The best-written recent fiction
And Beth Kephart answers our questions on prose technique.
Every week we identify the best-written works of fiction, speculative fiction, and nonfiction from recent releases and shortlists for major prizes. We also publish guides by their authors on prose technique.
On the last Friday of the month we publish for paid subscribers the best-written book of the month. Our next pick will be a work of Catalonian speculative fiction.
Recent literary fiction
An Observer 2025 most exciting debut. * A BBC best novel for 2025. * ‘A polyphonic masterpiece’—Sinéad Gleeson
Recent speculative fiction
“Every now and then, you are lucky enough to come across a book so inventive, so thrillingly odd, that you struggle to stop thinking about it.” —Sian Cain, The Guardian
A Millions Most Anticipated Book of Spring 2025
“Stunningly inventive. . . Virginia Woolf’s The Waves meeting a 21st century version of Philip K. Dick. . . Brilliantly weird. Weirdly brilliant.” —Kirkus, starred review
At the above links you’ll find:
The opening pages of our picks. Make up your own mind about the quality of the prose.
The full list of the books we considered.
Information about submitting to Auraist. If we publish your work, we’ll invite you to answer our questions on prose style. Your answers will be considered for inclusion in the published collection of these answers by many of the world’s best writers.
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Recommended Substack
Unfortunately we were unable to publish the interview below with Geoff Dyer, because it wasn’t focused enough on prose style. However, I do recommend the piece and the memoir it discusses, which we picked as a best-written recent release. You can read the opening pages here.
‘I still ache when I read Fitzgerald, quite possibly because his style is his substance, because the decorative in him knows.’
Beth Kephart is an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania. She was the 2013 Master Writing Teacher for National YoungArts, is a co-founder of Juncture Workshops, has delivered keynote addresses on the art of teaching, has led teach-the-teacher sessions, and has taught writers of all ages in a variety of settings. She has published a number of books on the teaching of memoir—Handling the Truth, Tell the Truth. Make It Matter., Strike the Empty, We Are the Words: The Memoir Master Class—and writes a monthly educational newsletter, Juncture Notes.
We chose her biography of her grandmother Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday's News as one of the best submissions from our subscribers. You can read the opening pages here.
In your early writing career, were there writers whose sentences permanently affected the standards of your reading and your own writing aspirations?
Your question returns me to a box of high school papers written for an English teacher named Dr. Dewsnap, where I find my thoughts on onion skin—my first attempt to come to terms with this notion of literary style, or how it is achieved, or how it might come to haunt one.
One subject of study (it seems I should add of course) was F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose sentences were, I privately believed, primers on breathing. The pause and keep going, the pause but don’t stop, the comma upon comma and now a dash of The Beautiful and Damned:
There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully - assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.
The alliteration and assonance and sibilance, the like and the as, the repetitions of The Great Gatsby:
The windows were open and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up towards the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.
But those were my private thoughts, my feelings. What I actually wrote in my senior paper was far more measured, more erudite, more (I thought) adult. I pondered Fitzgerald’s “dreamy atmosphere and illusions,” his way of building “careful character maps and sketches,” and his encounters with critics such as Edmund Wilson who wrote that Fitzgerald “has been given imagination without intellectual control of it; he has been given a desire for beauty without an aesthetic ideal; and he has been given the gift of expression without many ideas to express.”
Wilson and Fitzgerald were friends. Still, Wilson wrote that.
Who wouldn’t be terrified by the prospect of having the same judgment delivered on their own work? Who would not try to protect themselves from falling into the gift of expression without many ideas to express. I studied the History and Sociology of Science instead of English in my undergraduate years as self-defense. I became, where literature was concerned, a hidden autodidact.
This has given me the freedom to teach myself what I think I know about style, to build my own standards, to aspire and to reach and (I’m sorry) judge.
To fall hard for the clean, forgiving, impeccable, unaccusing, never whining calm of Natalie Kusz in Road Song. To embrace the vital verbs and exalting details of Louise Erdrich. To find sky itself in the sentence making of Willa Cather—flat, easy, plain sentences that accumulate like storm. To understand how idea and scene can be the one same thing if the sentences are sufficiently capacious by way of the meticulous Marilynne Robinson. To be emotionally ravaged by the unsmudged truth (precisely chosen words) of Wallace Stegner. To hear the call of a foreign tongue in the entirely American Alice McDermott. To recognize the powerful wound of the short sentence in Per Petterson.
