AI DIY MFA Reading List

Bird by Bird

by Anne Lamott

Read the chapter “Shitty First Drafts.”

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Writing Down the Bones

by Natalie Goldberg

Read Part One, specifically the sections “Writing as Practice” and “First Thoughts.”

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

The Sentence Is a Lonely Place

by Gary Lutz

Read in its entirety. The curriculum specifically requires you to read it twice: once for general comprehension, and a second time to identify one sentence that models its core argument.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: The Believer

The Triggering Town

by Richard Hugo

Read the opening essay. While reading, closely focus on Hugo’s concept of the “triggering subject,” which he describes as the concrete thing that unlocks a piece of writing from the inside.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Madame Bovary

by Gustave Flaubert

Read Part I, Chapter 1. The objective for this text is to study how the author constructs character through the use of precise physical details before moving into any abstract interpretation.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Place in Fiction

by Eudora Welty

Read it in its entirety. You are specifically instructed to read the text to examine Welty’s argument that establishing place provides emotional permission within a work of fiction.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Duke University Press

Writing Fiction

by Janet Burroway

Read Chapter 2: “Showing and Telling.” Focus on the distinction between showing and telling. Study concrete examples of how published writers actively move between these modes rather than simply avoiding one or the other.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

The Lady with the Dog

by Anton Chekhov

Read in its entirety. Focus on the balance between scene and summary. As you read, track exactly where the narrative compresses time through summary and where it slows down into real-time emotional truth through scene.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

The Art of Fiction

by John Gardner

Read the “Fictional Dream” section. This reading provides a useful framework for diagnosing what breaks in a narrative when telling replaces showing at the wrong moment, causing the reader to wake up from the dream of the fiction.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

The Art of Fiction

by John Gardner

Read the chapter on scene construction and the “fictional dream.” This reading provides the theoretical foundation for this week’s approach to scene architecture, including entry point, turn, and exit point.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

“The Dead” (from Dubliners)

by James Joyce

Read the first 20 pages, focusing on the opening party scenes. As you read, identify each scene’s turn, what changes in the dramatic action, and how Joyce signals that shift without explicitly announcing it.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft

by Janet Burroway

Read the scene construction section. Use it to study the difference between scene and summary, and how conflict functions as the engine that drives scene structure.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Selected Poetry

by William Carlos Williams

Read “The Red Wheelbarrow,” “This Is Just to Say,” and “Spring and All” in full. Read them as a prose writer studying what happens when a writer fully trusts the concrete object, and how that technique can translate directly into fiction.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Bird by Bird

by Anne Lamott

Read the chapter titled “Index Cards” and the chapter on school lunches. Focus on how Lamott moves between general statements and concrete details to connect observation with memory.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

In the American West (photographs)

by Richard Avedon

Spend 20 minutes with this book if you have library access. Optional but recommended: treat Avedon’s portraits as a study in what specificity accomplishes that generalization cannot.

Optional but recommended.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Amazon

“Hills Like White Elephants”

by Ernest Hemingway

Read in full twice: first for experience, second to mark each moment where the surface conversation diverges from underlying truth as a practical study of iceberg-theory subtext.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft

by Janet Burroway

Read the dialogue chapter with special attention to subtext and the structural function of what characters deliberately choose not to say.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

The Situation and the Story

by Vivian Gornick

Read Chapters 1 and 2. Focus on the distinction between the narrator’s situation (literal circumstances) and story (insight being pursued), and how the gap between them generates subtext in memoir.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

The Art of Fiction

by John Gardner

Read the sections on point of view and psychic distance.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

The Yellow Wallpaper

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Read in its entirety.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft

by Janet Burroway

Read the point of view chapter.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Aspects of the Novel

by E.M. Forster

Read the chapter titled "People." Focus on Forster's discussion of flat and round characters, especially his test that a round character surprises convincingly.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft

by Janet Burroway

Read Chapter 3, "Characterization." Focus on direct versus indirect methods and how character is revealed through detail, action, and relationships.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Beloved

by Toni Morrison

Read the opening 30 pages. Write down three things you know about Sethe by page 30 and identify the specific textual evidence for each.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft

by Janet Burroway

Continue with the characterization chapter, focusing on flat/round and static/dynamic characters and how Burroway demonstrates these through published fiction.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

by James Joyce

Read Chapter 1 only. Observe how Stephen Dedalus emerges through the texture of perception without direct summary or analysis.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Fleabag (Series 1, Episode 1 script)

by Phoebe Waller-Bridge

Read in its entirety. Track where character depth becomes visible through indirection and how direct address functions as character choice.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Script Slug

Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting

by Robert McKee

Read the chapter titled "Structure and Character." Focus on the want/need distinction: want as conscious plot goal, need as unconscious truth the character avoids.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Their Eyes Were Watching God

by Zora Neale Hurston

Read Chapters 1–4. Track Janie's explicit want against her underlying need, and note how Hurston encodes both without naming either directly.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

The Situation and the Story

by Vivian Gornick

Read the remainder of Part One (continuing from Week 6). Focus on situation vs. story as memoir's structural equivalent of want vs. need.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

“Hills Like White Elephants”

by Ernest Hemingway

Read in full with a dialogue-mechanics lens: attribution tags, action beats, and moments where one character answers a different question than the one asked.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Writing Fiction

by Janet Burroway

Read the dialogue chapter in full. Focus on dialogue's simultaneous functions, action beats, and Burroway's argument for using "said" over ornate tags.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Pulp Fiction (screenplay)

by Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avery

Read pages 1–30 only (opening diner and first apartment sequence). Study dialogue rhythm, short lines, and subtext carried through casual conversation.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Script Slug

Their Eyes Were Watching God

by Zora Neale Hurston

If you read Chapters 1–4 for Week 10, continue from Chapter 5. Focus on dialect, voice differentiation, and where speech and subtext are fully integrated.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Craft in the Real World

by Matthew Salesses

Read the sections on dialect, cultural authenticity, and representation. Use the reading to interrogate assumptions about what counts as craft.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

The Sopranos (pilot script)

by David Chase

Read the first 20 pages. Cover character names and read aloud to test whether each speaker is identifiable by vocabulary, rhythm, and omissions.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Script Slug

Place in Fiction

by Eudora Welty

Read in full. Study Welty's argument that setting is the proving ground of action and how specificity of place shapes meaning.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Duke University Press

Wuthering Heights

by Emily Brontë

Read Chapters 1–3 only. Mark where landscape and architecture do psychological and thematic work beyond description.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Desert Solitaire

by Edward Abbey

Read the first chapter, "The First Morning." Focus on sensory specificity and how setting becomes the primary subject rather than backdrop.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Frank Sinatra Has a Cold

by Gay Talese

Read in its entirety. Focus on immersive research and world-building in creative nonfiction. Mark every detail that could only have come from physical presence, and study how primary-source research changes texture.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Esquire Classics

The Great Gatsby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Read Chapter 1 only. Focus on economy of world-establishment, period vocabulary, and social codes that feel like natural scene furniture rather than inserted background.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process

by John McPhee

Read the chapter titled "Structure." Focus on how research and structure interact, and on McPhee's argument that structural decisions emerge only after enough material reveals the world's true shape.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Moonlight (screenplay)

by Barry Jenkins

Read the opening twenty pages. LF: spatial atmosphere without interiority. SP: economy in establishing world, character, and tone. CNF: how external details generate unstated emotional information.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Script Slug

Total Eclipse

by Annie Dillard

Read in full, with strict attention to the opening. SP: lyric prose and physical space beyond shot-list logic. LF: doubled consciousness across temporal positions. CNF: concentrated model of form.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: University of Baltimore

Mrs Dalloway

by Virginia Woolf

Read the opening 20 pages. CNF: exterior/interior simultaneity. LF: free indirect discourse as streets and memory interpenetrate. SP: translate dense spatial-psychological prose into actionable scene lines.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Writing Down the Bones

by Natalie Goldberg

Read the section on sustaining a writing practice, especially returning after a break and discipline/freedom. Read experientially as support for staying in the work when pages are unrewarding.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Becoming a Writer

by Dorothea Brande

Read Chapters 7 and 8. Focus on writing schedule and the writer's unconscious, and on separating generative and editorial capacities as a structural practice premise.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

by Mason Currey

Read any twenty entries. Focus on pattern recognition in sustainable practice, especially how constraint can be more generative than total freedom.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

