Non-Fiction

The Tin House Writer’s Series includes the best books on the craft of writing and the writing life. Plotto, The Writer’s Notebook, The Story About the Story, and The World Within are featured in this new series.

A classic how-to manual, William Wallace Cook’s Plotto is one writer’s personal method, painstakingly diagrammed for the benefit of others. The theory itself may be simple—“Purpose, opposed by Obstacle, yields Conflict”—but Cook takes his “Plottoist” through hundreds of situations and scenarios, guiding the reader’s hand through a dizzying array of “purposes” and “obstacles.”  

Your Wildest Dreams, Within Reason collects Mike Sacks’s unique humor pieces into one handsome, convenient volume. Originally published in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Esquire, and McSweeney’s, among other venerable publications, Sacks’s writing is original and sharp, yet broadly funny. Whether it’s a groom tweeting his wedding and honeymoon in real time, or a publisher offering editorial suggestions for The Diary of Anne Frank, Sacks’s work tangles contemporary social satire with his absurdist sensibilities.

In this nimble and original exploration of love’s hidden motivations and manifestations, Anouchka Grose tries to get to the heart of its hold over us. This straight-talking, sympathetic book sifts through the combined wisdom of philosophers and poets, scientists and shrinks to offer some serious solutions to the conundrum of love.

A Householder’s Guide to the Universe takes up the banner of progressive homemaking. Streetwise and poetic, fierce and romantic, the book provides not only a way out of our current economic and environmental logjam but also a readable and often funny analysis of how we got there in the first place.

River House, an exquisite blend of memoir and nature writing, is the story of Sarahlee Lawrence’s return from rafting the world’s most dangerous rivers to her family’s remote ranch. She and her father brave the central Oregon winter to build a log house by hand.

In India, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh incited his followers to unrestrained sexual license and encouraged them to engage in prostitution and drugsmuggling to feed his endless appetite for money . . . In Oregon, members of his cult launched the first campaign of bio-terrorism in U.S. history and a deranged nurse attempted to create a live AIDS virus . . . The Rajneesh Chronicles tells the frightening story from beginning to end.

A chance encounter between two writers, one young, one older, develops into a wonderful friendship neither expected. Frank Conroy, author of the classic memoirStop-Time, meets Tom Grimes, an aspiring writer and an applicant to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which Conroy directs. Exquisitely written, Mentor is an honest and heartbreaking exploration of the writing life and the role of a very important teacher.

One part celebration, one part history, two parts manifesto, Bernard DeVoto’s The Houris a comic and unequivocal treatise on how and why we drink—properly. The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author turns his shrewd wit on the spirits and attitudes that cause his stomach to turn and his eyes to roll (Warning: this book is NOT for rum drinkers).

How to Do Nothing literally tells "how to do nothing with nobody all alone by yourself"— real things, fascinating things, the things that you did when you were a kid, or your parents did when they were kids. This is a book to free your kid from video games for a few hours, a handbook on the avoidance of boredom, a primer on the uses of solitude, a child's declaration of independence.

In the late seventies, at the age of eighteen and with a seventh-grade education, Dolly Freed wrote Possum Living about the five years she and her father lived off the land on a half-acre lot outside of Philadelphia. In her delightful, straightforward, and irreverent style, Freed guides readers on how to buy and maintain a home, dress well, cope with the law, stay healthy, save money, and be lazy, proud, miserly, and honest, all while enjoying leisure and keeping up a middle-class façade.

The essays in The Story About the Story feature lively discussions of great literature by some of the most prominent authors of all time. With over thirty essays written by authors as diverse as Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf to Cynthia Ozick and Salman Rushdie, this collection offers an invaluable course on literature as well as a look into “Creative Criticism,” a form of critical essay that involves a personal perspective.

We Did Porn follows Zak Smith (or Zak Sabbath) from the New York art scene to Los Angeles's seedy, yet colorful, underbelly—the world of alt porn.

The Writer's Notebook combines the best craft seminars in the history of the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop with a variety of essays written by some of Tin House's favorite authors, offering aspiring writers insight into the craft of writing.

Do Me goes all the way with the funniest, boldest, hottest, and most richly imagined explorations of sex by some the finest contemporary writers.

Spanning from 1887 to a month before his death in 1910, The Journal of Jules Renard is a unique autobiographical masterpiece that, though celebrated abroad and cited as a principle influence by writers as varying as Somerset Maugham and Donald Barthelme, remains largely undiscovered in the United States.

Writers Talk Ambition, Angst, Aesthetics, Bones, Books, Beautiful Bodies, Censorship, Cheats, Comics, Darkness, Democracy, Death, Exile, Failure, Guns, Misery, Marijuana, Muses, Movies, New Age Men, Old Boys' Network, Oprah, Outcasts, Prison, Sex, Suicide, Smoking, Strippers, Torture, Underwear, Vietnam, VD, Violence, and More

A delectable collection of food and drink writing from the pages of the award-winning literary journal Tin House.