Reading Like a Writer

Read on to learn how Susie Yang's NYT Bestselling Novel "White Ivy" Explores Identity through Physical Description.

Explore the dynamic world of character creation in Farah Ali's "Beautiful," where danger, adventure, and complex personalities intertwine.

Analysis of Erika T. Wurth's strange and mysterious horror novel "White Horse"

How we can use fiction to capture emotional states that are far too complicated to state simply

The Women Could Fly, a novel by Megan Giddings, is set in a world like ours, except the misogyny's a bit more blatant: women must marry men or else register to be carefully watched, and the accusation of witchcraft could lead to execution.

The Hole by Hye-Young Pyun (translated by Sora Kim-Russell) is a terrifying novel told from the perspective of a person (Oghi) at the complete mercy of his caregivers. Some are careless. Some are cruel for the sport of it. Some fail to understand him. But the most frightening is his mother-in-law.

How do we let in outside perspectives beyond our main character's POV? Jung Yun's O Beautiful has some lessons for us.

I'm interested in the way the opening moments of the book introduce both the literal idea of a ghost bride, and the upside down logic and atmosphere of the afterlife more generally.

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu is about climate change, a worldwide pandemic, and a whole lot of death. The book chronicles multiple generations and includes robot pets, space travel, and a suicide theme park. But it's also a novel about grief and the devastating struggle of loss.

Ready, Set, Go by Inés Bortagaray (translated by Ana Patete) is about a family on a road trip. The narrator is a child who watches the scenery, squabbles with siblings over the window seat, and lets her mind wander just about everywhere.

Here's how it opens:

Quan Barry's We Ride Upon Sticks is about a high school field hockey team in the late eighties who make a pact with the devil (or Emilio Estevez, in notebook form) under the shadow of the Salem witch trials (they live where they happened).

City of Incurable Women, by Maud Casey, is a book about the psychiatric patients of Paris's Salpêtrière Hospital in the 19th century. It's about women diagnosed as hysterical. It is both historical and fictional.