New Books on Writing - The New York Times

Writing is now one of the few skills you must have—and we really mean “must” here—for the twenty-first century.

If you are creative, you can write short stories, tackle screenplays, or craft reviews for the arts section of a student paper. The specific format isn't important, just as long as you are writing.

My roster of the new literature of nonfiction, in short, would include all the writers who come bearing information and who present it with vigor, clarity and humanity.

The Paris Review on Twitter. There are, of course, other books, such as Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times. One that is sure to fuel a fire to write is To Live and To Write: Selections by Japanese Women Writers 1913-1938 (edited by Yukiko Tanaka), which is writing from women who wrote under the most adversarial conditions

On Writing Well is a craft book, and its principles haven’t changed since it was written 30 years ago. I don’t know what still newer marvels will make writing twice as easy in the next 30 years. But I do know they won’t make writing twice as good. That will still require plain old hard thinking—what E. B. White was doing in his boathouse—and the pl