and trying to convince readers to agree), descriptive (describing an object or scene by painting a picture with words), expository (recounting facts in an organized way), and narrative (telling a story that makes a point). Like writing a novel, a narrative essay is story-telling, although the story will be much shorter and more focused in a narrative essay.

Novels come in many different types, such as fiction, non-fiction, romance, and history. Novels can be epic, like J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, or just for fun, like Stephanie Meyer's Twilight.

12 of the Funniest Science Fiction and Fantasy Books

CJ Connor is a cozy mystery and romance writer whose main goal in life is to make their dog proud. They are a Pitch Wars alumnus and an Author Mentor Match R9 mentor. Their debut mystery novel BOARD TO DEATH is forthcoming from Kensington Books. Twitter: @cjconnorwrites | cjconnorwrites.com

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Plus, comedies are a great way to explore meaningful and thought-provoking themes. Humor can get people who wouldn’t otherwise let their guard down to think about issues in a new light. Not only can funny SFF novels entertain readers, but they can be life-changing. The Discworld series , from Vimes’ Boots Theory of Economics to its sage advice on living in a chaotic and strange world, is evidence enough of that.

Whether you’re in the mood for something escapist or witty and profound, you’ll find plenty to enjoy in these 12 funny science fiction and fantasy novels. I’ve included a mix of established authors like Connie Willis and rising stars like Kaliane Bradley to give you a wide range of options for your next read.

After you’ve gone through the recommendations ahead and added them to your TBR, visit Book Riot contributor Elisa Shoenberger’s essay Don’t Panic: Paying Tribute to Douglas Adams for further reading. In it, she visits the legendary writer’s grave in London’s Highgate Cemetery and reflects on how visitors honored his legacy as well as her own connection to Adams’s work.

Now, onto the books!

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

This witty novel’s unnamed narrator is a British-Cambodian woman working for a secret organization that, to study the effects of time travel, extracts people from different eras who otherwise would not have survived. Her job is to help these “expats” adjust to life in the present.

But when she’s paired with 19th-century explorer Graham Gore, their shared bond over feeling displaced in the world upends everything she expected.

The Afterlife of Mal Caldera by Nadi Reed Perez

If you’re in the mood for a book that’s as hilarious as it is moving, this is the one for you. It follows recently deceased rock star Mal, who’s determined to contact her estranged sister Cris before moving on to whatever comes next.

Things get complicated, however, when sparks fly between her and the medium who agrees to help her with her unfinished business. Why is it that her love life finally takes off after she’s passed on?

to say nothing of the dog by Connie Willis

Taking its inspiration from Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat , this novel captures its delightfully absurd humor but with a speculative twist. While visiting Victorian England for a short mission and a little relaxation, time-traveling Oxford student Ned Henry’s trip becomes unbelievably messy when he loses his only contact and he discovers that a wrong move could cause a butterfly effect for World War II.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell

Between its sharp wit and thought-provoking social commentary, this horror comedy is an excellent readalike for Terry Pratchett fans. After being saved from monster hunters by a kindhearted woman named Homily, shapeshifter Shesheshen feels something for the human that she never has before…love? Possibly. But both have more pressing matters at hand, namely the curse killing off Homily’s family with links to Shesheshen’s traumatic past.

Prophet by Sin Blaché and Helen MacDonald

The banter between special agents Adam Rubenstein and Sunil Rao makes this sci-fi thriller’s dark humor stand out. Estranged after a mission gone wrong, Rao and Rubenstein reunite to track down the origins of a drug that sends its targets into a nostalgia-induced delirium. What they discover throws their understanding of reality itself into chaos.

Dreadful by Caitlin Rozakis

After waking up with amnesia, Gav is shocked to discover that the Dread Lord that all the goblin henchmen surrounding him keep talking about is none other than… him. But Gav doesn’t feel like a bad guy, despite the princess apparently locked in his dungeon.

How’s he supposed to play along with the evil deeds people expect of him when he doesn’t even know who he wants to be?

Nicked by M.T. Anderson

Brother Nicephorus may be a cloistered monk in 11th-century England, but when he receives a saintly vision, he vows to burgle a holy relic with purported healing powers to save his city from the pox. His traveling companion, a treasure hunter named Tyun, is only too happy to take the fortunes promised to him for the journey.

But a journey that begins with a vision is bound to take a mystical turn, one that transforms Brother Nicephorus and Tyun into very different people than when they set out from home.

The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

Although it was created for one purpose—to kill anyone or anything that attacks its assigned research group—sentient android Murderbot would rather be left alone so it can watch TV. But despite its disdain for humans, it ultimately protects the ones in its charge when their mission goes awry.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

Charles Yu (the Minor Universe 31 version of him, anyway) is a time travel technician. When a customer’s multiverse travels go pear-shaped, it’s him they call to clean things up. With his own universe and self-esteem increasingly troubled, Charles throws himself into his desire to reunite with his lost inventor father.

Key Lime Sky by Al Hess

Autistic and non-binary in rural Wyoming, Denver Bryant often feels out of place. Xe channels xir passion for pie into a blog but, besides one viral post, doesn’t have an avid (or profitable) following.

That all changes when, after accidentally capturing a UFO sighting, xir blog skyrockets in popularity. Now xe must team up with bartender and fellow outsider Ezra to save a town from an alien invasion that doesn’t believe anything strange is happening.

The Dead Take the A Train by Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey

Blending fantasy and cosmic horror, this darkly humorous read stars Julie, a New York City monster hunter who’s already feeling her age in her early 30s. Folks in her career are often short-lived, with particularly gruesome deaths, and she fears her fate will be no different when she accidentally soul-bonds with an eldritch god.

On Earth As It Is On Television by Emily Jane

Everyone speculates about what humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrial life would look like. But in this novel, their arrival is just as sudden and perplexing as their disappearance. With the knowledge that aliens are real but nothing to do about it, people react to the universe’s absurdity in strange and unexpectedly life-affirming ways.

For more captivating SFF recs, check out the Best Adult Fantasy Audiobooks of All Time .

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30 great fantasy novels and book series when you want to escape.

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N.K. Jemisin, author of the acclaimed "Broken Earth" series, one of the best fantasy sagas.

Fantasy books offer an escape from everyday life, combining elements of magic, excitement and adventure that make readers’ pulses pound. Whether the main character heads off on a quest to save their civilization or is forced to confront a terrifying truth about their own powers, fantasy novels always explore larger themes that resonate in our own magic-free world as well. Fantasy book series keep the intrigue going with multiple volumes, giving readers a chance to immerse themselves in another dimension. Indeed, world building is an incredibly important part of fantasy—creating a world with its own history and traditions that propel readers into another time and place. This list of best fantasy books and series compiles classics and newer, innovative works that have made a big impact in a short time.

Top Fantasy Books

Fantasy novels include anything set in an imaginary world, which often exhibits elements of magic. While some fantasies use real locations, they are somehow changed from real life. Some fantasies take place in the past, while others are set in the future.

Some popular fantasy series include C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia , J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series.

J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series remains popular more than two decades after its first release.

30. Between Earth and Sky series by Rebecca Roanhorse (2020-2024)

Told in flashbacks from multiple points of view, Between Earth and Sky takes place in a kingdom where magic was banned following a devastating war. When Captain Xiala is commissioned to move the blinded Carrion Crow Serapio, her crew revolts after discovering her magical powers. A war then breaks out between the citizens.

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Roanhorse’s queer-centering novel explores themes of colonization. It received positive views and will be adapted for TV. The series is best for anyone looking for fantasy books focused on non-white characters. Rebecca Roanhorse’s Between Earth and Sky is available from publisher Simon & Schuster .

29. Woven in Moonlight series by Isabel Ibañez (2020)

Isabel Ibañez draws on Bolivian history and mythology for a series about a ruined civilization. Ximena is the decoy stand-in for Inkasisa’s last remaining royal, but she can only think about how much she wants revenge. Could pretending to marry usurper Atoc be the answer she needs?

The first book earned a spot on Time ’s top 100 fantasy books of all time. This is best for those who love fantasy steeped in mythology. Isabel Ibañez ’s Woven in Moonlight series is available from publisher Macmillan .

28. Binti by Nnedi Okorafor (2015-2019)

When math genius Binti has the chance to study at the prestigious Oomza University, she and her family are thrilled. But on the way there, her spaceship is attacked, and she is the only one to survive. Now she must make it through the remaining trip with her attackers still on board.

The first book in the series won the prestigious Hugo and Nebula awards, and a TV adaptation is in the works. This book is best for those interested in African history. Nnedi Okorafor ’s Binti is available from publisher Penguin Random House .

27. An Ember in the Ashes series by Sabaa Tahir

Laia, whose family is looked down upon in the Martial Empire caste system, becomes a rebel spy in order to save her brother, who has been taken hostage by the ruling party. The first book is told in alternating first-person narratives by Laia and Elias, who’s also been punished by the brutal regime.

The bestselling series earned good reviews, and the first book made Time ’s list of 100 all-time best fantasy novels. The book is best for those looking for a young adult fantasy read. Sabaa Tahir’s An Ember in the Ashes series is available from Penguin Random House .

26. The Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis (1950-1956)

One of the most famous children’s series of all time, C.S. Lewis’s saga begins with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe , a none-too-subtle Christian retelling of Jesus’s crucifixion. Thus begins the adventures in Narnia, a magical land with talking animals, witches and the occasional visiting human.

The seven books have sparked many TV and fantasy film adaptations, and they remain solid sellers more than 70 years after publication. This series is best for people looking for an introduction to fantasy. C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia series is available from publisher HarperCollins .

"The Chronicles of Narnia" has been the subject of many TV and film adaptations, making it among the ... [+] most beloved fantasy series.

25. The Magicians series by Lev Grossman (2009-present)

When an average high school senior is accepted into the country’s foremost college for magic, his life changes. He eventually learns that a fantasy book series he loved in his youth is real, and he encounters some intense adventures there that lead him on a new path.

The Magicians combines world building and fantastical storytelling. Grossman has cited T.H. White’s The Once and Future King (also on this list) as a major influence, and the New York Times dubbed the book Harry Potter for adults. This book is best for Potter fans looking for something more mature. Lev Grossman’s The Magicians is available from publisher Penguin Random House .

24. Circe by Madeline Miller (2018)

Raised as a witch by an indifferent divine family who write off her gifts because they deem her ugly, Circe is exiled after she uses her power in a way that threatens the gods. She encounters many traditional Greek heroes in this book that draws heavily on mythology, including her lover, Odysseus.

Miller’s impressive prose and creativity in retelling ancient stories turned this book into an instant critical favorite. It made the shortlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. This book is best for mythology fans. Madeline Miller ’s Circe is available from publisher Hachette .

23. Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1915)

This is probably the most obscure book on the list, yet it’s worthy. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is better known for The Yellow Wallpaper , but this fantasy about a feminist utopia is equally compelling. In this women-only society, reproduction is achieve asexually, and they live in peace until men appear on the scene.

Herland was initially published as a serialized novel in a magazine Perkins Gilman edited. The book is best for those who enjoy utopian novels. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland is available from publisher Dover Publications .

22. Cypher series by Daniel José Older (2015-2020)

This book is set in Brooklyn, but it’s not the one you’re used to. In this Brooklyn, zombies crash parties and graffiti murals cry real tears. Teen Sierra gets sucked into a plot by a Shadowshaper named Wick to eliminate his competition, and only she can thwart his plan.

The series has earned universally glowing reviews from readers. This series is best for those who like their fantasy with an edge of realism. Daniel José Older’s Cypher series is available from publisher Scholastic .

21. Shadow and Bone series by Leigh Bardugo (2012-2014)

Israeli author Leigh Bardugo created a phenomenon with the Shadow and Bone series. The young adult series kicks off with teenage orphan Alina Starkov suddenly discovering her untapped powers, which immediately put her at risk of violence from others. It features excellent world building and relatable teenage angst.

The series is popular on Booktok, and it spawned a Netflix series that recently finished its run. This series is best for those who enjoy immersing themselves in another world. Leigh Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone series is available from publisher Macmillan .

Leigh Bardugo attends Netflix's "Shadow And Bone" season two premiere at TUDUM Theater.

20. The Once & Future King series by T.H. White (1938-1958)

The first of two Arthurian fantasy works on the list, this historical novel recounts the legend of King Arthur, beginning with the sword in the stone and going through the final days of his reign and his fraught relationship with his son, Mordred. White changes some of the traditional details but stays true to others.

