Jane Alison’s book on craft calls into question the dramatic arc many writers have been taught to follow in their work. “So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. Why not draw on them, too?” she writes. Alison presents a “museum of specimens” including writing by Anne Carson, Raymond Carver, Gabriel García Márquez, Jamaica Kincaid, Clarice Lispector, and Mary Robison, to illustrate some of the possibilities for nonlinear storytelling—and she invites her readers to follow these examples to “keep making our novels novel.”
