How to Write a Sentence

Stanley Fish

Fish argues that the building blocks of writing are sentences, and that if you want to write a good one, you first have to learn how to read it.

On Writing Well

William Zinsser

I’m only just now reading this book, but it was a bit like discovering an old friend you didn’t know you had. Zinsser’s is the kind of casual, unassuming writing that sounds effortless, but isn’t.

Bad Feminist

Roxane Gay

We should all be as bad at feminism as Roxane Gay is.

The Dispossessed

Ursula K. Le Guin

A planet named Urras is host to a habitable moon known as Anarres. Some seven generations ago, a group of anarchist settlers left Urras to build a colony on the moon, after which the communication between the colonists and the planet all but ceased.

The Sentence

Louise Erdrich

Tookie works in a bookstore, and Flora—her most annoying, and most loyal, customer—has just died. This does not mean she has left the bookstore.

Babel

R. F. Kuang

In the nineteenth century, the British empire has achieved exceptional power through its dominance of silver-working: an art that locates and exploits the magic in the gaps of meaning between languages.

The Light Eaters

Zoë Schlanger

Amidst the noisy and nonsensical discourse about recognizing the intelligence of machines, Zoë Schlanger asks us to open our eyes to the intelligence that already surrounds us and upon which we wholly depend: that of plants.