The book was the inspiration for Disney’s popular animated film The Sword in the Stone . It also prompted the musical adaptation Camelot . The book series is best for monarchy lovers. T.H. White’s The Once & Future King series is available from publisher Penguin Random House .

19. Earthsea Cycle series by Ursula K. Le Guin (1968-2001)

Imagine a world of islands where much of the land is uncharted, and magic is a part of daily life. Ursula K. Le Guin created a world filled with diverse people with different complexions—a departure from most traditional fantasy to that point, where the default was white characters.

You can’t make a list of best fantasy books without Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the most revered fantasy writers of all time. The series won a slew of awards, including a Newbery Honor. The book is best for young readers starting their fantasy journey. Ursula K. Le Guin ’s Earthsea Cycle is available from publisher HarperCollins .

18. Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie (1990)

A 12-year-old boy named Haroun goes on a quest to heal the sea of stories, which proffers the power of storytelling. While this is a children’s book, author Salman Rushdie ’s sophisticated approach makes it just as readable for adults, even with the magical animals.

The critically lauded Haroun and the Sea of Stories spawned a sequel, Luka and the Fire of Life , about Haroun’s brother. Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories is available from publisher Penguin Random House .

17. Dark Star series by Marlon James (2019-present)

Author Marlon James tells the story of a young boy’s capture and death with an intriguing twist. Each volume in the trilogy tells the story from a different point of view, and along the way a clearer picture of what happened emerges. James also weaves African history and mythology into the books.

The first two books became bestsellers, and first book Black Leopard, Red Wolf was a finalist for the National Book Award. The series is best for those interested in learning more about African history or who love creative storytelling. Marlon James’ Dark Star series is available from publisher Penguin Random House .

16. A Court of Thorns and Roses series by Sarah J. Maas (2015-present)

Sarah J. Maas has become one of the hottest authors around thanks in part to Booktok. A Court of Thorns and Roses begins with Feyre Archeron’s forced arrival in Prythian, a faerie land, after she kills a wolf. Tamlin, her captor, teaches her that the things she’s learned about faeries are wrong.

Considered a young adult series, Thorns and Roses books have earned spots on best-of year-end lists from Bustle, Buzzfeed, Business Insider and more. It is best for fans of Beauty and the Beast-type fairy tales. Sarah J. Maas ’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series is available from publisher Bloomsbury .

Author Sarah J. Maas, who wrote one of the best fantasy series, appears on "The Kelly Clarkson ... [+] Show."

15. The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (2007)

This action-packed book tells the story of the world’s most notorious wizard and how he came to use his gifts. Kvothe grows up as an orphan in an unforgiving city, and he somehow gets into a legendary wizarding school only to become a fugitive.

The book gets very strong positive reader reaction on GoodReads, Amazon and Google. It is the first book in the Kingkiller Chronicle , and it earned a spot on Publishers Weekly’s best books of the year list. This book is best for those who love books about wizards. Patrick Rothfuss ’s The Name of the Wind is available from publisher Penguin Random House .

14. His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman (1995-2000)

One of the most popular young adult fantasy series of recent years, the trilogy begins with The Golden Compass and functions as a retelling of John Milton’s Paradise Lost . It interrogates the notion of original sin while sending characters through parallel universes.

Pullman won the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Book of the Year. The trilogy became a successful HBO miniseries as well. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series is available from publisher Penguin Random House .

13. The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson (1990-2013)

Robert Jordan originally envisioned this as a six-book series, but the high fantasy saga eventually ballooned to 14. The Hugo-nominated series focuses on a world where the Wheel of Time maintains the cosmic order, which is threatened by the reappearance of the evil Dark One.

Jordan passed away in 2007 while working on the 12 th book. Working off the notes Jordan left, Sanderson completed the final three books. This series is best for those invested in high-stakes world building. Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson ’s The Wheel of Time series is available from publisher Macmillan .

12. The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro (2016)

Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro creates a post-Arthurian world in which memories have become fleeting—literally. People’s long-term memories go on the fritz, and an elderly couple who think they may have had a son decide to go looking for him.

The Nobel Prize-winning author’s foray into fantasy received generally solid reviews, and it was published in five languages. It is best for anyone who wonders what happened after Arthur and the knights of the round table. Kazuo Ishiguro ’s The Buried Giant is available from publisher Penguin Random House .

11. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola (1954)

When a young West African boy flees a slave trader, he plunges into the bush, where he is pursued not just by his would-be captors but also by a slew of ghosts and spirits who terrify the young man. The book, often compared to a Grimm’s fairy tale, has a surreal edge.

It became a pop culture touchpoint, and musicians David Byrne and Brian Eno named their 1981 album after the book, which made Time ’s list of 100 greatest fantasy novels. This book is best for those who enjoy dark fairy tales. Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is available from British publisher Faber and Faber .

10. Legends of the Condor Heroes series by Jin Yong (2019)

Already a sensation in China, Jin Yong’s series about the quest to become the ultimate kung fu master became an instant American hit. The book is set in ancient China, where Guo Jin seeks assistance from Genghis Khan to avenge his father’s murder. He trains for a showdown in the Garden of the Drunken Immortals.

Translated by Anna Holmwood, the book series was originally published as a serial in Hong Kong from 1957-1959. Jong (which is a pen name) later revised the books in the 2000s before they were published in the U.S. This series is best for fans of martial arts movies . Jin Yong’s Legends of the Condor Heroes series is available from publisher Macmillan .

9. A Song of Fire and Ice series by George R.R. Martin (1996-current)

You may not know it by the Fire and Ice moniker, but you definitely know of George R.R. Martin’s high fantasy series, which begins with a little book called Game of Thrones . The series will eventually consist of seven novels, but only five have been published so far, the most recent in 2011.

It follows the charged battle for power in the nations of Westeros and Essos, and it explores themes of morality vs. violence, loyalty and pride. Martin draws on real historical events, like the War of the Roses, for inspiration. He has won literary prizes like the Locus Award for the novels, which of course inspired HBO’s smash Game of Thrones . The series is best for fans of the show or Lord of the Rings lovers. George R.R. Martin ’s A Song of Fire and Ice series is available from publisher Penguin Random House .

George R.R. Martin speaks onstage at the "House of the Dragon" panel during 2022 Comic Con ... [+] International.

8. The Changeling by Victor LaValle (2017)

It’s certainly no coincidence that this dark book came out after Donald Trump’s rise to political prominence. Victor LaValle reinterprets the classic fairy tale for the modern age, focusing on two new parents whose lives suddenly fall apart—and the quest to save love and a seemingly doomed marriage.

LaValle’s novel earned a spot on Time ’s and USA Today ’s top 10 of the year. This book is best for those who love fairy tale retellings. Victor LaValle ’s The Changeling is available from publisher Penguin Random House .

7. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (2012)

Le Cirque des Rêves is a nighttime circus that arrives suddenly, and it’s the place where Celia and Marco fall in love. Unfortunately, the two performing magicians are also involved in a nightly competition, and neither knows that only one of them can win. They may just take down circusgoers and other performers with them.

The Night Circus became a New York Times bestseller, receiving glowing reviews and earning a place among the best romantic fantasy books. This book is best for romantasy devotees. Erin Morgenstern 's The Night Circus is available from publisher Penguin Random House .

6. The Lord of the Rings series by J.R.R. Tolkien (1937-1950)

The best-known high fantasy series of all time, the Lord of the Rings series has sold more than 150 million books and is one of the top-selling series of all time. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote it as a sequel to The Hobbit , and it follows several hobbits on a quest to destroy the One Ring.

Wizard Gandalf, brave Aragorn and Boromir, elf Legolas and dwarf Gimli aid on the quest as the hobbits are pursued by the evil Sauron, a Dark Lord trying to reign over Middle Earth. The books became a top-grossing, Oscar-winning movie trilogy as well. This series is best for anyone interested in high fantasy. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings series is available from publisher HarperCollins .

5. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)

When Alice follows a white rabbit down a rabbit hole (just one of the expressions credited to Carroll), she emerges in Wonderland, where everything inspires awe but nothing is as it seems. Alice faces trial after trial as she attempts to find the rabbit and then escape from the not-so-wonderful land.

Carroll delivered clever social commentary through a book ostensibly meant for children—despite sophisticated messaging. Disney turned the book into a popular animated film in 1951 and a quirkier live-action version in 2010. This book is best for those who revel in absurdity. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is available from publisher Simon & Schuster .

4. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz series by L. Frank Baum (1900-1920)

The wonderfully weird Wizard of Oz series begins with a girl named Dorothy Gale, who is accidentally whisked to a faraway fantasyland after a fight with her family. Her adventures with Oz residents help her realize there’s “no place like home”—but the book series goes on for 13 more volumes.

The books bring to life magical characters who we never even meet in the popular 1939 film, such as The Soldier With the Green Whiskers, Patchwork Girl and Woggle-Bug. They are truly a delight of imagination and writing. This series is best for anyone who loved the movie Wizard of Oz and wants more. Frank Baum’s Oz series is available from publisher HarperCollins .

3. Watership Down by Richard Adams

Author Richard Adams has long claimed he wrote his acclaimed story of anthropomorphized rabbits forced out of their longtime warren in search of a new home not as a parable or allegory but as a story for his daughters. Still, it’s impossible to miss the greater themes in this Carnegie Medal- and Guardian Prize-winning book.

In addition to garnering critical acclaim, the bestselling book about exile and survival has also prompted multimedia adaptations, including an animated movie and a TV show. This book is best for children and teens just delving into fantasy. Richard Adams ’ Watership Down is available from publisher Simon & Schuster .

"To achieve what you believed impossible, that is deeply, deeply satisfying," said Richard Adams, ... [+] the civil servant whose first book, "Watership Down," changed his life.

2. Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling (1997-2007)

J.K. Rowling’s storytelling abilities are without peer. From the moment Hagrid swoops in to rescue Harry Potter from his tedious muggle life to the series’ final confrontation with Voldemort, she keeps readers on the edge of their seats awaiting the exciting conclusion. The Christ story parallels are unmistakable, but the writing never feels stale.

Rowling’s politics have justifiably brought her more attention in recent years than her creativity. But Harry Potter remains the bestselling series of all time and inspired a hugely successful movie franchise as well. This book is best for reluctant readers and adults who have somehow avoided reading the books. J.K. Rowling ’s Harry Potter series is available from publisher Scholastic Press .

1. Broken Earth series by N.K. Jemisin (2015-2017)

N.K. Jemisin’s unrivaled prose puts her atop the list for her trilogy beginning with the beautifully rendered Hugo Award-winning opener, The Fifth Season . It tells the story of a girl, a young woman and a desperate mother navigating life in a volatile world torn apart by geographic catastrophes.

Jemisin uses fantasy and metaphor to explore the issues of prejudice and oppression. She tackles big issues while also telling a compelling story in an impressive feat of world building. This book is best for fans of science fiction and fantasy. N.K. Jemisin ’s Broken Earth trilogy is available from publisher Hachette Book Group .

Bottom Line

Fantasy has something for everyone of any taste. You can find epic quests, dark love stories, young adult coming-of-age tales and mythology cleverly updated for a modern age. Choose from a single book or immerse yourself in a long series. Whatever you pick, you will enjoy it!

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What are fantasy genres.

There are many subgenres of fantasy, which appeal to different readers. They include: 

Romantasy : Romantic fantasy that centers the finding or preservation of love.

Historical fantasy : Fantasy that takes place in the past.

Dark fantasy : Fantasy with goth or horror elements. 

High fantasy : Epic fantasy set in a world other than the Earth we know. 

Low fantasy : Fantasy that occurs in our otherwise normal world. 

Folkloric fantasy : Fantasy rooted in folklore.

What Are The Best Romance Fantasy Novels?

Romance fantasy novels center on an often thwarted, forbidden or otherwise doomed romance between two of the main characters. The passion and frustration often play out over multiple volumes in an exciting “will they or won’t they” dance. Some of the best fantasy romance novels include: 

House of Marionne series (2023-present) by J. Elle, about a teen named Quell who joins a mysterious magical society to protect her from her past and just may find her true love. 

The Ending Fire trilogy (2022-2024) by Saara El-Arifi, about a trio of young people who come together to fight for their new empire and a slow-burn romance between two of them. 

