The Books Briefing: The Writers Who Don’t Work Alone

📚 The Two Noble Kinsmen, by John Fletcher and William Shakespeare

(CALLAHAN / OLENA YAKOBCHUK / JACOB LUND / SHUTTERSTOCK / KATIE MARTIN / THE ATLANTIC)

The joy of writing a book with my dad

“While the verdict is out on whether collaborations lead to better writing, for me at least, it led to a better writing experience. Writing this book was difficult, sometimes more difficult than past projects, but it was never, ever lonely—and that means more than I can put into words.”

📚 The Good Vices: From Beer to Sex, the Surprising Truth About What’s Actually Good for You, by Harry and Erik Ofgang

(WENJIA TANG)

On being happy for and jealous of a friend at the same time

“It can be hard to be really close to someone who’s trying to do the same thing that you do.”

📚 Topics of Conversation, by Miranda Popkey
📚 Look, by Zan Romanoff

📚 A Song to Take the World Apart, by Zan Romanoff

📚 Grace and the Fever, by Zan Romanoff

(HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT)

A new book about formative literary friendships

“Female friendship, a trending theme in contemporary fiction, is ripe for fresh nonfiction attention. Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney—two young writers who are, yes, also friends—have just the book (and they got Margaret Atwood to write a foreword). They probe the lives of four literary giants, exploring formative experiences of literary sisterhood that have gone unsung.”

📚 A Secret Sisterhood, by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney

(CARLINA TETERIS / GETTY)

What fan fiction teaches that the classroom doesn’t

“[Katie] Davis, along with her University of Washington colleague Cecilia Aragon, recently spent nine months studying a couple of fan-fiction websites, focusing mostly on young authors writing on fanfiction.net. … They published their observations in a new book called Writers in the Secret Garden, and described their theory that people on these websites are actually teaching one another to write through a kind of sprawling, communal learning that Aragon and Davis call ‘distributed mentorship.’”

📚 Writers in the Secret Garden, by Cecilia R. Aragon and Katie Davis

📚 The Broken Earth Trilogy, by N. K. Jemisin

📚 Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Kate Cray. The book she’s reading next is Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-ju.

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Kate Cray is an assistant editor at The Atlantic.