The Art of Fiction

by John Gardner

Study Gardner's six-level psychic distance scale and prose movement across levels. Read this section twice: comprehension first, then application to diagnose your default distance.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Mrs Dalloway

by Virginia Woolf

Read the opening 20 pages. Focus strictly on free indirect discourse. Mark at least ten narration-to-consciousness shifts and apply the voice test by shifting each to first-person present.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

by George Saunders

Read any single story chapter. Focus on sentence-by-sentence analysis of complete stories and on paragraph-level mechanics of interiority and psychic distance.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

The Art of Fiction

by John Gardner

No new chapter. Return to any previously read section and reread actively, testing Gardner's claims against evidence from your own writing.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Your best exercise from this semester

by You!

Return to your strongest exercise and reread strictly as a reader, not the writer. Write a five-sentence honest assessment of what the prose can and cannot yet do.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Personal work

Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft

by Janet Burroway

No new chapter. Return to the most difficult chapter and reread. Record how this week's 1,000–1,500-word thesis opening works differently in LF, SP, and CNF tracks.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft

by Janet Burroway

Read the point-of-view chapter in full. Keep your Week 18 thesis opening beside you and test whether your chosen POV is truly the one your project requires, based on what each mode enables and forecloses.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

The Catcher in the Rye

by J.D. Salinger

Read Chapter 1 only. Focus on voice mechanics and track how Salinger establishes a complete world, tonal register, and profound unreliability in roughly 1,500 words through vocabulary and rhythm.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

The Liar's Club

by Mary Karr

Study this as retrospective first-person memoir. Track how Karr manages the gap between past-self and narrating-self, noting where adult understanding enters and where it is deliberately withheld.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

by George Saunders

Read any one story chapter in full and observe Saunders's sentence-level analysis of Chekhov, with special attention to how third-person limited controls what information becomes available and when.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

The Remains of the Day

by Kazuo Ishiguro

Read as a study in ironic self-presentation: track the gap between what Stevens reports and what the prose reveals, the same gap third-person limited often exploits from an external position.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Breaking Bad (pilot script)

by Vince Gilligan

Read the first 20 pages only. Focus on visual POV discipline: how information, camera positioning, and action lines keep the experience inside Walter White's perceptual vantage without violating external visual limits.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Script Slug

Girl

by Jamaica Kincaid

Read in full twice: once for the experience of second-person address, once for mechanics. Notice the daughter's two italicized interruptions and what second person gains that other modes cannot.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: The New Yorker

Middlemarch

by George Eliot

Read Chapter 1 as a study in confident omniscience. Focus on how Eliot's narrator self-announces and makes omniscience itself feel like a character trait rather than an invisible convention.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

A Visit from the Goon Squad

by Jennifer Egan

Read the chapter “Great Rock and Roll Pauses.” Study the PowerPoint constraint: what it forces compared with prose, and what is lost when sentence-level prose is abandoned.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

The Remains of the Day

by Kazuo Ishiguro

Read Chapters 3 and 4 to study structural self-deception. Mark where Stevens's narrative form (qualification, avoidance, and circumlocution) reveals more than his stated content.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Speak, Memory

by Vladimir Nabokov

Read Chapter 1. Focus on memoir as a consciously shaped artifact and study how Nabokov's aestheticizing of memory changes your relationship to the truth claims being made.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Gone Girl (screenplay)

by Gillian Flynn

Read the first act (about pages 1–30). Track the information architecture of competing narrators and how early signals of dual unreliability are planted without announcing themselves on first read.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Daily Script

The Art of Fiction

by John Gardner

Return to the psychic-distance sections and study movement rather than static levels. Identify transition mechanics and the lexical or syntactic signals that trigger shifts.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Mrs Dalloway

by Virginia Woolf

Read pages 20–40 and track free indirect discourse at full intensity. Mark every distance transition and count how many times Woolf adjusts distance on a single page.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org

Tenth of December

by George Saunders

Read the title story in full. Track how Saunders alternates focal characters across different psychic-distance ranges and how those shifts create dramatic irony.

Tip: Check your local library before buying.

Source: Bookshop.org