The Books Briefing: A Guide to Transcending Your Daily Anxieties

📚 The Living Mountain, by Nan Shepherd

How music made Bruce Springsteen

“The journey from obscurity to rock-and-roll fantasy is not as important in this book as the internal journey from anxious urgency to some sort of self-forgiving peace.”

📚 Born to Run, by Bruce Springsteen

When a writer’s great freedom lies in constraint

“If I can take the incredible fervor with which I pursued heroin, or my former lover, and if I can direct that kind of passion and fixate on something that can fulfill me, it becomes an immense kind of power.”

📚 “Living Like Weasels,” by Annie Dillard

📚 Abandon Me, by Melissa Febos

Writing advice from Kazuo Ishiguro, Nobel winner

“The goal was method writing, essentially: to create an environment, through force of will, in which the author and his story might be merged into one.”

📚 “How I Wrote The Remains of the Day in Four Weeks,” by Kazuo Ishiguro

📚 The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro

The poem that made Sherman Alexie want to “drop everything and be a poet”

“The very act of storytelling is a return to the prison of what torments us and keeps us captive … Hopefully, you get to a point when you realize there was beauty in your prison too. ”

📚 “Elegy for the Forgotten Oldsmobile,” by Adrian C. Louis

📚 The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, by Sherman Alexie​ ​

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Rosa Inocencio Smith. Her copy of War and Peace, for the co-reading project Tolstoy Together, just arrived.

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Rosa Inocencio Smith is an assistant editor at The Atlantic.