Recommended Reading
Books About Writing:
Bernays and Painter. What If (writing exercises)
Baxter, Charles The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot
Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction
Boswell, Robert The Half-Known World
Burroway, Janet Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (updated edition) for all beginning writers. It covers all the fundamentals.
Dillard, Annie. The Writing Life
Forster, E.M. Aspects of the Novel
Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction
Jauss, David. Alone With All That Could Happen
Lamott, Anne. Bird By Bird
Madden, David. Revising Fiction
O’Conner, Flannery. Mystery and Manners
Prose, Francine. Reading Like a Writer
Strunk and White. The Elements of Style
Wood, James How Fiction Works
Chicago Manual of Style
Some Recommended Fiction Writers and Works (in no particular order):
Shirley Hazzard The Transit of Venus, The Great Fire
James Joyce “The Dead” and Dubliners
Christina Stead The Man Who Loved Children
Tim Winton Cloudstreet
Peter Carey Oscar and Lucinda
James Baldwin “Sonny’s Blues,” Another Country
Denis Johnson Angels, Jesus’ Son, The Name of the World, Train Dreams
Michael Cunningham A Home at the End of the World , The Hours
Melville Moby Dick , “Bartleby the Scrivener,” “Benito Cereno”
Annie Proulx Wyoming Stories
Joy Williams Taking Care, Honored Guest
Tim O’Brien The Things They Carried , In the Lake of the Woods
Don DeLillo White Noise, Underworld, Americana, Mao II
Flannery O’Connor Complete Stories, especially “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge” and “Good Country People”
Ralph Ellison Invisible Man
Ethan Canin Blue River, Emperor of the Air
Malcolm Lowry Under the Volcano
J. D. Salinger Nine Stories
Saul Bellow Adventures of Augie March
Faulkner “Barn Burning,” “A Rose for Emily,” As I Lay Dying
Pete Dexter Paris Trout
Marilynne Robinson Housekeeping
Stuart Dybek The Coast of Chicago
James Salter A Sport and a Pastime, Light Years, Last Night (stories), Dusk (stories)
Donald Barthelme Sixty Stories
Raymond Carver Collected Stories (2009)
Deborah Eisenberg Under the 82nd Airborne (stories), Twilight of the Superheroes (stories)
Hemingway In Our Time (stories)
Frank Conroy Midair, Stop-Time
Thomas Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49, Mason and Dixon
Katherine Anne Porter Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Noon Wine
William Maxwell So Long, See You Tomorrow, They Came Like Swallows
Amy Hempel The Collected Stories
Jhumpur Lahiri Interpreter of Maladies
Cormac McCarthy The Road, All The Pretty Horses
John Updike Rabbit novels
Philip Roth The Counter Life, Sabbath’s Theater
Margaret Atwood Surfacing, “Rape Fantasies”
Eudora Welty The Collected Stories
George Saunders Civilwarland in Bad Decline
David Foster Wallace Infinite Jest, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (essays)
Paul Bowles The Sheltering Sky, “A Distant Episode”
Ron Carlson
Jennifer Egan A Visit From the Goon Squad
Wells Tower Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
Toni Morrison Jazz
Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible
Andrea Barrett Ship Fever (stories), Servants of the Map (stories)
Charles Johnson Middle Passage
Lydia Davis The Collected Stories
Joan Didion Play It As It Lays
Jonathan Safran Foerr
“Here We Aren’t So Quickly” Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close
James Allen McPherson Hue and Cry
Steven Millhauser Martin Dressler
Tobias Wolff “A Bullet in the Brain,” This Boy’s Life (memoir), The Barrack’s Thief, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (stories)
Roberto Bolano By Night in Chile
Ondaatje Coming Through Slaughter
Sebald The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz
David Markson,The Last Novel
Richard Yates Revolutionary Road
Thomas Bernhard Concrete
Paula Fox Desperate Characters
Michael Chabon The Mysteries of Pittsburg
Paul Harding Tinkers
Nicholson Baker Mezzanine
William Trevor After Rain
Nathaniel West, Miss Lonelyhearts, Day of the Locust
Sherwood Anderson Winsburg, Ohio