10 books like Death in the Afternoon

A Moveable Feast is life-changing, with its introspective and evocative exploration of Hemingway’s early years as a struggling writer in the 1920s. It heavily inspired me to make my own move and pursue my authorship journey in Paris!

Through vivid and poetic prose, Hemingway captures the bohemian atmosphere of the era. The book delves into themes of creativity, love, loss, and pursuing one's artistic vision. Hemingway's raw and honest reflections on his own experiences and struggles offer profound insights into the nature of art, resilience, and the pursuit of a meaningful life. 

This book inspired me to uncover my passions, live the life of my dreams, embrace the beauty of the world around me, and, most importantly, savor every moment.

This book is a mix of memoir and advice, taking you inside the life, mind, and writing processes of one of the most successful fiction writers of our time. It’s an oldie-but-a-goodie, having come out in 2000, but the advice on craft is timeless.

Much like Everybody Writes, this book also serves as a great case study in making your writing distinctive and leaning into your lived experiences when you write. Admittedly, I’m not a big fan of the horror genre, but I’d wager that this quick read is almost as compelling and thrilling as many of his other works. 

Where to begin? Proust’s gigantic masterpiece is the proverbial gift that keeps giving, none more so than in its explication and then repeated “demonstration” of the very thing it describes, the sensory triggers of what Proust calls involuntary memory but that here become the emotional propulsion for this book about writing the very beautiful book (or books—it comes in six volumes) you are reading.

Okay. Fine. Maybe I only think this book is about loss because I know that, in later books, the same Glass family suffers losses and this sets the stage. But this is a story about a promise that is never realized and a relationship that is becoming progressively distant—and, in it, there is a sense of being lost if not having experienced a loss, specifically. In it, Buddy Glass takes Army leave to attend his brother’s wedding, but his brother never shows up. Somehow, Buddy winds up stuck in a limo with a group of disgruntled guests from whom he tries to hide his identity. In his sense of isolation, but also his awareness of the situation’s absurdity, we find humor and also sadness.

This elegantly written biography helped me to know my subject.

It was especially vivid on what it was like to be the child of an Edwardian hostess, the minimal effect of WW1 on the day-to-day life of Great Britain and the effect of this on later life. It is a model of what a biography should be: thoughtful, clear, interesting, and perceptive.

It’s one thing to advocate for simple, clear writing—and another to do it consistently. For the most inspiring demonstration of these principles look to Ernest Hemingway. Read even one of his short stories, or any of his novels or reportage, for in-action proof of how convincing we can be by using the most basic English: short everyday words derived from English’s early Anglo-Saxon history, and unadorned, straightforward sentences. Note how the most profound ideas, emotions, and subtle interactions can be communicated with spare language, nearly absent of descriptive words. How to generate this kind of impact with the writing most of us do every day is a central goal of my own book. TIP: a helpful online resource for simplifying copy is found at…Hemingway.com. 

It was Hemingway’s Boat, with its discursive Shandean style, that set the tone for my book. It was the only way I knew to tell a story that was so uniquely decentralized, so rollickingly exploratory, but I couldn’t begin to rival Paul Hendrickson, who remains the master of the tangential truth, digging deeper into the soul of the man than any Hemingway biography I have ever read – by focusing on his boat. At one point in my Phillips biography, after wandering off-course for 60 pages and finally coming back to the narrative moment I had abandoned, I wrote, “For all of my faith in extended digression I hope I haven’t stretched the limits of reader patience too much by now. Let me just pick up the thread.” But this is nothing compared to Paul Hendrickson’s masterful command of seemingly structureless story-telling, the non-fiction equivalent of some of Alice… show more.

Where does persuasive writing start? Whether you’re writing fiction, journalism, or a business message, good sentences are the key. Write good sentences and you write well in all fields. Bad sentences doom your writing. This tight 76-page book shows how to achieve simple, clear sentences, and at the same time build in power and even drama. Euchner moves on to cover paragraphs: how to find the focus of each and create logical, one-idea units. This is the book I wish I’d been given somewhere along the line in school, or later—it would have saved me a lot of trial-and-error! Like Euchner, I believe you need not study grammar rules to write well—that route has always put me to sleep.

As Cyril Connolly himself writes, "What follows are the doubts and reflections of a year, a word-cycle in three or four rhythms; art, love, nature and religion: an experiment in self dismantling..." This fragmentary method of writing, with quotes, aphorisms, epigrams, allusions, from a litany of great writers, thinkers, and diarists, with sudden reflections on love, the loss of love, spirituality, desire, literature, art, and psychology are the collected musings of Cyril Connolly, first published in 1944 in Horizon, the magazine he was founder and editor for.  My favourite parts of his writing are the plentiful poetic depictions of the scene, usually with the aid of perspicacious and evocative lists, revealing the interior life of the poetic author: "Dead leaves, coffee grounds, grenadine, tabac Maryland, mental expectation - perfumes of the Nord-Sud; autumn arrival at Pigalle..." 

This book is a literary sketch or prayer book, overflowing with ideas and… show more.

For my money, Hemingway is the greatest American short story writer. He is spare and direct until he isn’t. The meter and clipped phrasing and short sentences set up bigger, longer runs that are beautiful and often explain what it’s like to be a human being without being obvious or careless. They never feel false and are edited down to the bone. That’s probably what I learned most from Hemingway, the editing. Just picking a story, “On the Quai at Smyrna,” has such a staccato matter-of-factness that belies just how awful the situation there on the pier must have been. The narrator is hardened and recounts the events so matter-of-factly that you know they’ll come back later, once he is home and has time to reflect on them.