To be irreversibly stunned by the affective whisper of Michael Ondaatje—first The English Patient, then Coming through Slaughter, then Running in the Family, then all the rest. I am haunted by the sound of Ondaatje. By how close to the soul his writing is, how even his simplest sentences are alerting:
“Every four days she washes his black body, beginning at the destroyed feet.” (The English Patient)
“Half a page—and the morning is already ancient.” (Running in the Family)
Virginia Woolf breaks me in other ways—her sentences, in closing upon themselves, close upon me, keep me inside them. Woolf, too, is an obsession.
But I have gone on too long, and this is my list, these are, for me, the stylistic standard bears: Kusz, Erdrich, Cather, Robinson, Stegner, McDermott, Petterson, Ondaatje, Woolf, and what the hell, I’m going to confess it here: I still ache when I read Fitzgerald, quite possibly because his style is his substance, because the decorative in him knows, because if they are going to make accusations against Fitzgerald, then let them also make them against me.
(That last bit is just writerly solidarity speaking, not pride. I have yet to write a Fitzgerald sentence.)
(Continues below)
‘First I edit for clarity. Then I edit for facts. And finally, and repeatedly, I edit looking to cut self-indulgence.’
How important are voice and style in TOMORROW WILL BRING SUNDAY’S NEWS to casting the spell that helps the reader’s immersion in the book?
Voice—mood, tone, diction, syntax—governs my work, my thinking. I can’t escape it, can’t imagine writing anything that does not begin with voice. (Even this interview. I couldn’t get started. I didn’t know why. And then I realized: I had abandoned my voice to answer questions. I needed, instead, to tell a story.)
I don’t sit down with a plot in mind. I don’t build an outline with an eye on what might sell (I used to try; it’s a game I can’t win; check my sales records and you’ll know I’m not lying.).
Instead, I sit or walk or dance and wait, and sometimes—not often, but sometimes—I catch wind of a certain rhythm, a sound that becomes a sense that becomes a voice, and that is when I know there is story in me.
Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News was—it couldn’t be helped—the story in me. Walking around the house one day—pacing back and forth, as I often do—I heard my grandmother speaking. She’d reached the end of her life. This voice held the bloom of thoughts in her head, the stems, the roots. It offered a vessel for the memories that she could not contain—memories I suddenly had access to, for a few months before, I’d received in a circuitous fashion a letter sharing small details of her life.
One such detail was my grandmother’s favorite song—“Among My Souvenirs.” I’d played the song over and over and over again. In its tempo, and in its lyric, there was mood and tone and story. And then one day, as I paced, voice.
So here was my grandmother, the voice in my head. Here were her words—words I was certain she would have spoken to me decades ago, when I was a nine-year-old child by her bed. My grandmother had secrets she wanted to share. She would find them, she would share them, I would listen. I the nine-year-old child. I the much-older me. What do you do when your long-departed grandmother starts speaking? You hold her voice close. You honor her with a book.
The first sentences of Tomorrow are the first sentences I wrote. I never changed them. They locked me in. I read them out loud to myself (pacing again, using the movement of my body to be sure the rhythms were right) until I knew that they would carry me, which is to say that they would carry the story: “She lies in her bed, in her room, listening: the glug in the gutter.” The metering, the soft vowels, the glug and gutter. A voice that I hope keeps readers not just near but immediately immersed.
When planning TOMORROW WILL BRING SUNDAY’S NEWS, to what extent did you disconnect substance from style? And when editing it?
I have sat with this question for a while now. I keep having the same thought: If the voice becomes the sound on the page, the voice now owns the story. The voice is, in other words, both style and substance. There’s no separating the two, at least for me.
In Tomorrow, my grandmother has a story to tell, as we’ve established. She is using her voice to tell that story. Because she has reached the end of her life, her voice rises, falters, falls as she moves in and out of present tense. Dying in 1969, she is remembering 1918, and sometimes she just—can’t. She can’t go on but she must go on; if she doesn’t share her secret with her granddaughter, then who will ever know?
In this back and forth of time, the density of once is replaced by the white space of now, and back again. There is no comma, white space, hyphen, or slash between substance and style in Tomorrow.
How much time did you spend editing TOMORROW WILL BRING SUNDAY’S NEWS? Is this more or less time than you spent editing your earliest publications?
