I don’t read football books on Super Bowl Sunday or basketball books during March Madness. But the World Series invokes one hundred years of tradition, so I always watch it with the sound off and with something to read pregame, postgame, and during rain delays. Here are seven World Series books I’ve read, reread, and will read again. A Day in the Bleachers by Arnold Hano In 1954, Arnold Hano, a staff writer for Sport magazine and one of the stellar names of the golden age of American sports writing, decided to go to a World Series game. He went

There are books about things, and then there are books about writing about things. Much self-reflexive writing tends to turn into self-panegyric about discovering—against all odds—the “freedom” to “create,” the discovery of one’s “voice.” The books below dwell on honest failure, shame, and the sharp self-awareness that comes after failing to write about anything other than failing to write. Each of these five authors shows us that writing through failure can produce great and necessary work. Concrete by Thomas Bernhard, translated by David McLintock A book-length suicide note written by a character who insists he is just about to start

The success of Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is the latest sign of a fascination for all things Austen. Today’s Janeites devour everything from novels to blogs to cultural histories based on her work. But what did Austen herself read? Below are some of the best sellers that had the greatest influence on Austen’s early novels. Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson Hailed as the father of the English novel, Richardson was Austen’s favorite author. Although she preferred the melodrama of his Sir Charles Grandison, it was the intimate epistolary style of Pamela that spawned a sensation

Much contemporary poetry gets written off as too “experimental”—perhaps because of how crazy the poems look on the page, because they’re full of fragmentary images and half-finished thoughts, because they’re slathered in irony, or because they take poetry itself as their subject. Yet many of the most off-the-wall poets are actually writing about the same things—parenthood, love, sex, the environment, and the joys of literature—as their more straightforward contemporaries but have chosen to describe experience using untraditional means. Here are a few great books that embrace the experimental side of poetry. Like Wind Loves a Window by Andrea Baker This

The narrator of my novel in progress has a storefront preacher mother and a family legacy of extremism that seem, the more she struggles against them, destined to determine her future. While her life goes in a very different direction from mine, I’ve taken quite a bit of material from my own experiences and neuroses in imagining her story. I’m a doubter by nature—committedly, almost compulsively so—and gravitate toward works by other agnostics. Skepticism is as old as faith, and its manifestations are complex and varied. Ecclesiastes By far the most heretical book of the Bible, this candid, downbeat, and

There are certain books that all young artists read. For example, the other night I met a young woman at a bar. She said she was a cartoonist, so I asked to see her studio. Going over the next night, I noticed on her shelves a book I cherished when I was eighteen: Salvador Dalí’s Diary of a Genius. It was interesting that she had glommed onto Dalí—just as I once had. But what lessons was it teaching her about the artist’s life? Likely the ones I, too, had absorbed, studying certain books so thoroughly that now it gives me

While there are countless autobiographies by writers who have lost their sanity, memoirs of schizophrenia are a rarer breed. In moments of florid psychosis, schizophrenics can become so self-conscious about how they use words that they lose the ability to communicate. Everyday phrases seem unfamiliar, threatening, or absurd. As the psychoanalyst Hilde Bruch wrote, “The poet is a master of language, the schizophrenic is a slave to it.” Below is a list of six memoirs by writers who reveal the limits of language by chronicling their descent into madness. Perceval’s Narrative: A Patient’s Account of His Psychosis, 1830-1832 by John

Odile by Raymond Queneau The narrator in this novel runs with two gangs: a group of petty criminals who spend their days playing cards and hanging out at the racetrack, and a cultlike band of revolutionaries who aim to “bring about the liberation of the Mind and of the proletariat” by strolling the Paris streets, […]