Bibliography. Books on Writing.

Here is a selection of books on the craft of storytelling, most of which we can recommend to budding authors.

Aristotle, Poetics. Oxford University Press, 2013. – Influential in the west, though to be read and interpreted with some caution. 

Baxter, Charles, Burning Down The House. Greywolf Press, 2008. – Interesting essays on storytelling.

Beinhart, Larry, How To Write A Mystery, Ballantine, 1996. – Contains much that is true beyond genre writing.

Booker, Christopher, The Seven Basic Plots. Continuum, 2005. – More erudite than the title would suggest, and somewhat controversial since he favours classics and disses almost every story of the last 200 years.

Boyd, Brian, On The Origins Of Stories. Harvard University, 2009. – The world’s foremost Nabokov expert with a brilliant and comprehensive – though occasionally quite dry – explanation of why stories are an integral part of the human species, an evolutionary adaptation we couldn’t live without.  (more…)