Got a dreadful first novel stashed somewhere in the proverbial drawer? Take heart, dear writer. Roberto Bolaño will show you how to salvage from the wreck.

His debut collection features sentimental Vikings, hungover moose-hunters, and fuming stepsons, among other luckless men. Wells Tower talks jokes, beauty, and painful, teeth-gnashing revision with Rebecca Scherm.

Writers are continually told to trim their work down, but is that always the best course of action to follow? Not if you don’t know why.

Next time someone asks you how your revision is going, show them this comic.
It’s funny because it’s true. Wait…

The Half-Known World, Robert Boswell’s collection of essays on the craft of fiction writing, is also driving-idea behind his conversation with Michael Hinken. In it Boswell discusses the power of writing better sentences, characterization as jazz, the narrative brain versus the linear brain, the value of writing fifty drafts and other mysteries and wonders of the half-known world.

After its publication in 2000, the first edition of Betsy Lerner’s The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers became one of my students’ favorite writing books, and over time it became my go-to gift to graduating seniors with whom I’d formed a special bond, and whose persistence I hoped to bolster in those daunting years ahead. I even kept a small stash of copies in my office. So it was with great anticipation that I looked forward to this second edition, published in October 2010.

”The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.” —Cyril Connolly