6 great books about writing

As selected by Harvard research fellow Matthew Battles:

The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (Harvard, $264). More than perhaps any other author, Dickinson made herself through writing, and this sumptuous edition presents her poems as she made them: written on folded stationery and sewn together in small, haunting packets.

The Gospel According to John (King James Bible version). Read it as ancient literature of a spare and striking kind, poised between the oral world of tale and legend and the rich lettered world born from the early church. Writing built Christianity, so it's strange to see that the Jesus of John's Gospel appears supremely suspicious of reliance on writing's authority.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Epigrams by Martial (Oxford, $17). Read Martial alongside the Gospel of John to get a complete sense of the range of lives writing made possible in the ancient Mediterranean world. Dirty, decadent, and redolent with the strangeness of Rome's 1st-century elite, Martial's shocking, bawdy lines offer the image of a poet living by his wits and words in a cutthroat manuscript culture.

Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (Everyman's Library, $20). Combining metaphysics with poetry and textual puzzles with hard-boiled intrigue, the tales of Argentina's great blind storyteller limn the spectrum of possibilities in the literary experience. Especially in stories like "The Library of Babel," Borges makes magic with the mysterious ways of the written word.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (Dover, $5.50). In Dickens' famous bildungsroman, writing plays a crucial role: Pip begins his emancipation from drudgery by teaching himself to write; his tormentor Miss Havisham summons Pip in writing to confess her misdeeds; and Joe, Pip's savior, signals his own transformation through writing.

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf (Mariner, $15). This great essay on the intellectual and creative rights of women begins in outrage — an anger ignited when Woolf was denied entrance to a library. She shows that while writing is often an instrument of the powerful, it is also crucial to the cultivation of liberty.

—Harvard research fellow and author of 2004's Library: An Unquiet History, Matthew Battles' new book is Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word