5 Story Collections That Will Make You a Better Writer, Picked by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

I had already been a voracious reader, but I had never read with direction or purpose the way I did after that first meeting. Part of the deal was that, in each meeting, I had to report to Lynne all of my noticings on the stories I'd read since we'd last spoken. This forced me to read closely, to flood the margins with my annotations. Now, my own debut collection is set to drop in October, and reading great fiction is the first and most important thing I tell my students about writing. Read well and widely. Read what you love. It is the core of your craft. Read and get lost; read and parse the sentences apart like a surgeon. Obsess, let go. Sink into and rise out of the words that make you feel. Everybody says this because it's true.