Novels for Novelists: A Writer’s Reading List

Jane is getting everything she’s ever wanted and lounging around on borrowed time in Hollywood — until it turns her totally upside down. House sitting in the hills while working on her novel, Jane feels like she finally has it all figured out… until she doesn’t. This is a story about finding your voice, sticking to your morals, and seeing how far you’ll go for a dream. Danzy Senna’s quick wit and wry voice has the big-heartedness of Dolly Alderton and the sensibility of Sally Rooney; readers of Miranda July’s All Fours and Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It will want to tell all their friends about this smart and sharp tale.

Anyone who’s ever wondered what it’d be like to write for a show like Saturday Night Live or 30 Rock needs this book. Sally is a sketch writer for late-night tv show The Night Owls and rolls her eyes at middling men’s penchant for dating incredibly successful (and stunning) women. When a world-famous musician hosts the show and sets his eyes on Sally, she’ll have to rethink everything she thought she knew about the world — and love.

For readers of White Oleander by Janet Finch, fans of Carson McCullers or Jane Smiley, Lily King’s Writers and Lovers is a big-hearted story of love and family, loss and grief. When Casey moved to Massachusetts in the summer of 1997, she had no partner, no job, and no clue what to do next. While waiting tables at a restaurant, working on a six-year-old manuscript, and falling in love with two different men, Casey is in crisis mode, and she’s doing her best not to flail. Tender, funny and wise, Lily King’s depiction of language, art and creativity is enough to inspire any reader.

While you may have heard of the dark, fairytale-like twists and turns of Bunny, did you know this story takes place in a highly exclusive MFA program at a prestigious New England university (besides, only writers would get into this much of a wacky mess)? Meet the Bunnies, a clique of women that call each other Bunny and participate in things called “Smut Salon” parties. Awad offers a candid and barbed portrait of the nuances of femininity and societal expectations forced onto women that readers will devour.

Beloved by booksellers, readers and writers including Elizabeth Strout, Zadie Smith, and Jhumpa Lahiri. The first installment in the Neapolitan Novels series introduces us to Lila and Elena, two women who brave the ever-changing terrain of love, life and friendship’s complications. From age ten to adolescence, this is just the first volume in a four-book epic that gives readers a deeply satisfying story of friendship, childhood and coming-of-age. Elena Ferrante’s enigmatic prose, complex characterization and elegant writing style is a masterclass in storytelling for any aspiring author.

Any writer knows how it feels to see your characters through murky waters, just out of reach and never fully formed. What if they decided to do the job for you? When Alma inherits an ancestral plot of land in the Dominican Republic, she knows exactly what she wants to do with it — turn it into a literary graveyard. She decides to give up on her unfinished characters and let them rest in peace, but when they begin talking back to her and revising their own manuscripts, Alma realizes they won’t go down without a fight. A funny, life-affirming novel about storytelling, friendship and death from the author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.