Books like A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
A class on how fiction works, built around close readings of seven Russian short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol, from the course Saunders has taught for decades.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
Bird by Bird
Lamott's guide to writing and the writing life, built on permission to write terrible first drafts and the advice her father once gave her brother, stuck on a school report about birds: take it bird by bird.
The Writing Life
Dillard's short book on the daily work of writing, the cabins and studies where she has done it, and what it costs, with a detour to a stunt pilot who wrote in the sky.
A Room of One's Own
Woolf's lecture-turned-book on why women who want to write need five hundred a year and a lockable door, in a voice that invented its own form of argument.
Novelist as a Vocation
Essays on how Murakami became a novelist, from the baseball game where he decided to write his first book to the daily routine and stubbornness that have kept him writing since.
On Writing
Stephen King's memoir of the craft: his childhood, his early struggles and drinking, the toolbox of grammar and habit he swears by, and the 1999 accident that nearly ended his life while he was writing the book.
One Writer's Beginnings
Welty's Harvard lectures on growing up in Jackson, Mississippi, on her parents and her reading, and on the habits of listening and watching that made her a writer.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Murakami reflects on decades of long-distance running and what the discipline has taught him about writing, ageing, and pain.
Minor Feelings
Hong writes about Asian-American shame, Richard Pryor, friendship, and why the minor feelings of a model-minority life refuse to stay put.
Less Than One
Brodsky's essays on growing up in postwar Leningrad, on his parents, and on the poets he loved, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Auden and Cavafy among them.
When You Are Engulfed in Flames
Sedaris on quitting cigarettes by moving to Tokyo for three months, on domestic life with Hugh in Paris and Normandy, and on the neighbours, strangers and medical complaints that keep finding him.
Trick Mirror
Nine essays on how late-2010s America scams itself, the internet as self, the wedding industry, athleisure and optimisation, written from inside the trap by someone who does not pretend to be above it.
Between the World and Me
A letter from a father to his fifteen-year-old son about what it means to live in a Black body in America, written in the shadow of Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Prince Jones.