Fourth Wing series (2023-present) by Rebecca Yarros, where romance blooms at a college for dragon riders. 

What Are The Best Adult Fantasy Books?

A large portion of fantasy is written for children and teens, though adults can still read and get a lot out of them. Still, sometimes you want a book written for adults with steamier romance and heavier themes. The best adult fantasy books include: 

The Poppy War series (2018-2022) by R.F. Kuang, a military fantasy inspired by China’s recent history.

The Roots of Chaos series (2019-2023) by Samantha Shannon, about a queen who must produce an heir while she tries to avoid assassins. 

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020) by Victoria Schwab, about a woman granted eternal life and all the complications it brings. 

What Are The Best Dark Fantasy Books?

Dark fantasy incorporates elements of horror to take on a darker bent. Stories of dark academia and gothic tales fit under this header, often with a dystopian element . Some of the best dark fantasy books include: 

The First Law   series (2006-2008) by Joe Abercrombie, each one inspired by a famous literary quote. 

The Black Jewels series (1998-2000) by Anne Bishop, about the rise of a new queen and the dark powers who try to influence her.

Dark Tower series (1982-2012) by Stephen King, about a gunslinger searching (both metaphorically and actually) for a tower.

What Are The Best High Fantasy Books?

High fantasy takes place in another world and often involves an epic quest. They can include many characters and involve great world building. Some of the best high fantasy books include: 

Children of Blood and Bone (2018-2024) series by Tomi Adeyemi, based on African folklore and following a young woman with great untapped powers.

We Shall Be Monsters (2024) by Tara Sim, which deliciously blends the story of Frankenstein with Indian mythology. 

The Folk of the Air   series (2018-present) by Holly Black, about a human and a faerie who fall in love. 

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An intimate and hopeful collection of meaningful, smart, funny, sad, emotional, and inspiring essays from today’s authors and advocates about what it means to be Jewish, how life has changed since the attacks on October 7th, 2023, and the unique culture that brings this group together.

On October 7th, 2023, Jews in Israel were attacked in the largest pogrom since the Holocaust. It was a day felt by Jews everywhere who came together to process and speak out in ways some never had before. In this collection, 75 contributors speak to Jewish joy, celebration, laughter, food, trauma, loss, love, and family, and the common threads that course through the Jewish people: resilience and humor. Contributors include Mark Feuerstein, Jill Zarin, Steve Leder, Joanna Rakoff, Amy Ephron, Lisa Barr, Annabelle Gurwitch, Daphne Merkin, Bradley Tusk, Sharon Brous, Jenny Mollen, Nicola Kraus, Caroline Leavitt, and many others. On Being Jewish Now is edited by Zibby Owens, bestselling author, podcaster, bookstore owner, and CEO of Zibby Media.

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Do You Know These Novels That Were Adapted Into Video Games?

By J. D. Biersdorfer Aug. 12, 2024

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Good novels can make you feel as if you’re immersed in the action, but playing the video games based on those novels can give you a real interactive experience. That said, action games based on popular fiction are the focus of this week’s edition of Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books and stories that have gone on to find new life in other formats.

But even if you’ve never picked up a game controller in your life, knowing basic facts about the novels and their authors will get you through. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their game adaptations.

This 1969 novel by Mario Puzo, about an Italian family business in the New York City area, was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film in 1972 and then had two sequels. The story also inspired multiple video games over the years, including notable editions in 2006 and 2017. What was the name of the book that started it all?

“Moonstruck”

“The Gangs of New York”

“The Godfather”

“The Big Gold Dream”

This sprawling novel, which dates to the 16th-century during the Ming dynasty and is usually attributed to Wu Cheng'en, is considered a classic of Chinese literature and has been adapted numerous times for the stage and screen. It has also inspired multiple video games — including “Black Myth: Wukong,” which is scheduled for release later this month. Some adaptations of the novel are titled “Monkey King” after a popular character, but what is the book’s original title?

“The Art of War”

“Romance of the Three Kingdoms”

“Dream of the Red Chamber”

“The Journey to the West”

This 90-year-old mystery novel featuring a Belgian detective has been adapted for various types of media, including multiple film and TV appearances (one as recently as 2017) — and as a video game in 2006 and 2023. Which novel is it?

“The Nine Tailors,” by Dorothy L. Sayers

“Murder on the Orient Express,” by Agatha Christie

“Deadly Nightshade,” by Elizabeth Daly

“Speedy Death,” by Gladys Mitchell

This 1975 novel by James Clavell has been adapted for television twice, in 1980 for network television and as a Hulu series that began streaming earlier this year. The story was also adapted into a video game twice in the late 1980s for the early wave of personal computers. What is the name of the book?

“The Samurai”

“Noble House”

“The Book of Five Rings”

Dan Brown’s best-selling 2003 novel spawned an eponymous 2006 video game that, like the book, involved running around Europe and solving puzzles. What is the title of the book?

“The Lost Symbol”

“Foucault’s Pendulum”

“The Da Vinci Code”

“The Name of the Rose”

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The lasting power of ‘Sweet Valley Twins’: How my daughter and I are connecting over the series

When I was in the fourth grade, my teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. “A writer,” I said without hesitation. “Just like Francine Pascal — and Elizabeth Wakefield.”

Francine Pascal was the writer and creator of the book series “Sweet Valley Twins” and “Sweet Valley High.” Elizabeth Wakefield, of course, is twin sister to Jessica Wakefield — the main characters of the beloved series. When I learned that Pascal passed away in July at 92, it hit me hard. Not only did I consider her my first writing teacher (though we never met), but also I’d just reconnected with Elizabeth and Jessica and the world of Sweet Valley by introducing them to my 9-year-old daughter, Mila.

“Sweet Valley ” was so ingrained in my childhood that it’s more to me than just a book series. The characters and storylines of “Sweet Valley Twins” were amalgamations of what was happening in my own life: friendship drama, gaining my parents’ trust and finding some independence, and, in the case of “Sweet Valley High,” what I hoped would happen one day: boyfriends, homecoming dances and driving a car or — gasp — a motorcycle. The bookshelf in my bedroom is where I proudly displayed my prized collection of “Sweet Valley” books. I used my allowance money to bring them home as soon as they hit bookstores. 

“Sweet Valley Twins” always ended with a cliffhanger that teased the next book. This was 1986, a time before spoilers and Goodreads. Since I devoured each book in a single setting, I had to take matters into my own hands when it came to satisfying my craving for more. When I finished a book, I’d painstakingly write up “bonus chapters,” creating my own plot twists and fantasies instead of idly waiting for the next release. It was fan fiction before I knew what fan fiction was. I filled dozens of notebooks with the trials and tribulations that I dreamed up for Elizabeth and Jessica to go through next. I even sent some of my work to Pascal herself in the hopes she’d take my ideas into consideration. I’m sure my pages must have been lost in the mail.

Alas, as I got older, I grew apart from Elizabeth and Jessica, but I always carried a piece of the Wakefield twins with me. I became editor-in-chief of my high school newspaper and took it as the highest compliment when a friend said I was following in the footsteps of Elizabeth, who was also editor of her school paper in the books. As I moved to New York City and started a writing career , many friends liked to joke that I was a “Carrie Bradshaw,” but I always thought of myself as more of an Elizabeth.

I never thought my daughter would be interested in “Sweet Valley.” But when Mila became so enthralled with my other love, “The Babysitters Club,” that she dressed as Claudia for “Character Day” at school, I wondered if she’d connect with the Wakefield twins, too.

All my “Sweet Valley” books were donated years ago (against my will, when I went off to college), but thanks to eBay and Etsy, I’ve begun rebuilding my collection. 

Though my daughter is almost 10 years old, reading out loud to her is still a cherished part of her nightly bedtime routine. And it was the perfect way for me to introduce her to the Wakefield twins. I have to admit, it took a bit for my Gen Alpha daughter to find her groove with the totally '80s lifestyle in Sweet Valley. Some of her questions were simply reflections of the books’ age (“Sweet Valley High” debuted in 1983 and “Sweet Valley Twins” in 1986): “Why are they using typewriters instead of laptops?” “Why is Jessica leaving Elizabeth a note? Can’t she just call her cell phone?”

But other questions initiated deeper conversations. We were on page two of the very first “Sweet Valley Twins” book, “Best Friends,” when I gasped, unsure if I should skip over a conversation where Jessica complains to Elizabeth about their classmate looking “fat” in her leotard. “They shouldn’t let a tub like her take ballet,” I read in practically a whisper, watching my daughter’s eyes widen with horror. The upside was that the moment prompted Mila to go on a rant about how “fat” is a terrible word and “everyone’s body is beautiful” before we put the book down for a heart-to-heart about acceptance and not judging others by their looks .

I would argue that the 'Sweet Valley' books are timeless. The struggles and growing pains of tweens and teens don’t change even if their fashion, slang and technology do.

But, while Jessica’s prejudice against weight is not where the outdated, cringey moments in the series ends, I would argue that the “Sweet Valley” books are timeless. The struggles and growing pains of tweens and teens don’t change even if their fashion, slang and technology do. Elizabeth and Jessica, though identical on the outside, are complete opposites. They’re lucky enough to be sisters and best friends — but still struggle with growing apart and embracing separate interests. I’ve watched this start happening with my daughter and her own friends — and they’re not even in middle school yet. Elizabeth, as the responsible one, always bails impulsive Jessica out of trouble. Elizabeth dreams of being a writer while Jessica just wants to be popular. In “Sweet Valley Twins,” Elizabeth starts a school newspaper while Jessica is initiated into a clique of snobby girls called “The Unicorns” (they were ahead of their time, paving the way for Regina George and “ The Plastics ”).

As a kid, I always had an “Elizabeth” sitting on one shoulder encouraging me to read, write and behave, while a “Jessica” sat on the other, daring me to disobey my parents, wear a little lip gloss and talk to cute boys. Elizabeth was my soul sister but it never stopped me from wondering, “What would Jessica do?”

I could tell my daughter was inspired by Elizabeth yet awestruck by Jessica, just as I’d been.  In one book, Jessica tells an elaborate lie so she can see her favorite singer, Johnny Buck, in concert even though her parents already told her she was too young to go. “Mommy, didn’t you do the same thing?” my daughter gleefully asked me. It’s a famous story in my family about a complex plan I hatched so I could attend a meet-and-greet event with Brian Austin Green after my parents said I too was too young to go. Things went so horribly awry that I got caught by my parents and needed assistance from the police to safely get home. I’m sure if my daughter ever pulls a stunt like that, I’ll initially be angry or disappointed. But I also know it’s a rite of passage to embrace your inner “Jessica.” In fact, it’s a rite of passage to discover the world of Sweet Valley. And now that my daughter has met the twins, perhaps she’ll have a few chapters of her own to write for them.

Lauren Brown West-Rosenthal is a writer, storyteller and producer with over 20 years experience interviewing celebs, writing features, essays and more for various publications, brands and TV. You can learn more  about her at laurenbwestro.com .

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The 20 Best Novels of the Decade

Yes, here it is..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the  best debut novels , the  best short story collections , the  best poetry collections , the best memoirs , the best essay collections , the best (other) nonfiction , and the best translated novels of the decade . We have now reached the eighth and most difficult list in our series: the very best novels written and published in English between 2010 and 2019.

You may be shocked to learn that we had a hard time deciding on 10. So, being captains of our own destiny, we decided we were allowed to pick 20 . . . plus almost that many dissents. We did not allow reissues, otherwise you had better believe this list would include The Last Samurai ,  Speedboat , and Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead , among a robust host of others. We also, for this list, discounted novels in translation, as they got their very own list last week, and including them would have necessitated a list twice as long. (My beloved  Sweet Days of Discipline , certainly in the top ten novels I personally read this decade, is doubly ineligible , but luckily I also write these introductions.)

Now, for the last time: the following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Twenty

Jennifer egan,  a visit from the goon squad   (2010).

