look inside$36.00

hardback, 6 x 7.75 in.
416 pages, 42 bw drawings
978-1-938221-37-8
pub date: May 4, 2026

THIS IS A PREORDER for the 2nd printing. Your order—we hope—will ship by the end of August. Fingers crossed!

 

PDF Press Release

Selected by The New Yorker as one of “The Best Books of 2026 So Far”!

First edition sold out (well, a few available here). You can now place a preorder for the 2nd printing—which will likely (hopefully) ship out at the end of August.

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There are 365 exercises for writing in this book, but it is not simply a book of writing exercises.

three six five is a “how-to” book of questions—not answers. It is an ars poetica of expanding possibility, a tarot deck of acts instead of images, a book of bending hours, a diary of contemplation and imagination, an antidote to consumption in the shape of care and attention.

These prompts, acts, and divinations—in alchemical combinations with new drawings by Nick Mauss—invite both aspiring and experienced writers to learn and unlearn, to mine memory and forgetting, to enter impossible spaces and create new ways of telling time, to inhabit multiple, other, and conflicting perspectives, to discover the elasticity of language and its constraints, to write by drawing, walking, listening, and even by being distracted.

While this is an inexhaustible compendium for writing, it is also an enduring reservoir for those who have no desire to be(come) a writer. Many exercises take the form of play, encourage collaboration with friends, strangers, and non-human beings, and operate off the page, often in the world, in the spirit of discovery rather than result. All intend to nurture and cultivate possibility.

Tracing the lineage of Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit and Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, novelist, poet, and critic Lucy Ives offers encouragement, candor, and a deep appreciation for the vagaries, wonders, and challenges of a writing life.

Lucy Ives is a novelist and critic. Her most recent books, both from Graywolf Press, are Life Is Everywhere: A Novel and An Image of My Name Enters America: Essays, winner of the 2024 Vermont Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. Ives’s work has appeared in Artforum, Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, and Vogue, among other publications. A 2026 Guggenheim Fellow (congrats, Lucy!) and a recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, she has taught at Brown, Cornell, and New York Universities.
Ives previously collaborated with siglio as the editor of The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader.

nick mauss is a multidisciplinary artist working in drawing, dance, performance, ceramics, and other media. He is also a writer. His work has been included in gallery and museum exhibitions worldwide, including solo shows at Kunsthalle Basel, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and at 303 Gallery and the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York City.

Dave O’Neill, “Why the Best Writing Advice Is Often the Weirdest” in The New Yorker:

“Both a guide and a work of literature in its own right… the book resembles a devotional text or a mood ring. Inside, each of the 365 exercises breathes on its own page. Spindly line drawings by Nick Mauss pop up periodically—surreal figures like a lobster telephone—though they don’t illustrate the text so much as shimmy​ and dream alongside it… My favorite prompt from three six five, “weak spot,” turns the turbulence of the writing life into something that, on a good day, feels like a joyride.”

Head to Full Stop for a “test-drive”/review by writer and bookseller James Webster.

Listen to Scott Simon’s Weekend Edition interview with Lucy on NPR. (And here are the prompts from that interview.)

Find selections of more prompts at The Paris Review, Graywolf Lab, LitHub, and Kismet. For the latter two, Ives has written introductions that shine various light on the book and the writing process. By the way, Poets & Writers’ The Time Is Now recommends three six five as does novelist Randy Kennedy in the contemporary culture magazine Ursula.

Two more interviews with Lucy: one by Shiv Kotecha at Public Parking (check out all of his interviews, most recently with Lisa Robertson) and another by Jacqui Devaney at Dinner Music where Lucy shares all kinds of things, including some music and recipes (hers is lineup #185—it’s worth perusing the previous 184 episodes!)

And we’ve got a video recording of  Lucy’s recent lecture at The Clark Institute of Art—“Ordinary Magic: How Artists’ Books Transform Reading & Writing”!

Coming up: A conversation with Lucy Ives at MassMOCA R&D (North Adams, MA) on September 12 at 5 p.m. (preorder a signed copy if you can’t make the event).

Most recently, Lucy led a workshop “Writing as Divination,” hosted by Tunnel Books at Hard-Pressed Print Shop in Danville, VT on Saturday, June 6. Two more fantastic events took place in April in Massachusetts: a workshop at Unnameable Books in Turner Falls on April 11, and on April 12, a presentation (see link above to video) and an offering of prompts scattered through the museum on Artists Book Day at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown.

She is also teaching a year-long, generative (and remote) course—“Lucy Ives: A Year of Sundays,”—for both new and experienced writers, offered by Poets House, and based on three six five.

Stay tuned for more of everything!