Hmmm. How much time? The truth is, Tomorrow was desperately urgent in me. I can’t remember writing most of it. I don’t know how I walked around looking like an ordinary person living in the current era, when actually I was living somewhere and some time else.
I do know this: I was not plagued by that I cannot do this feeling. But after those first several sentences came to me and kept their early shape, I rearranged the beginning segments at least a dozen times to get the right balance between the now and the then, between the imagined, the remembered, and the memoiristic. I spent a lot of time working the chapter titles, too, so that readers would feel like the story never stopped.
A friend read the book and wondered if, in a few places, there might be more or less, and if I really meant to use Macintosh apples.
(I did.)
My editor read the book and asked two important questions—one about a minor character and one about the history of racism in my city.
I went back, did more, made those aspects better.
Then it was the turn of my copy editor, who worked with my editor and me seemingly countless times to make sure the facts were right (street names, business names), that I was choosing all words for all the right reasons (and not just because they held a certain beat or sound), and that I would not keep misspelling one of my own characters’ last name.
(When you are really inside something, you need very loving editors and copy editors to wake you from the dream and say: “Uh, would that be Miss Theiler or Miss Thieler? For some reason you have both.”)
As for whether or not this is the same amount of time I’ve spent on earlier books—hell. No. I wrote and rewrote a book that took fifteen years; that one started as fiction and became memoir (Still Love in Strange Places). I wrote the memoir of a river at least five different ways, until I returned to the first draft, which is the draft that was published (Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River). One of my picture books went through 30 separate edits, as I went back and forth with my editor about what the book should be (Good Books for Bad Children: The Genius of Ursula Nordstrom) while another (And I Paint It: Henriette Wyeth’s World) was hardly touched after the first two drafts.
If I were to summarize my editing process, it would be this: First I edit for clarity. Then I edit for facts. And finally, and repeatedly, I edit looking to cut self-indulgence. When the book is published I can only squint toward it. For there will be mistakes. There will. This is me.
How can aspiring writers avoid haughtiness but still write with authority?
This is something I think a lot about. In fact, I just took a long walk (this time I was outside, gently waving off my neighbor friends who say I should spend less time thinking about literature when I walk and more time looking for the birds in the trees) and talked to a colleague about this very matter. We explored questions like these: When does authoritative become annoying? How much distance will the reader accept from the “on-high” status of the writer? Does authority require one to appear to know more than one does?
And when does knowing so much leave you the least liked person in the room? As in, That person sure does know a lot, but I’m not inviting her to my party. YOU ARE NOT COMING TO MY PARTY, YOU ELITIST KNOW-IT-ALL.
What it always comes down to, for me, is this: Avoid reporting in favor of evoking. Think of engaging rather than educating. Suggest, don’t demand. Make room for the other at the table. A book is not a stage, not in my opinion. Nor is it a bullhorn.
What do poor stylists most lack: guidance, accurate self-estimation, or something else?
May I humbly suggest a good ear?
Name a book published in the past year that you admire for the quality and originality of its sentences, and describe what’s accomplished and original about them.
Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor knocked me over, but not, thankfully, out. Talk about an inclusive, immersive, undiminished, never-diluted, never-pretentiously artful first-person voice that never breaks, that never reminds you that a writer is at work behind the scenes.
Here’s a passage from the first page. Note how O’Connor paints a landscape scene not with pretty brushstrokes, but with jagged ones—with words full of edges and noise. O’Connor is not afraid of consecutive right-branching sentences. She’s not trying for adornments. She wants us to see what she sees, and so she uses hard and soft sounds, declarative but surprising words, only the adjectives she needs.
The kittiwakes come closest to our houses, picking food scraps from the middens in the yard. They perch on the roofs: from afar the building is spiked with the grey points of their wings. They live on the roof, covering it in a silver layer of feathers and guano, waking us inside as they squabble and scurry across the tiles. Sometimes they fight mid-air, leaving red smears on each other.
We’re running a series on the best-written novels of the 21st century, and the best-written works of nonfiction. Could you nominate one or more of each for us?
You KNOW this is impossible, right.
What if I go with a few hybrids, a lyric essay, and a memoir:
All the Living and the Dead: A Tale of Exile? (Inara Verzemnieks)
A Ghost in the Throat (Doireann Ni Ghriofa)
Voice of the Fish (Lars Horn)
All Down Darkness Wide (Sean Hewitt)
*
More on Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s New:
More on Beth Kephart:
Substack: The Hush and the Howl
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Incredibly honored. Thank you so much.