There are some moments from  A Visit From the Goon Squad  that I won’t forget. In one chapter, a former PR hotshot named Dolly is tasked with reviving the public image of an African dictator known as “The General” with the help of a B-list actress named Kitty Jackson. Kitty’s job is to stand next to The General in a photo, but she ends up asking too many questions about a genocide and gets thrown into prison. Months later, it turns out, The General’s government becomes a democracy, Kitty is freed, and Dolly opens a sandwich shop. This strand of Egan’s polyphonic, funny, and often poignant book encapsulates some of her satire’s recurring ideas. In  Goon Squad , a book with a large cast of characters set in a period roughly spanning the late 1970s to the 2020s, shifts in time are always jarring—they can destroy the body, corrupt memory, and blur processes of change. Nominally centered on the American celebrity industrial complex (particularly rock’n’roll in the Bay Area),  Goon Squad  is also very much about media “spin,” fragmented perspectives, illusory identities, and aimless materialism in a capitalist society. Though the premise may seem to indicate otherwise, the book is decidedly skeptical of nostalgic impulses. “Time is a goon,” one of Egan’s characters says. The past is nothing if not the foundation of contemporary disillusionment with its promises—promises of beauty, fame, family, and the attainment of other icons.  Goon Squad  earned Egan well-deserved plaudits, including the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and cemented her status as one the 21st century’s most insightful (and formally experimental) American writers.  –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

David Mitchell,  The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet   (2010)

It is easier to conjure the intellectual-literary atmosphere of an era when it is 30 years’ past than when it is a mere decade ago. It is hard to see 2010 right now, as we wait for time and the canon to true the lens, but I have a very clear sense-memory of revelation and exhilaration as I sped through David Mitchell’s epic-historical ghost story, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet , wondering if the spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson had momentarily taken possession of Haruki Murakami. Here was a reminder that the world of a novel—in this case, a very detailed rendering of an 18th-century Dutch trading post in the port of Nagasaki—can be fuller, more vivid, than our own, that it can exist as a hothouse for the reader’s moral imagination.

It is difficult to say what another 25 years will make of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. In the context of Mitchell’s more recent novels, and their space-operatic excesses, the plot of De Zoet seems worryingly baroque, show-offy, even. But it is clearly the work of the same writer who gave us the near-perfect coming-of-age novel, Black Swan Green , its language similarly precise and unexpected, all in aid of a story that seems somehow to tell itself, a true history that never quite happened.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Denis Johnson,  Train Dreams   (2011)

If I was tasked with proving that literary awards are a cruel joke and that life is nothing but a bleak and meaningless trudge toward the grave, Exhibit A would be what I have dubbed The Great Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Travesty of 2012. 2012 was, of course, the year the Pulitzer board (not the jury) decided that no book published in the previous twelve months merited the most prestigious honor in American letters, despite the fact that the trinity of finalists included Denis Johnson’s hallucinatory masterwork  Train Dreams , as well as Karen Russell’s lushly brilliant debut novel  Swamplandia!  and David Foster Wallace’s unfinished opus  The Pale King . (An explanation as to how this happened was proffered by novelist and 2012 jury member Michael Cunningham in a  rather wonderful letter  to the  New Yorker  in the wake of the non-decision).  Train Dreams  may well be the 21 st  century’s most perfect novella (he said, having of course read them all…). It’s the incantatory story of a turn-of-the-century logger and railroad laborer, Robert Grainier, who loses his family to a wildfire and retreats deep into the woods of the Idaho panhandle as the country modernizes around him. Johnson’s spare, strange, elegiac prose conjures a world that feels both ancient and ephemeral, full of beauty and menace and deep sorrow. As Anthony Doerr wrote in his  New York Times  review: “His prose tiptoes a tightrope between peace and calamity, and beneath all of the novella’s best moments, Johnson runs twin strains of tenderness and the threat of violence.” An American epic in miniature,  Train Dreams is a visionary portrait of soul untethered from civilization, a man stoically persevering on his own hermetic terms in the face of unimaginable tragedy. A haunted and haunting reverie.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Julie Otsuka,  The Buddha in the Attic (2011)

Julie Otsuka’s groundbreaking (and PEN/Faulkner Award-winning) Buddha In the Attic begins: “On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves.” This is how we are introduced to our narrators, a group of Japanese “picture brides.” We follow them as they immigrate to California. We watch helplessly as they meet the husbands they were promised to, as they attempt to assimilate to America and raise children across a cultural divide. The collective first person narration matches the subject matter beautifully; it mimics the immigrant experience, the way “others” are often seen as the same and the automatic camaraderie and safety we might find among those who share our stories. Slipping out of the shared “we” and “most of us” and “some of us,” Julie Otsuka creates a dizzying dislocation, a confusion of identity that serves the story well: “…unable to remember our own names, not to mention those of our new husbands. Remind me one more time, I’m Mrs. Who? ” Her timing is impeccable. Just when you start to grow weary of the collective voice, for just a sentence or two, she’ll give us an intimate detail, an individual life, to hold onto, and it always catches you off guard when she does, like a rule broken: “The youngest of us was twelve, and from the eastern shore of Lake Biwa, and had not yet begun to bleed.” The specificity is heartbreaking. You can feel the intention behind every choice; so rarely does a book mesh style and subject so brilliantly. The most shattering bit comes at the end (SPOILER ALERT!)—when there is a sudden shift in the narrative. The “we” abruptly becomes the white Americans who are left to tell the story, after their Japanese neighbors are sent to internment camps. It’s chilling, and terribly accurate, the way their voices are literally taken from them in this story. I’ve re-read this novel many times, trying to understand how it can encompass such a wide scope of things. What Julie Otsuka has accomplished here is both an artful, intimate portrait of individual lives and a piercing indictment of history.  –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Téa Obreht,  The Tiger’s Wife   (2011)

Although it came out in 2011, I read  The Tiger’s Wife , the elegant first novel by Téa Obreht, only recently. I found it stunning, so perfectly moving on its many levels. Obreht’s protagonist and narrator, a young doctor named Natalia Stefanovic whose life is upended by the mysterious death of her beloved grandfather, is one of the most mellifluous, engrossing storytellers I’ve encountered in my life (she has learned well—her grandfather is one of the most mellifluous, engrossing storytellers she has encountered in hers). Her account remembers and aches for her loved one in a way that is both so poetic and relatable; she chiefly connects to his memory through a text, using his beloved copy of  The Jungle Book  to try to solve the puzzle around his last days, as well as his interior life. I also found  The Tiger’s Wife  to be very personal—Obreht was born in former Yugoslavia, and  The Tiger’s Wife  takes place in the Balkans, immediately after the war. My family, too, is from former Yugoslavia (where I spent much time, growing up), and though my life in America (and my age) has removed me from deeply experiencing the region’s turmoil firsthand, I marveled and cherished how Obreht’s book performs the acts of both collection and remembrance about the recent scarring and splintering of this region—this region which has historically been scarred and splintered so many times. (And it made me think of my own grandfather, another Yugoslavian storyteller, with whom I spent much of my childhood dreaming of animals.) “Collection and remembrance” are more than fluid themes of the novel, though—they comprise its methodology. Inspired by the format of  The Jungle Book , perhaps, but also a culture that incorporates so many legends and beliefs (both Eastern and Western), Natalia begins interweaving fables and stories and flashbacks in her story—connecting an older, superstitious, and magical world and a bleak, modern, and disillusioned age. She does this as a device for the reader, but also because they keep unfurling in her own life as she learns her grandfather’s full story, and becomes, in a way, herself, inspired by the magic of it all.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Jesmyn Ward,  Salvage the Bones   (2012)

Most of what remains with me years after reading Jesmyn Ward’s second novel is impressionistic. One of the final images in  Salvage the Bones  is of the 14-year-old protagonist Esche’s father roughing out the initial impact of Hurricane Katrina in the attic of their flooded house. They’ve been separated from the family dog, China, and her litter of puppies; Esche’s dad resolves to stay there until China returns. Ward’s story is largely about caretaking; the slimness of the book and the small-scale—a father and his children prepare for a hurricane that people are warning about—belie the immensity of what Ward set out to do with this National Book Award-winning novel. We all have at least some sense of the disastrous Katrina response and what it revealed about government infrastructure and shortsightedness concerning communities of color in particular. Katrina is the costliest natural disaster in US history, and by the time  Salvage the Bones  was published, the long-term mental and material costs of the hurricane were in some ways easier to see, though also largely lost in an over-saturated media market. China and the puppies are not just decorations Ward includes, but in fact central to the identity of a poor black family in the fictional Mississippi Gulf town of Bois Sauvage. China’s “motherhood” is a source of strength for Esche, who is quietly pregnant herself; Esche’s older brother, Skeetah, hopes to one day sell the puppies as fighting animals—a decision motivated by economic desperation rather than callous detachment. Ward explicitly sought to remind readers of the dignity, suffering, and hopefulness of families of color amid one of the largest-scale disasters of our times.  –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Rachel Kushner,  The Flamethrowers   (2013)

Rachel Kushner’s 2013 masterpiece has the advantage of being both epic in its historical sweep and highly, acutely specific in its characterization, observation, and ultimately, its aesthetic goals. The story is simultaneously too sprawling to do justice to in a few lines and disarmingly simple. A woman moves to New York City in the 1970s primed to create. She’s an artist. She’s swept up in the circles of other artists and finds herself perhaps too much under the sway or influence of an older man, a successful artist and the heir to an Italian tire/motorcycle fortune. The novel is a wash of conversations remembered, urges subsiding and returning, impressions. Reno, as the protagonist is nicknamed, travels to the western salt flats, crashes a motorcycle, challenges a speed record. Then she’s in Italy, adjacent to extreme luxury and wealth; next she’s in the streets, caught up in riots and a burgeoning activist culture on a collision course with her past. There is, throughout, an eerie sense of destiny, partly because we know she’s passing through important modern historical epics, but also because of the dreamlike grace of Kushner’s prose. “I was doing that thing the infatuated do,” Kushner writes through Reno, “stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us.” In other moments, the writing turns rock hard and visceral. A world spreads out before us, and before Reno, and we can’t help but follow the path ahead, knowing that it’s full of mistakes, cruelties small and large, and pain. But there’s also an electricity there. This is a book, ultimately, about art, that deeply human subject.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Miriam Toews,  All My Puny Sorrows   (2014)

How rare is it to come across a novel that elicits a physical reaction from its reader? All My Puny Sorrows runs the gamut of emotions. Miriam Toews will have you laughing out loud one minute and sobbing on the subway the next. Her novel tells the story of Elf and Yoli, two sisters with an incredible bond despite living very different lives. By all external trappings, Elf is the successful sister. She is a world-renowned virtuoso pianist. She’s wealthy and happily married. Yoli is not any of those things. Instead, she is struggling with how to love someone who no longer wants to live. And so here we find ourselves, in the room with these two inseparable sisters in the aftermath of Elf’s suicide attempt. The way Miriam Toews describes her sadness is haunting: “Then Elf tells me that she has a glass piano inside her. She’s terrified that it will break. She can’t let it break. She tells me that it’s squeezed right up against the lower right side of her stomach, that sometimes she can feel the hard edges of it pushing at her skin.” (I read this novel months ago, and I still think of the glass piano often. It’s so memorable in its specificity! It’s so weird and unique that it could only have come from the mouth of this wonderfully well-rounded, surprising character.) But it’s not all sorrow! It hits all the notes. Shown through some flashbacks to the sisters’ Mennonite upbringing and cutting to their cruel present, the intimacies of their relationship are a saving grace, a sigh of relief. Miriam Toews has an ear for dialogue. Elf and Yoli talk like flesh-and-blood sisters. The details are spot-on. At some point, they speak of their plans to “chop wood, pump water, fish, play the piano, sing together from the soundtracks of Jesus Christ Superstar and Les Miserables , re-imagine our pasts, and wait out the end of the world.” There’s a version of this story, painted with less carefully crafted strokes, that comes out cliche. But Miriam Toews is a pro at teasing out the details that make the story full and unexpected.  –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation   (2014)

It is possible to read Jenny Offill’s second novel, Dept. of Speculation , in a day. In fact, it is more difficult not to, as you will not want to stop reading once you’ve started. The first time I read it, I remember being dazzled by the form: a progression of short paragraphs, sometimes continuous with those around them, sometimes ostensibly standalone, each one a jolt of intelligence or feeling. Here is the one everyone quotes:

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.

The novel is filled with anecdotes like these, and also sayings, or literary quotes, like this one, which I have written down in my notebook every time I have read this book:

What Rilke said: I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

The second time I read it, I was heartbroken by the story, every bit of it: the writer who sacrifices (too much?) for her family, the wife whose husband has strayed, the woman rebuilding. It is the quality of mind Offill creates that makes this novel so extraordinary, that makes me want to live inside it.

