Eight books about struggling writers

Andrew Martin's first novel Early Work was a New York Times Notable Book of 2018 and a finalist for the Cabell First Novelist Award. His stories and essays have been published in The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, Harper's, and T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

Martin's new book is Cool for America: Stories.

At Electric Lit he tagged eight "favorite works of literature about artists who are stymied in their attempts to fulfill their visions, both by the usual impediments—sloth, vanity, booze, love—and, sometimes, by the capricious workings of the outer world," including:

So Many Olympic Exertions by Anelise Chen

Chen’s elliptical novel is of the noble “failing to finish one’s dissertation tradition,” a situation I deeply relate to despite having never attempted to start a dissertation. A former competitive swimmer, the narrator is a sports historian fixated on stories of failure and disaster. She’s also trying to reckon with the suicide of her ex-boyfriend. Over the course of the book, the convergences between sports, life, and art become clearer and clearer. “If doing sport is to be ‘lost in focused intensity,’ as swimmer Pablo Morales said once,” she writes, “then watching sport is to be lost in the focused intensity of someone else’s focused intensity.” That sounds a lot like reading, too.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue