Eight top books about struggling writers

Andrew Martin's first novel Early Work was a New York Times Notable Book of 2018 and a finalist for the Cabell First Novelist Award. His stories and essays have been published in The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, Harper's, and T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

Martin's new book is Cool for America: Stories.

At Electric Lit he tagged eight "favorite works of literature about artists who are stymied in their attempts to fulfill their visions, both by the usual impediments—sloth, vanity, booze, love—and, sometimes, by the capricious workings of the outer world," including:

Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta

Spiotta’s tricky, emotionally devastating novel is about a brother and sister duo fighting for artistic control over the narrative of their lives. The book’s central figure, Nik, is a musician who has established an elaborate private mythology for his work, which includes extensive writings, some in the voice of his sister, who, as his main audience, has often found herself in her brother’s shadow. The novel becomes, in her words, “the counter chronicles” to his version of the family story, a reclamation of her own life as a writer that requires her to push Nik’s vision of himself aside.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue