“I’m a nonfiction author whose success owes enormously to fiction,” Alan Weisman writes on the new book recommendation website Shepherd.com. “Reading great novelists has taught me to obsessively seek exactly the right words, to fine-tune the cadence of each sentence, and to heed overall structural rhythm; continually, I return to the fount of fiction for language and inspiration.”
Fiction can also be a source of insight on the most urgent challenges facing the world, he writes. He goes on to describe five “astonishing novels” he turns to “to help grasp the critical times we’re living in.”