TRUTH IS THE ARROW, MERCY IS THE BOW: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories by Steve Almond

The chapter on Writers’ Block is worth the price of the book. But all fifteen essays, from “How to Write Sex Scenes Without Shame” to “The Price of Entitlement,” land on Almond’s honest take on what it means to be a working writer in contemporary America. By giving examples of his own failures—manuscripts in a drawer, numerous rejections, self-doubt, self-sabatoge, and giving up on writing for years—reinforces Almond as one of us—writers trying to understand why we do what we do and what it requires of us. These essays won’t make your plot stronger, but it will make the writer reading this collection more resolute in pushing forward.

Favorite line(s): The Woman Upstairs (by Claire Messud) is a stark example of the work literature is meant to do, which is to implicate the reader, to bring them into contact with the damaged precincts of their inner life, to help them feel less isolated with those parts of themselves. Big emotions are disruptive to our lives off the page, which is why we expend so much energy hiding our sadness, suppressing our rage, dodging conflict, striving to be likable. As writers, we have to accept a different code of conduct. Our mission is to aim for the painful events and unresolved feelings, to spend time amid desperate characters, to push past our inhibitions. It takes work for us to find a voice capable of such courage.

CULT CLASSIC by Sloane Crosley 

A woman can’t stop running into her ex-boyfriends on the streets of New York City. Lola’s former boss and best friend have something to do with it. Newly engaged, Lola must contend with her doubts about marriage and commitment while unwittingly becoming the center of attention in her former boss’s (now a mystical guru) experiment. Through an emotional time machine-type storyline, he manages to put Lola’s exes back in her life. Why? You’ll have to read to find out. Cult Classic is more about memory and the philosophy of romance than a rom-com fantasy—but in Crosley’s quick-witted hands, it definitely is both.  

Favorite line(s): I told Willis about my new job, about the magazine folding. He only registered it as an updated LinkedIn profile, not the death of a way of life. He always said that everyone in New York identified too much with their careers. This was a stunning piece of hypocrisy, coming from an Olympian, the kind of blanket statement that made for a champion athlete but a strangely unfeeling civilian. Willis never said what the big deal was in any given scenario, no matter how significant. A swastika on an advertisement, rendered in Sharpie, was “just one idiot.” Global warming was “something the Earth was gonna do eventually.” I suspect that if Rocket died, he’d be the first to tell me it was an opportunity to get a kitten.

There were perks to this worldview. Willis knew the answers to his own questions before he asked them. Like Boots, he was not a torturer. Unlike Boots, he used words like goals. Though I will give him this: Willis had a healthier grip on the confines of his own mortality than most of my peers, even if I didn’t agree with his rationale. Marriage, children, home ownership? Real. Jobs, boyfriends, landlords? Fake. This is why some people got engaged in the first place, to step off the fake list and onto the real one. And I had joined their ranks. I had turned another human being into a talisman against social grief.

REAL AMERICANS by Rachel Khong

What does it mean to be American? Khong examines the inter-generational traumas that follow families for decades, if not lifetimes. May and Charles fled Mao’s China for Hong Kong and then America to pursue careers in science. They meet a wealthy entrepreneur whose company wants to finance their scientific discoveries, only to have the implemented discovery ruin her relationship with her daughter, Lily, and her daughter’s marriage to Matthew. Nick, Lily, and Matthew’s son wonders about his place in the world growing up without a father and his role in a company involved in genetic manipulation. Told through three generations of a Chinese-American family, Real Americans asks at what price scientific advancement trumps nature, and who determines class, familial inheritance, and what it means to be a family.

Favorite line(s): She nodded, unsurprised. She knew these things happened, that people drifted apart. It was what made her different from Timothy’s father, from many of the people who lived here: her realism, their idealism. Our white neighbors had sought the island’s isolation and thought of themselves as outside the mainstream. But they didn’t see how central they still were—how the world revolved around them. My mother never described herself as an outsider, she just was one—that was obvious to me. From the perimeter, she could see what was invisible to everyone in the middle.