The third time I read it, I realized that this is one of the few novels that I find both formally exciting and emotionally devastating—in a good way. Most writers can pull off one or the other, but Offill does it right: she uses the form to slay you good.

PS: For those, like me, who have read this book too many times already, I am pleased to inform you that Offill’s forthcoming Weather is just as brilliant and wonderful as Dept. of Speculation , but it swaps out marriage and swaps in climate change/existential malaise as its main concern, which makes it exactly the kind of book we need right now.   –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Paul Beatty,  The Sellout (2015)

It’s tough to sell me on a novel that’s not funny. To me, fiction without humor is missing an essential part of the human experience. Paul Beatty’s Booker Prize-winning masterpiece is one of the funniest—and most human—novels I’ve ever read. Not only that, it made me feel entirely vindicated for insisting upon comedy. The Sellout is so sharp you might not notice it’s cut you until you’ve already feeling faint. It’s a combination of laugh-out-loud comedy, precision social satire (rooted in a deep understanding of history), and literary tour de force. It’s so good it made me use the phrase “tour de force.” The mission of The Sellout ’s narrator, a black man, is to reintroduce (official) segregation to his rural neighborhood within inner-city Los Angeles after it is mysteriously disappeared from the map. The novel fittingly begins with the narrator lighting a joint in the halls of the Supreme Court, where his re-segregation endeavor landed him. As Kevin Young wrote in his review , “Beatty takes the same delight in tearing down the sacred, not so much airing dirty laundry as soiling it in front of you.” But The Sellout celebrates as much as it torches. It is, in addition to being one of the great satirical novels of the decade, and maybe of all time, a celebration of blackness in an allegedly post-racial era (keep in mind, this was 2015).  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Viet Thanh Nguyen,  The Sympathizer   (2015)

As a novel, The Sympathizer is a roiling, darkly comic, propulsive literary thriller set in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War, as a North Vietnamese mole keeps watch on the exiled South Vietnamese government in Southern California—it is compulsive reading, arresting in its language, unforgettable in its imagery. But it is more than that. By simply writing the words “Vietnam War” I am able to conjure an entire American mythology, the 40-year cultural byproduct of so much not-quite propaganda/not-quite art: long-haired protesters in the streets, Rustbelt grunts wading through steaming jungles, a flock of juddering choppers against an enormous foreign sun, broken men returning to a country that does not want them… This is the “American” version of the war, a story we’ve told “ourselves” that, while not particularly flattering, is as narrow and myopic as any campfire epic.

So let’s try this: The Sympathizer is an American novel about an American War, a devastating and needless conflict that created hundreds of thousands of refugees, new Americans (we were all new here, at some point) who found a home in the empire that displaced them, and who’ve made it better. Our cultural account of the American war in Vietnam has never been fully “ours” because it has neglected and actively excluded the perspectives of these refugees and their descendants. The Sympathizer is a vital work of art that begins to redress that imbalance.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Hanya Yanagihara,  A Little Life   (2015)

A Little Life is a polarizing book. There are those who love it, who hate it, and who spend their entire reading experience vacillating between these extremes. As one of the book’s advocates, even I experienced moments when I felt like throwing the book across the room. But the brilliance of this book is in the unbearable suffering it causes its characters; if the Bible was about how to survive the arbitrary punishments of angry Lord to such figures as Job, then A Little Life is about how to stay friends with Job, without forcing Job to, well, get better.

A Little Life follows four college friends through the ups and downs of their lives in any-time New York City, but is primarily focused on Jude, the survivor of an unimaginable childhood, grimly detailed in the most horrifying sections of the book. (While many would find the depth of suffering in A Little Life to be implausible in its extremes, Hanya Yanagihara, at a bookseller meet and greet I attended, said she’d received plenty of mail since publication that would suggest otherwise.) All this suffering sets Jude up for a central conflict between his friends, who want him to be happy, and his own understanding that the best he can aim is not to be happy but instead to just…be.

To me, the plausibility of the text was neither here nor there. My respect for the novel is more grounded in the book’s return to 19 th century style emotional narratives, as opposed to the hyper-masculine modernity of mid-century America that insisted on short sentences from the perspectives of nascent psychopaths (yes, that was a jibe at Hemingway). It’s also a turn away from the usual misery memoir’s happy healing, in favor of a grimly realistic portrayal of the long shadow of trauma. A Little Life gives me all the feels, and yet provides no easy answers, and to me, that’s what makes for good literature.  –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

N. K. Jemisin,  The Fifth Season   (2015)

It’s not always possible to tell that a novel is great while you’re reading it. I mean, obviously you can usually tell if you like something, but to for me, you only know that a novel is capital-g Great when you find yourself, weeks or months or years after the first reading, still thinking about it. Most books, even delightful and brilliant ones, do not pass this test, at least for me. But I have thought about N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season (and its two sequels, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky ) at least weekly since I read it a few years ago.

Perhaps it’s unfair. The novel imagines an alternate Earth that is periodically torn apart by apocalyptic weather—like suffocating ash, acid clouds, fungal blooms, mineral-induced darkness, magnetic pole shifts—that lasts for decades at a time, often threatening to wipe out humanity entirely. So you can see how it might come to mind these days.

But I also think about it for its incredible world-building, its unfortunately relevant cultural critique (caste systems, power hierarchies, fear and oppression of the other or unknown, particularly when that unknown other has dreamed-of skills), and its unforgettable characters, particularly, of course, Essun, with all her anger and fear and strength and softness and power. I love her.

And hey, if you don’t want to take my word for it, consider that all three books in the Broken Earth series won Hugos. All three. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Rachel Cusk, Outline   (2015)

There is something about the texture of Rachel Cusk’s prose in Outline (and in the novel’s two follow-ups, Transit and Kudos ) that feels different from anything you’ve ever read before. It’s ostensibly a novel about a woman teaching creative writing in Athens, but it’s really just a series of conversations—importantly, conversations as she remembers them, filter after filter. There’s no real plot, and I’m at a loss to fully describe why the novel is so captivating. Probably, it’s because, as Heidi Julavits put it , it is “lethally intelligent . . . Spend much time with this novel and you’ll become convinced [Cusk] is one of the smartest writers alive. Her narrator’s mental clarity can seem so hazardously penetrating, a reader might fear the same risk of invasion and exposure.” That will do it.

Once, on the subway, I saw a young woman reading Transit and a young man reading Outline , both in the appealing Picador editions. They were standing very close, but they were facing away from one another, and didn’t seem to be together. It took all I had not to stand up and tug on their sleeves—not only because of the perfect meet-cute, but because these books feel like a kind of shibboleth, that rare bit of artistic consumption that might actually tell you something about a person, and how their mind works, and the ways to access their heart. I got off before either of them. I hope they turned around and found each other. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Colson Whitehead,  The Underground Railroad (2016)

Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel is, as they say in the business, a shoo-in for this list. It won the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, the Arthur C. Clark Award, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize. It was also a huge bestseller, of course, and achieved near-unanimous praise from critics. Oprah picked it for her book club. Barry Jenkins is adapting it into a television show . It doesn’t get much better than that.

But, why , you might ask, if by some strange accident you have not already read it yourself? Well, it’s accessible, entertaining, and character-rich, and it also reminds us of some uncomfortable but necessary truths about America and its history. (Though not, mind you, that there was literally a coal-burning railroad underground during the 19 th century—I mean, first of all, where would the smoke go?) It has the intensity, immediacy, and high stakes of any escaped slave narrative—literally life or death—which makes it a captivating page turner, but it’s also written by the talented and adaptable Colson Whitehead, who seems to be able to tackle any genre and style, from historical fiction to bildungsroman to zombies, and make it look easy. All we can ask is that he keeps on doing it. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Adam Haslett,  Imagine Me Gone   (2016)

This was one of those novels I had to be told multiple times to read. I just didn’t want to read a sad book about depression! And to be fair . . . it is sad. But even so, I was wrong to resist, and so are you if you missed this one.

Adam Haslett’s second novel is a full and frank portrait of a family and the mental illness that besieges its members—some genetically, others merely experientially. It’s no more complicated than that—there’s no hook, no high concept twist, just the story of a family, told over the years and through the lens of each member: John, Margaret, and their (adult) children Michael, Celia, and Alec. Michael is the most intense narrator, and the one who has inherited his father’s “beast,” though in him it is changed into an obsessive, endlessly riffing master. In fact, Michael’s writing shows up quite a bit in the novel, and it’s one of the book’s best parts—a direct lens, as it were, into a highly unusual mind.

Throughout, the writing is perfectly calibrated, shifting in tenor between characters but always elevated, even lovely. But the most impressive feat is the empathy with which Haslett unravels this family, and the tenderness with which he writes about love in all of its forms. This is a striking novel, and one of the best examples in recent memory of a certain literary mode: quiet, moving, immersive, beautiful. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Richard Powers,  The Overstory   (2018)

Much has been made of Richard Powers evocation of arboreal deep time. As ecologists and botanists and field biologists having been trying to tell us for decades, trees are alive in ways far closer to what we think of as sentience than anyone thought.

And while they can certainly be characters in bestselling narrative nonfiction (Peter Wohlleben’s The Secret Life of Trees comes to mind), can they be characters in a novel? Yes and no. While Powers does introduce several recurring tree characters—a landlocked and lonely chestnut that measures the generations of a single family, a monumentally giant redwood that’s home to eco activists—the lasting importance of this elegiac epic of climate collapse will be the way it takes environmental activism seriously. Powers’ human characters are heartbroken about the destruction of the planet, and they act upon it in all the messy, complicated ways one might expect from non-trees; but they are taken seriously—they are not quirky Franzonian extras, sprinkled through the narrative for a little radical spice. Here is a novel that contains within it layers of sadness and quiet hope; its concerns are ours, its characters are us. Deep time for dark times.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Hernan Díaz,  In the Distance   (2018)

From the very beginning of Hernan Diaz’s slyly Western noir we are lashed to its main character, an adolescent Swedish immigrant named Hakan, as if to the mast of a doomed ship: we see what he sees, struggle through the same harsh weather; we drift through his grim Sargassos, desperate for that ribbon of land on the horizon that will grant reprieve. Diaz’s close third person shadowing of Hakan makes his felt dislocation ours: we know he has been separated from his brother on the way to New York, we know he has never seen a city (at one point he almost disembarks at Buenos Aires, thinking it his final destination), but we don’t really know where he is, or where he’ll end up, or why.

Though painstaking in its historical detail (without succumbing to the obsessive’s need to show off) In the Distance has the feel of a very contemporary story, capturing as it does the struggle and the will at the heart of migration, along with the cruelties that inevitably surround it. And though Diaz clearly has a copy of the Cormac McCarthy family bible, its brimstone and blood, there is tenderness buried at the borders of this novel, just waiting for a little rain to draw it to the surface.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Susan Choi,  Trust Exercise   (2019)

A finalist (and in my books, at least, the front runner) for this year’s National Book Award, Susan Choi’s fifth novel Trust Exercise is a novel in three parts. There’s a lot of concern over not ruining the twist that comes in part two (and to a lesser extent, part three), but it’s impossible to describe quite why this is one of the best novels of the decade without giving it away. So if you haven’t read it yet, stop reading this and just trust that the central hinge is perfect, and that you should go read it. Now, the spoilers. The first section of the novel begins at a performing arts school in the 1980s, a love story between Sarah and David, friends from opposite sides of the tracks, that suffer through their teenage years, their drama amplified by being sensitive, ambitious theater kids. The shift in part two is that this first story is, in fact, the story within the story, a book written by an adult Sarah (who is not actually called Sarah), being read now by a secondary character from the first story, someone named Karen (who is likewise not actually called Karen). It is an incredibly bold, somewhat shocking twist, resulting in an unraveling that’s pure craft. In The New York Times Book Review , it was labeled unlovingly a “bait and switch,” while Dwight Garner (in the same paper) wrote that it made the book “burn more brightly than anything [Choi’s] yet written.” The second part of the novel is a revenge story too, with carefully built suspense (and a theatrical play with an actual gun), while the third dovetails perfectly, if a bit expectedly, into the future of not-Karen’s life. The premise of Trust Exercise is that teenagers are real people, not just unformed adults, with real concerns and emotional intelligence; they, too, are worthy of great literature.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Anna Burns,  Milkman   (2019)

Anna Burns’s Milkman requires a little commitment. I don’t particularly hold to the idea that some books are “easy” while some are “hard” (or that there is particular virtue in either case) but Burns’s unspooling story of a young woman in Belfast during The Troubles asks of its readers that they be good listeners, that they might have the patience to let the novel’s speech-driven rhythms carry them along, its endless clause-laden sentences tugging like a current toward some unknown destination.

The novel doesn’t specifically locate us in Belfast, nor does it give us an exact era; in fact, the only character that’s ever granted a name is the “Milkman,” an IRA higher-up who may or may not be courting the main character, who’s something close to 18. Already deemed odd for her habit of walking the (dangerous) streets with her nose in a book, the attentions of the older man—he shows up at random in his white van—has people talking (but always just out of earshot, the curtains quickly drawn). Milkman is all menace and mood, its ambiguities like dark corners, places of concealment, its violence latent throughout, ready to explode.

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top twenty, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Tom McCarthy,  C   (2010)

Listen, haters. I know it’s not as good—or at least as pure —as Remainder , which is a nearly perfect novel. But I loved this book for its sheer postmodern ambition, its obsessions—with hearing and mishearing, communication and miscommunication, associative thinking—and its arch coldness. It seems McCarthy, who let’s not forget is the general secretary of the “semi-fictitious” International Necronautical Society, which is “devoted to mind-bending projects that would do for death what the Surrealists had done for sex,” is playing some sort of trick, or set of tricks, on us, and maybe on literature itself, and well, unfortunately I am the sort of reader who appreciates that.

After all, the novel, which is ostensibly about a troubled and troublingly blank young man named Serge Carrefax, building radios and dropping bombs as the twentieth century begins, is so weird, and so much, and so clearly about language and what we make of it, and what it’s for. In her review of the novel for the New York Times , Jennifer Egan wrote that McCarthy “withstands the temptations of emotional plotting and holds out instead for something bigger, deeper, more universal and elemental.

C is a rigorous inquiry into the meaning of  meaning : our need to find it in the world around us and communicate it to one another; our methods for doing so; the hubs and networks and skeins of interaction that result. Gone is the minimalist restraint he employed in Remainder ; here, he fuses a Pynchonesque revelry in signs and codes with the lush psychedelics of William Burroughs to create an intellectually provocative novel that unfurls like a brooding, phosphorescent dream.

To be fair about the response of the critics, Michiko Kakutani hated it, calling it “disappointing and highly self-conscious” and finds his “carefully manufactured symbols and leitmotifs . . . to be more gratuitous than revealing.”

Which is perfectly reasonable. I, however, will continue to delight in its self-conscious, hyper-intellectual handwringing. I love that sort of thing. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Patrick DeWitt,  The Sisters Brothers   (2011)

Patrick DeWitt’s  The Sisters Brothers  is a perfect Western, which is why it’s so startling that it’s a comedy about a protracted existentialist crisis. The Gold Rush-era story of two bounty-hunters, the philosophical Eli and his rowdier, more impulsive brother Charlie, it unfolds slowly as they head from Oregon to California to kill a prospector-alchemist named Hermann Kermit Warm at the behest of a shady figure known as the Commodore. Eli doesn’t exactly love what they do for a living (he’d rather work in a shop, he thinks), while Charlie doesn’t question it. As they make their way south, in a picaresque-fashion they stumble from one (often gritty) misadventure to the next, and eventually wind up teaming up with Warm when they finally find him. The best part of the novel is the narration—Eli is the ambivalent moral compass normally absent from Westerns, a kind of extreme normalcy and humanity amidst a desolate and unforgiving landscape and livelihood. He is ever-loving towards his cruel and reckless brother, a little anxious about his weight, and gets extremely excited when he purchases a toothbrush for the first time. Charlie, on the other hand, is scary—and you’ll spend pages worrying that the complicated, loving bond between them will be Charlie’s to selfishly, stupidly break. Eli’s sincerity is what keeps everything afloat, as well as makes it all feel so precarious.

His considerate, soft-spoken-ness is jarringly interrupted by unsettling (usually gruesome, sometimes disgusting) moments of gore—sometimes violence, sometimes other nauseating things. The imagery is stunning—there are passages here and there, both horrifying and not, that have stuck with me since I read it. There is, I should warn you, some extremely tough, hard-to-read violence against horses (usually something that will compel me to burst into tears and stop reading/watching the thing at hand, but I was so interested in the story that still cried but plugged on). It’s elements like this that recall how, for all its creativity and charm,  The Sisters Brothers is actually extremely sad: a wrenching evocation of a bitter moment in the history of mankind, as it tries and fails to make progress. On a different note, it also has the single best title of a fictional work, possibly ever. In my opinion. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Claire Messud,  The Woman Upstairs   (2013)

“How angry am I? You don’t want to know,” begins Claire Messud’s novel, in a sure hook if I’ve ever seen one. If I could, I would quote the entire first page because it establishes one of the most powerful and memorable feminist voices I have ever read in fiction: urgent and chillingly true. The quietly seething protagonist of The Woman Upstairs, Nora Eldridge, is a teacher who has sidelined her art, because she is a rule-follower who fears risk and uncertainty. She is unmarried, single, without kids; intelligent, experienced, and incisive enough to pierce societal facades and expose the enduring gender conventions, stereotypes, and pressures that imprison women. Thus, Messud’s titular allusion to Bertha Mason, the first “madwoman in the attic.” Nora’s predictable life is enlivened by the arrival of the worldly Shahids, a family of famous Italian artist Sirena, Lebanese academic and intellectual Skandar and young, well-mannered Reza. In each of the Shahids Nora glimpses the revival of a life she thought to be long lost. With their flattery and tacit permission she returns to her art, sharing a studio with Sirena who is preparing for an upcoming art show in Paris; she engages in intellectual discussion with Skandar (though he talks and she mostly listens); and as she gets to know Reza, finding him the perfect child, she wishes she were his mother. She is filled with promise, until they betray her. Messud yields Nora’s confessional, vehement voice from beginning to end, lending the novel the pacing and tension of a psychological thriller. In The Woman Upstairs Messud’s signature intellectual tone is invigorated by the unmoored passion of her protagonist, who grapples with the choices of her past and the promise of her future, burdened with the question of determinism as she is tormented by self-doubt and the sense of having no control to alter her fate. Messud has struck the finest balance between showing and telling: she has delivered one version of the tale of the modern woman that no one can ignore. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Kathryn Davis,  Duplex   (2013)

It’s difficult to explain the phenomenon of reading this novel for the first time, though Lynda Barry does it as well as anyone could in the opening of her review for The New York Times :

The chapter is called “Body-­without-Soul,” the book is called Duplex , and you’ve lived in a duplex so you think, “Oh, I know what this book is about.” . . . And then you read this: “The car was expensive and silver-gray and driven by the sorcerer Body-without-Soul.” And you find out not only does Miss Vicks know him, they are romantically involved, and he can make things vanish or “vibrate at unprecedented frequencies,” including her privates, he can sow fear inside anything, and then you read that he can fit his entire hand inside her. Time stutters. What? His entire hand what?

You read the phrase four times, trying to catch up, the way you tried to catch up when you were a kid and Henry, the teenager from next door, told a bunch of you a story about his finger and a girl. Finger? Girl? What? Then a flood of understanding horrified you, shamed and excited you, trailed you back into the house to the kitchen where dinner was ready, where your chicken potpie was waiting to be pierced with your fork and you stared at it.

Because the thing is, you don’t know what this book is about. I could not tell you what this book is about, because this book is an experience—closest to a dream, maybe, or a memory. An enchantment. Tom Bissell called it “a coming-of-age-meets-dystopian-fantasy-meets-alternate-reality novel, or maybe an Ionesco-meets-Beckett-meets-Oulipo novel.” It is deadpan, episodic, unrelentingly bizarre, continually surprising, and gorgeously written. It considers teenage girls deadly serious, and deadly seriously. It is a suburban American fantasy of the highest order—though Davis herself might balk at this description. “I hope that what I write is about as “realistic” as a piece of writing ever can be, though maybe “true to life” is more like what I want to say here,” she said in an interview . “I think The Metamorphosis is the most realistic autobiography ever written, and I hope Duplex aspires on some level to such lofty heights.” It does. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,  Americanah (2013)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s third novel is many things at once: part social satire, part coming-of-age, part romantic comedy, part immigration story. It is expansive and engaging and deeply enjoyable. It insists on the multiplicity of immigrant experiences, including the idea that an immigrant who has found success in the US might return to her country of origin, as its female protagonist Ifemelu does. Born in Nigeria, Ifemelu comes to the US for college, and struggles to earn money, unhappily doing sex work at one point, but ultimately thrives as a writer, winning a fellowship at Princeton and writing a popular blog about her experience of race in the US as a black African. When the novel opens, she is preparing to return home. Ifemelu’s childhood friend and later boyfriend (then ex-boyfriend)—and the novel’s second narrator—Obinze, travels to England and similarly faces money struggles, though his result in deportation. Americanah does not shy away from either social critique or pure, satisfying romance. It is about identity, in both the capital and lowercase senses, and it succeeds in its precise drawing the humanity of its characters as well as the nuances of its cultures. –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Ben Lerner,  10:04   (2014)

Considering his reputation, it’s actually a little jarring to remember that Ben Lerner has published all three of his novels (and one poetry collection) in the last decade. For those ready to jump down to the comments to tell me that actually, Lerner’s a poet —I know, dudes. Yes, he’d published two books of poetry before this decade (2006’s Angle of Yaw was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry), and he published another in 2010, but there’s really no denying that Lerner rose to general prominence with 2011’s slim, semi-autobiographical novel Leaving the Atocha Station , and that since then, he’s become a major name in the literary world primarily on the strength of his novels. Them’s the facts.

I reread both Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 recently, so as to better contextualize Lerner’s latest, The Topeka School , and found them both to still be pleasantly over-intellectual, funny, and flawed books—but 10:04 held up rather better, even with its “mild lacrimal events.” Yes, in 2019 the fact that he dropped a New Yorker story into his novel wholesale isn’t as charming as it was in 2014, but who cares? And sure, the novel is mostly just a series of Ben Lerner’s observations about art and people and the world, but who cares, and actually that’s exactly what I love about it, because Ben Lerner’s observations are better than most people’s, and because if a book makes me sit around and think deeply about the world I live in and the connections between phenomena, then I’m more than satisfied. Plus, it has a truly hilarious masturbation scene. Really, you can’t beat it. (No pun intended!!!!!!!) –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Rabih Alameddine,  An Unnecessary Woman   (2014)

Of course I was going to love this book. This is a book about books. It has four (4) epigraphs. W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz is mentioned on page three. Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is mentioned on page six. That’s only the tip of the iceberg . Plus, it’s about an introverted, deliciously sardonic, relentlessly stubborn woman who hates pretty much everyone, but loves literature, and spends all her time hiding in her Beirut apartment, secretly translating all her favorite novels into Arabic. She’s been doing this for 50 years. No one has ever read any of them. Honestly, I can’t think of a book better suited to my temperament.

And that’s just the flashy headline. This is also a novel about the Lebanese Civil War, and about how we treat people who live at the margins, particularly women, particularly older women. This is also a novel about loneliness, and about grief, and about how language can help us negotiate these, and the limits of that negotiation.

