How many books on writing can you call a page turner? This is one of the few. Great advice and immensely accessible.

This was the standard companion for all my students when I taught on the university level. The advice here is simple and concrete. My favorite book on style.

This book is for general argumentative writing. It’s a trove of rhetorical devices (“moves”) on both the sentence and paragraph level that are effective in persuasive writing. Full of examples.

I’m a big fan of King’s fiction writing, and few writers in popular culture are as good as he is. But he’s also got great advice on writing, like this: “If you don’t have time to read, you can’t be a writer.”

Zinsser’s book is a classic and one of the few you can read cover to cover. One of my favorite bits of advice comes from this book: “people see your writing before they read it.”

Truly a joy to read and a longtime favorite of mine. Trimble’s book is indeed a conversation.

Jennifer Egan’s follow-up to A Visit From the Goon Squad revisits some of the characters from that book in an absolutely stunning piece of writing.

Colson Whitehead (2016 Pulitzer Prize winner) has written a fantastically entertaining book about holdups and shakedowns in 1960s Harlem.

Author of Blacktop Wasteland (also pictured here), S.A. Cosby has written a thrilling crime/mystery novel set in the rural area around Richmond. This is true “I can’t wait to turn the page” writing.

Joe Wilkins’s book should be the next one you read. It’s hard to state how good this is. It’s poetic and gripping, urgent and beautiful. Wilkins is also a poet, and the setting is Montana. Read this.

Former speechwriter Grand Ginder’s novel about a politician running for Senate has a touch of VEEP but is also full of intrigue. Both hilarious and suspenseful.

This novel by James McBride is a wonderful story about a cast of characters in New York City in 1969 and how their lives intersect, from gangsters to housing project residents to police officers.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner is a searing alternative to the many American-centric portrayals of the Vietnam war. The dark humor reminds me of Slaughterhouse Five.

How to describe this crime thriller that takes place in rural Virginia: it’s Narcos in book form. Stellar writing and impossible—impossible—to put down.

Ayad Akhtar’s novel

One of my favorite things about Laila Lalami’s novel is that the chapters are narrated by different characters, so you get to see how, say, a mother and a daughter view the same event. Fantastic writing too.

Quite simply, I do not know that I’ve devoured a book this quickly. It’s hilarious and poignant. Kevin Wilson’s book will make you laugh and give you goosebumps. Read it.

Andrew Sean Greer’s book about a middle aged author on an international book tour is very funny, and comedies don’t often win the Pulitzer, as this did in 2018.

Tommy Orange’s debut novel tells the Native American story in urban America, in this case Oakland. It’s a story not often told.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Yes, debut. I don’t know that I’ve read many books with such a combination of both dramatic tension and beautiful prose.

Vonnegut’s book is at the top of my list. When I finished it, I slowly put it down, took a deep breath, and beheld its greatness.

Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize winning book is a group of 13 connected stories centered around record company executive Bennie Salazar.

Hilarious, dark, irreverent, and moving: Kristen Arnett’s book about a daughter who takes over her deceased father’s taxidermy practice in Florida is fantastic.

Anthony Doerr’s description of canned peaches as “wedges of wet sunlight” is one of the greatest images I’ve ever read. Doerr’s work of WW2 historical fiction won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize.

Few outside the literature community know about Breece D’J Pancake. He was heralded as the “hillbilly Hemingway” because the setting of his sparse prose was in his home state of West Virginia. This book is all we have of his writing because he committed suicide in 1979 at age 26. This book is incredible.

It’s hard to go wrong with any Raymond Carver collection, but this is one of my favorites. Anyone who writes anything should read something by him.

Michelle Zauner fronts the great band Japanese Breakfast, and she’s also written a wonderful memoir centered around growing up Korean American and losing her mother.

From elephants to fruit flies, Ed Yong will make sure you never look at animals the same way again. Incredible book.

I love Jack Lynch’s book because it destroys all the myths we were taught about the “rules of English.” Spoiler alert: you can end sentences with prepositions and split infinitives.

Writing about the history of music isn’t easy, but Kelefa Sanneh, staff writer for the New Yorker, brings the magazine’s style to this fantastic book.

Kendra Atleework’s memoir takes place in the remote California desert. It’s a powerful story of family and place bound up with ramifications of climate change and water rights. So so good.

I’m a big fan of Gioia’s other books on music, and this is an extraordinarily well-researched book on the history of the Mississippi blues. If you like rock n’ roll, you need to know its roots. Hint: it’s not Elvis.

Douglas Preston, a writer for the New Yorker, accompanies archaeologists into the Honduran rainforest to search for a long abandoned civilization. They find it—and get a life-threatening disease in the process. I devoured this book.

Don Kulick is a linguist who spends several long periods doing ethnographic fieldwork with a remote tribe in Papua New Guinea, recording its native language of Tayap before the language becomes extinct and its members fully embrace Tok Pisin.

David Grann’s knack for suspenseful storytelling and meticulous research shines in this story of the 1920s serial murders on the Osage reservation. Grann is a staff writer for the New Yorker.

That’s correct: Cecelia Watson’s book is about the history of the semicolon. But it’s also about how punctuation happened (it’s relatively recent) and why we need it. For history of the English language lovers.

Dennis Baron, professor emeritus of English and linguistics, tells the story of how we got from he and she to zie and hir and singular they. Thankfully, he argues that singular they is, and always has been, correct.

Robert Macfarlane is no ordinary travel writer: he goes deep into places like underground sea caves, the Greenland ice cap, and bunkers where nuclear waste will be stored. He presents these places with a combination of introspection and gorgeous detail.

The Internet is coming for the English language, which means the language is changing probably faster than ever. Linguist Gretchen McCulloch explains the how and why in this fascinating book. Descriptivists, unite!

Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Moss, author of Salt Sugar Fat, continues his look at the processed food industry, aka Big Food. Meticulously researched and an eye opener.

Before Hemingway, no one wrote like him. He set out to write in a style no one had ever seen. Hemingway succeeded in The Sun Also Rises, but he made a lot of enemies in the process, according to Lesley M.M. Blume.

Theo Cateforis is a professor at Syracuse University, so this is an academic treatment of the genre of new wave music—which is rare and which I love. The writing is academic yet accessible.