Books like Zen in the art of writing by Ray Bradbury

A thoughtful meditation on Annie Dillard’s creative process, woven from anecdotes and vignettes that illuminate her distinctive prose style.

Eighteen‑year‑old Laila Piedra, a biracial aspiring author, must choose between perfection and sanity when a newly appointed, Pulitzer‑winning novelist becomes her strict mentor and questions her talent.

Illustrated biography of Ray Bradbury, tracing his artistic journey through the 20th and 21st centuries, including rare art and writings by and about him.

"In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six of America's finest writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. All six of these men were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast. Often, they did their drinking together: Hemingway and Fitzgerald ricocheting through the cafes of Paris in the 1920s; Carver and Cheever speeding to the liquor store in Iowa in the icy winter of 1973. Olivia Laing grew up in an alcoholic family herself. One spring, wanting to make sense of this ferocious, entangling disease, she took a journey across America that plunged her into the heart of these overlapping lives. As she travels from Cheever's New York to Williams's New Orleans, and from Hemingway's Key West to Carver's Port Angeles, she pieces together a topographical map of alcoholism, from the horrors of addiction to the miraculous possibilities of recovery. Beautiful, captivating, and original, The Trip to Echo Spring strips away the myth of the alcoholic writer to reveal the terrible price creativity can exert. - For readers of Amanda Vaill's When Everyone Was So Young, Elif Batuman's The Possessed, and Kingsley Amis's Everyday Drinking"--