But probably the best argument for this book as one of the greatest of the decade is this: Aaliya’s is one of the best narratorial voices I have ever read. She is unusual, contemplative, critical, complex, candid, rude and tender. She’s absurdly compelling. If the truly great novels are those that invent and maintain a unique quality of mind (and for me, they are), this is one of the greatest. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Lauren Groff,  Fates and Furies   (2015)

Things were pretty good in 2015—Obama was president, the Paris Agreement was drafted, the Supreme Court affirmed same sex marriage (plus a little website called Lit Hub launched). And Lauren Groff’s third novel, Fates and Furies , was published. A finalist for the National Book Award, the book was a sensation, garnering positive reviews from everyone (including Obama, who said it was his favorite book of 2015). The novel begins on the day a young couple Lancelot (Lotto) Satterwhite and Mathilde Yoder marry, a mere two weeks after they meet. The way their love grows is told in the first half of the book, following Lotto’s mythic-hero story (born during a hurricane to a theme-park mermaid mother) he struggles as an actor before transforming into a brilliant playwright. He is a man touched by fate, who doesn’t question his successes. The second half of the novel turns the story on its head, Mathilde revealing herself as the catalyst for Lotto’s good fortune. As the story is retold and reshaped from her perspective, not only are gaps filled, but are secrets revealed. In an interview for Lit Hub, Groff said the novel is a “conversation about marriage, but also about privilege and background and our personality and how we deal with the world.” Fates and Furies takes a fairy tale marriage and probes its deepest darknesses and psychological depths with perfect, lyrical prose. If somehow you missed it when it was first published, this is your alarm to pick it up now. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Paulette Jiles, News of the World   (2016)

A magnificently vivid and thoroughly heartwarming odd couple adventure tale set in the aftermath of the Civil War, in which Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd—an elderly (but still spry) widower and veteran of three wars who roams the towns of Northern Texas, spreading the good word that the 15th Amendment has just been ratified and reading newspaper stories from distant lands to town halls full of rapt locals—finds himself tasked with delivering a young orphan girl (the delightfully quarrelsome former Kiowa “captive” Johanna) across 400 miles of unsettled territory to her relatives in San Antonio. As I have detailed at excruciating length to anyone who’ll listen over the past three years, I love everything about this tender gem of a novel: the way Jiles textures her Old West landscape with Kidd’s tersely poetic observations and ironic musings, the old-fashioned getaway and gunsmoke thrills over which she allows her mismatched protagonists to bond, her masterful blending of humor and suspense, and the pleasure she takes in detailing a disappearing way of life. It’s an exquisite portrait of two wary, worn-out souls, starved of love and unmoored from the worlds they knew, finding unlikely solace in one another. What begins as a hilariously combative battle of wills between this unlikely pair of malcontents becomes, by the close, something altogether more poignant, more precious. If I’m making this sound treacly and sentimental, forgive me, for it is neither. There’s nothing cheap, nothing unearned about the warmth that radiates from its closing pages, the sweet sorrow we feel at their journey’s end. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Mike McCormack,  Solar Bones   (2016)

The flap copy on my edition of Solar Bones gives away the ending, or at least the kicker. I’m going to give it away again, now, so look away if you’re one of those people who clutches their pearls at “spoilers,” as if one could spoil great literature by detailing any point of its plot. So: Marcus Conway is dead. And in this exceptional, strange novel, whose present action is no more than a few hours on All Souls’ Day, Marcus sits at his kitchen table and recounts the day of his death—and much of the life that came before it—in one book-length sentence, an incantatory ode to small town life in western Ireland. But the experimental formatting isn’t even the most impressive feature of the novel—I mean, before this I never would have imagined that I could be so enchanted by a book largely about the daily habits and various relationships and minor work dramas of a middle-aged civil engineer. What magic is that?

And ultimately, that’s what is so profound about this novel: it takes something quite straightforward—a regular person’s life—and presents it so carefully, so lyrically and specifically, that it can’t help but become cosmic, philosophical, a whole world to wonder at. This is why the ending—whether you know it’s coming or not—is so gutting. It’s an apocalypse, a small one, and you feel it, even as the cars continue to stream by outside your bedroom window. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Samantha Hunt,  Mr. Splitfoot   (2016)

Mr. Splitfoot , Samantha Hunt’s third novel, is her creepiest, and maybe her saddest. It is about two preteens—orphans—Ruth and Nat, who live in desolate upstate New York at the Love of Christ! Foster Home, Farm, and Mission, a terrible place run by a greedy religious psychopath. Ruth is in love with Nat, while Nat is enamored of his own skills—somehow, he can speak to the dead. He can summon the deceased parents of the children who live in the home. It’s during one of his séances that they are interrupted by a new character—a charismatic charlatan named Mr. Bell who wants to help Nat profit financially from his talent. This interloper is obviously bad news—but the sense of foreboding around him and their whole enterprise is gravely augmented by the fact that every other chapter of the novel takes place many years later. Ruth, now an adult, is there, and Nat is nowhere to be found. This older Ruth also does not talk at all now, but she is determined to help a young woman, her niece Cora, escape something dangerous.

Hunt’s novels, in general, are tremendously atmospheric, but Mr. Splitfoot  might take the cake—here, she is a veritable cinematographer. The ambiance she designs is exceptionally vivid: alternately shadowy and garish, extremely lonely and damp. It’s weird that the novel’s setting is so real and ordinary (just outside Troy, New York) because the story is so otherworldly, so metaphysical, so much a sinister fairy tale. The novel conjures its hair-raising, skin-crawling pulse from grotesque Christian iconography, dank forests, and smoky ghosts that might resemble what mothers look like (though, among the very motherless ensemble, no one knows for sure). Mr. Splitfoot  is rich in symbolism, which might feel too-thickly applied for some readers, but I think it fits the overall generousness of her storytelling. Hunt doesn’t just write fiction; like the magical waifs at the center of her story, she truly brings things to life—though to put it this way might be laying things on a bit thick, as well. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Yaa Gyasi,  Homegoing   (2016)

Homegoing , Yaa Gyasi’s sweeping narrative of the slave trade’s toll on a family lineage across three centuries, begins with two half-sisters in 18th-century Ghana: Effia, whose marriage to the British governor of Cape Coast Castle furnishes her with security and wealth, and Esi, who is kidnapped and sold into bondage, waiting for passage to the Americas in the packed, rank dungeons under the fortress where Effia lives in luxury. Each chapter is told from the perspective of one of their descendants, unfolding the effects of slavery on both sides of the Atlantic: in West Africa, families and villages are torn apart by war and kidnappings; in America, the inhuman brutality of American slavery, rumors of which provoke horror among those who remain in Africa, leads into the era of Jim Crow apartheid and torture. In the book’s earlier scenes, some of its most vivid, Isabel Wilkerson wrote for The New York Times that Gyasi “walks assuredly through the terrain of Alex Haley, Solomon ­Northup and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her intimate rendering of the human heart battered by the forces of conquest and history.” Some critics contended that the book’s later scenes, in the modern-day US, relied on stereotypes that were “sometimes unquestioningly imported, rather than combatted, subverted, and complicated,” Kate Osana Simonian wrote for The Kenyon Review . Regardless, this book is an astonishing testament to survival and a witness to the ancestral wisdom and ingenuity that made survival possible. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Danielle Dutton, Margaret the First (2016)

I have been recommending this slim, glinting dagger of novel since it came out in 2016, to anyone who will listen, and I’m not going to stop now. Look, “best of” lists like this one should be messy and idiosyncratic and unexpected, reflections of long and heated arguments by people who care a lot about books and are always reading—what they shouldn’t be is calibrated to please everyone. Having said that—and aside from my love of Danielle Dutton’s miraculous first-person inhabitation of 17th-century Renaissance woman Margaret Cavendish—I would like this book to serve as representative evidence of all the short novels that might not be epic in length, but are so in scope, that are too often left off lists like this one because they don’t immediately register as monumental. But back to the book.

Of noble station, Margaret Cavendish—aka “Mad Madge—was a real person, a writer of plays, poetry, philosophical treatises, scientific theories, and more. The first woman ever invited to the Royal Society in London, Cavendish did, indeed, achieve the intellectual fame she’d long sought; unsurprisingly, her accomplishments were diminished at every turn, as many claimed her books must have been written by her husband. Dutton (who founded Dorothy: A Publishing Project) realizes the outsize ambitions of this remarkable book with virtuosic efficiency, braiding first- and third-person perspectives with passages from Cavendish’s original writing. I will be recommending this book for the next decade.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Elif Batuman,  The Idiot   (2017)

The Idiot is one of those books that expanded my understanding of what a novel could look like. It is meandering, but it meanders with such gusto that I never doubted that Elif Batuman knew exactly where she was leading me. The Idiot is a campus novel, telling the story of its protagonist’s first year at Harvard. She—Selin—has a romantic interest (their relationship is sort of one-and-a-half-sided—their courtship mostly takes place in the then-nascent medium of email), but mostly she bobs along. That’s part of it, the bobbing. Selin is something of a buoy in a world of torpedoes. If this sounds tiresome, consider the profound power of the incredibly funny, linguistically virtuosic narrator. The Idiot is occasionally baggy, but its voice is so thoroughly charming that I could have read volumes of it. Selin is, if occasionally bewildered, also full of wonder, without any of the tweeness with which that word is sometimes unfairly burdened. The Idiot is a novel of ideas, a novel of fascination. And it’s just so damn funny. Of the novel’s humor, Cathleen Schine writes , “Language is the medium and language is the comedian, language is the star and the prop, Chaplin and the globe he balances, the hungry fellow and the shoe he dines on.” The Idiot is, for all its shaggy bits, a perfectly self-contained world. –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Jesmyn Ward,  Sing, Unburied, Sing   (2017)

Jesmyn Ward is a MacArthur genius grant recipient, a two-time National Book Award winner, and a former TIME 100 honoree, as well as the author of one of the  most powerful and affecting memoirs  of the last ten years, so why does it still feel like she’s under-read? Granted, Ward is not one of the book world’s Very Online Authors, nor does she qualify as a literary  wunderkind  (though I’d argue that winning two National Book Award by the still-young age of forty is pretty damn  wunder ful), and she and her work have never really been subjected to the kind of breathless op-ed assault that can, as a silver lining, serve to raise awareness of a title, but still… All that throat-clearing is to say that if you haven’t yet gotten around to reading Ward’s work, you really,  really  should. She is a truly magnificent writer and one of the most poetic and humane chroniclers of the trauma that generations of systemic racism has inflicted upon the contemporary black American family. Her finest (and most harrowing) work to date,  Sing, Unburied, Sing  is an intimate, mystical portrait of a fractured Mississippi Gulf Coast family and the painful histories and buried secrets that plague its members as they embark upon a journey to the State Penitentiary. As she does in 2011’s  Salvage the Bones , Ward infuses this devastating Southern realist tale with a sort of mythic grandeur. Her language is lyrical, hypnotic, haunted by a deep and profound sorrow as her characters are haunted by the ghosts of young men brutally and prematurely wrenched out of the world. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Ottessa Moshfegh,  My Year of Rest and Relaxation   (2018)

If I were to choose one word to describe my experience reading Ottessa Moshfegh’s latest novel, the word would be delight . It’s just so goddamn fun, and weird, and, well, mean in a way you’re not allowed to be, usually, either in literature or in life, which made me love it (look, she’s not hurting anybody, everyone is fictional, let me have this).

Like many readers (and writers) I know, I first fell for Moshfegh via her stories in the Paris Review , and 2017 her collection Homesick for Another World . My Year of Rest and Relaxation picks up some of her stories’ elements—horrible people, anger, dissociation between reality and interiority—while feeling like a much bigger, better, complex work. Well, it’s a novel, after all, and it’s a good one.

As you may know, the book centers on an unnamed narrator (rich, she tells us, and pretty) living in New York City, whose parents have recently died, and who would like to take a “year of rest and relaxation” via a drug stupor, waking only every three days to eat. She is sometimes stymied by Reva, her “best friend,” but eventually more or less succeeds, and wakes in the summer of 2001, slowly readjusting to her life before she’ll have to readjust all over again.

And not for nothing, the latter half of this decade has made me extremely sympathetic to the quest to spend a year asleep. As long as I’d still be able to vote (absentee ballot?), I would happily agree to be unconscious for 2020. Just think of all the bullshit I’d miss. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Sally Rooney,  Normal People   (2018)

Just popping in to introduce you to a book you’ve definitely never heard anything about, an underappreciated novel I like to call Normal People . Just kidding! I’m sure you know all about it. I’m sure it’s the first thing you see when you walk into your local indie. I’m sure you probably tried to go to the Books Are Magic event that so many people RSVP’d to that they had to move it to a local church (and it was still packed!). You are probably also pumped for the TV adaptation —right? There is good reason for the hype, friends. From Sally Rooney, celebrated author of Conversations With Friends and heralded as “the first great millennial writer” comes the story of Connell and Marianne. Connell is your quintessential cool kid (popular, star of the football team, etc.), while Marianne lives a more solitary and private high school existence. His mother works for her family. One day, when Connell comes to pick his mother up from Marianne’s house, an unlikely connection grows between the two teenagers. Through Sally Rooney’s masterfully controlled prose, we follow them through the halls of their high school, where they pretend not to know each other. We follow them as they outgrow the place, shed friendships, move away from home. We follow them to university. We see them thrive and wilt, ebb and flow. There is something about Sally Rooney’s writing that is so certain, that makes us trust the feelings of the characters. She cuts to the core of them. Normal People is a biting portrait of an intimate relationship as a living, breathing thing. But in the periphery, through some details of circumstance, it also examines socioeconomic class (Sally Rooney has said she wants to write “a Marxist novel”) in a way that reads like George Eliot’s Middlemarch for the modern age. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Richard Wagamese, Indian Horse   (2018)

Most of us (I hope) are at least intellectually aware of the centuries of colonial violence meted out by European settlers upon the Indigenous nations of North America, and though we don’t need to feel something to grasp its injustice, art is here to remind us of the specific human cost of systematized theft and racism.

