Books like 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.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Novelist as a Vocation
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.
Absolutely on Music
Murakami and the conductor Seiji Ozawa listen to recordings together and talk about Mahler, Beethoven and Ozawa's apprenticeships with Bernstein and Karajan.
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.
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.
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.
An Angel at My Table
Janet Frame's autobiography, from a poor childhood in Oamaru through eight years in mental hospitals to her escape into writing and to Europe.
Istanbul: Memories and the City
Pamuk's memoir of growing up in Istanbul in the 1950s and 60s, of his family, and of the melancholy of the city, which Turks call hüzün.
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.
Autobiographies
Yeats's own account of his childhood in Sligo and London, his youth among the artists and occultists of the 1890s, and the Irish literary revival.
Living to Tell the Tale
The first volume of García Márquez's memoirs, from his childhood in his grandparents' house in Aracataca to his years as a young journalist in Cartagena and Barranquilla, up to 1955.
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.
Me Talk Pretty One Day
Sedaris's essays on growing up in North Carolina with his singular family and on moving to France with his boyfriend Hugh, where a sadistic language teacher reduces him to a child.