The late Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse (first published in Canada in 2012, but released in the US by Milkweed in 2018) recounts the all too familiar story of Indigenous children stolen from their parents to be (re)educated in the ways of Christian empire. In this case, that story happens in one of Canada’s notorious “residential schools,” church-run boarding schools that were effectively prisons, in which all traces of First Nations’ culture were forbidden (language, first and foremost), and where neglect, abuse, and even murder, were tragically commonplace. Though the material is necessarily grim, Wagamese doesn’t fetishize despair, and allows his main character, Saul, the chance to feel something like joy as he discovers a preternatural talent for hockey. And though the sport might only represent a brief respite for Saul, from a lifetime of pain and loss, these sections contain the best writing about a sport I have ever read.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Téa Obreht,  Inland   (2019)

You’d be forgiven, if you read Téa Obreht’s 2011 debut The Tiger’s Wife (ahem, see above), for having high expectations for her sophomore effort, especially considering it’s been 8 years in the making.

You’d be forgiven, and you wouldn’t be disappointed. This is a lush, wide-ranging, and fully American novel, a revisioning of a classic Western, imbued, as all the best revisionings are, with many of the satisfactions of the trope, but presented alongside a set of new and better ones.

For instance, for a Western, it’s not particularly violent—or not as violent as you’d expect, though what is there was so well-written as to make me gasp—and instead we get the aftermath: the ghosts. Ghosts are everywhere in this novel, reminding us that every place and time has its own history, its own victims, its own way of self-consideration. Both Nora and Lurie see them, though it’s not always clear that they both believe them. We believe them, though: such is the compelling texture of Obreht’s prose.

There are two stories at play here: as the novel opens, Nora, a frontierswoman in the Arizona Territory in the late 19 th century, waits more or less patiently for her husband and two eldest sons to return, as her water runs out and her youngest son begins to see monsters in the underbrush; then there’s Lurie, the outlaw and immigrant who joins the United States Camel Corps (yes, this is a thing) and begins a long trek.

These two stories eventually converge, in a way I didn’t see coming at all—though in retrospect it was perfectly orchestrated, inevitable, really. Maybe it was my level of immersion that kept me from noticing Obreht’s deft use of time and space between and within the two narratives. Suffice it to say, if this is a new American myth, I’ll take it. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Emma Donoghue, Room  (2010) · Jonathan Franzen,  Freedom  (2010) · Tana French, Faithful Place (2010) · Maaza Mengiste, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (2010) ·  Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake  (2010) · Brady Udall, The Lonely Polygamist (2010) ·  Attica Locke, Black Water Rising (2010) · Jaimy Gordon,  Lord of Misrule  (2010) · Chang-rae Lee,  The Surrendered  (2010) · Paul Murray,  Skippy Dies (2010) · Tom Rachman,  The Imperfectionists  (2010) · Nadifa Mohamed,  Black Mamba Boy  (2010) · Andrea Levy,  The Long Song  (2010) · Helen Oyeyemi,  Mr. Fox  (2011) · Nicholson Baker,  House of Holes  (2011) · Ann Patchett,  State of Wonder  (2011) · Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child (2011) ·  Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia  (2011) · Justin Torres,  We the Animals  (2011) · Teju Cole,  Open City  (2011) · Donald Ray Pollock, The Devil All the Time (2011) ·  Eleanor Henderson, Ten Thousand Saints  (2011) · Kevin Wilson,  The Family Fang  (2011) · Francisco Goldman,  Say Her Name  (2011) · Colson Whitehead,  Zone One  (2011) · Karen Russell,  Swamplandia!  (2011)  · José Saramago, Cain (2011) ·  Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending  (2011) · Ben Lerner,  Leaving the Atocha Station  (2011) · Adam Johnson,  The Orphan Master’s Son  (2012) · Edward St. Aubyn,  At Last  (2012) · Barbara Kingsolver,  Flight Behavior  (2012) · Sheila Heti,  How Should a Person Be?  (2012) · Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles (2012) ·  Louise Erdrich, The Round House  (2012) · Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds (2012) ·  Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl  (2012) · G. Willow Wilson,  Alif the Unseen  (2012) · Amanda Coplin, The Orchardist (2012) ·  Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies  (2012) · Zadie Smith,  NW (2012) · Andrew Miller, Pure (2012) ·  Orhan Pamuk, Silent House  (2012) · Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins (2012) ·  Amelia Gray, Threats  (2012) · Kevin Barry,  City of Bohane  (2012) · Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis (2012) ·  James Salter, All That Is  (2013) · Edwidge Danticat,  Claire of the Sea Light  (2013) · James McBride,  The Good Lord Bird  (2013) · Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) · Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland (2013) ·  Philipp Meyer, The Son  (2013) · J. M. Ledgard,  Submergence  (2013) · Anthony Marra,  A Constellation of Vital Phenomena  (2013) · Alissa Nutting,  Tampa  (2013) · Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam (2013) ·  Ayana Mathis, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie  (2013) · Donna Tartt,  The Goldfinch  (2013) · William H. Gass, Middle C (2013) ·  Kate Atkinson, Life After Life  (2013)  · Eleanor Catton,  The Luminaries  (2013) · Jim Harrison, Brown Dog (2013) ·  NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names  (2013) · Laila Lalami,  The Moor’s Account  (2014) · Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life (2014) ·  Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing  (2014) · Lily King, Euphoria (2014) ·  Akhil Sharma, Family Life  (2014) · Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (2014) · Dinaw Mengestu, All Our Names (2014) ·  Marilynne Robinson, Lila  (2014) · Anthony Doerr,  All the Light We Cannot See  (2014) · Marlon James,  A Brief History of Seven Killings  (2014) · Nell Zink, The Wallcreeper (2014) ·  Catherine Lacey, Nobody is Ever Missing  (2014) ·   Chang-Rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea (2014) ·  Jeffery Renard Allen, Song of the Shank  (2014) · Nell Zink,  The Wallcreeper  (2014) · Celeste Ng,  Everything I Never Told You  (2014) · Merritt Tierce,  Love Me Back  (2014) · Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World (2014) · Tom McCarthy, Satin Island (2015) ·  Angela Flournoy, The Turner House  (2015) · Alexandra Kleeman,  You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine  (2015) ·  Ali Smith,  How to Be Both  (2015) · Sara Nović,  Girl at War  (2015)  · Scarlett Thomas,  The Seed Collectors  (2015) · Nell Zink,  Mislaid  (2015) · James Hannaham, Delicious Foods (2015) ·  Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond  (2016) · Jane Alison, Nine Island (2016) ·  Nicole Dennis-Benn, Here Comes the Sun  (2016) · Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers (2016) ·  Imbolo Mbue, Behold the Dreamers  (2016) · Tony Tulathimutte,  Private Citizens  (2016) · Emma Cline,  The Girls  (2016) ·  Deborah Levy, Hot Milk (2016) ·  Martin Seay, The Mirror Thief  (2016) · Brit Bennett,  The Mothers  (2016) · Garth Greenwell,  What Belongs to You  (2016) · Jade Sharma, Problems (2016) ·  Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone  (2016) · Esmé Weijun Wang, The Border of Paradise (2016) · Victor LaValle,  The Changeling  (2017) · Jon McGregor, Reservoir 13 (2017) · Andrew Sean Greer,  Less  (2017) · Katie Kitamura,  A Separation  (2017) · Scott McClanahan, The Sarah Book (2017) · Gabe Habash, Stephen Florida (2017) ·  George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo  (2017) · Mohsin Hamid,  Exit West  (2017) · Hari Kunzru, White Tears (2017) ·  Omar El Akkad, American War (2017) · Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Kintu (2017) ·  Min Jin Lee, Pachinko  (2017) · Sally Rooney,  Conversations With Friends  (2017) · Fiona Mozley,  Elmet  (2017) · Amelia Gray,  Isadora  (2017) · Julie Buntin,  Marlena  (2017) · Tayari Jones,  An American Marriage  (2018) · Sigrid Nunez,  The Friend  (2018) · Madeline Miller,  Circe  (2018) · Nico Walker,  Cherry  (2018) · R. O. Kwon,  The Incendiaries  (2018) · Tommy Orange,  There There  (2018) · Gina Apostol, Insurrecto (2018) ·  Daisy Johnson, Everything Under  (2018) · Dan Sheehan,  Restless Souls  (2018) · Tara Isabella Burton,  Social Creature  (2018) · Chandler Klang Smith,  The Sky is Yours  (2018) · Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers (2018) ·  Jamie Quatro, Fire Sermon  (2018) · Chloe Benjamin,  The Immortalists  (2018) · Akwaeke Emezi,  Freshwater  (2018) · Ling Ma,  Severance  (2018) · Lisa Halliday,  Asymmetry  (2018) · Wayétu Moore, She Would Be King (2018) ·  Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous  (2019)  · Helen Phillips, The Need (2019) ·  Maurice Carlos Ruffin, We Cast a Shadow  (2019) · Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall (2019) ·  Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure  (2019) · Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein (2019) · Lucy Ellman, Ducks, Newburyport (2019) ·  De’Shawn Charles Winslow, In West Mills  (2019) · Sandra Newman,  The Heavens  (2019) · Colson Whitehead,  The Nickel Boys  (2019) · Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway (2019) ·  Kathleen Alcott, America Was Hard to Find  (2019).

Emily Temple

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Book Review: What’s it like to be a rental stranger? Kat Tang’s debut novel imagines an answer

This cover image released by Scribner shows “Five-Star Stranger” by Kat Tang. (Scribner via AP)

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As our lives become more automated, increasingly niche jobs materialize to fill in the gaps. Ours is a society in which people hire celebrities to make birthday videos, or pay “job leaving agents” in hopes of a more frictionless quitting experience. What would it be like to be that stranger for hire, to inhabit whatever role someone paid you by the hour to be?

Kat Tang’s debut novel, “Five-Star Stranger,” follows one man over a months-long spiral as he realizes he’s getting attached to his clients — a violation of his first rule for himself as a rental stranger — forcing him to confront his past and examine why he got into the business in the first place.

Tang never reveals the Stranger’s real name — one of the many ways he becomes a blank slate onto which others can project what they want. He’s a self-described attractive man, whose Japanese American heritage means he can code-switch easily between white and Asian depending on his clients’ needs. His apartment is full of wigs and outfits for different personalities and occasions, and he can use makeup to age himself up or down.

If this isn’t giving you identity crisis vibes yet, he also takes accents, mannerisms and stories from clients that he can later whip out for another gig. His evening client just wants to hear stories for an hour — so he regurgitates the stories his afternoon client told him nonstop, even adopting the original teller’s voice.

The juxtaposition shows how an insidious isolation has crept into our hyperconnected psyche, and how loneliness might have been solved genuinely and for free had they just met the right kind of person — or anyone at all.

But why risk rejection when you can hire someone instead? The Stranger notes that, “like everything else in this intensely connected yet deeply lonely life, there was an app for that.”

The narration often dips into philosophical before yanking back to the safety of light-hearted and funny; a whiplash between deep interrogations of society and the Stranger’s humorous deflection to avoid getting too lost in it.

Tang makes it easy to become engrossed in the characters. Even the brief encounters are made interesting by the psychoanalytical lens the Stranger sees them through. It’s a smart book, and it has to be to tackle such a topic in a thoughtful and thought-provoking way without digging itself into an existential hole.

“Five-Star Stranger” starts bright, hopeful and funny. By the end it’s a tangled gloomy mess that’s strangely still hopeful, the protagonist emptied out but not empty.

With its cool premise, great descriptions and amazing attention to emotion and relationships, “Five-Star Stranger” is a strong debut, and Tang an author to keep an eye on.

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews