The best books from vistas and fantasias of the subconscious

Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet—original, counter, spare, strange—is not like anyone’s book, truly, in its mix of prose poetry, reflections, impressions, descriptions of psychic states and the city of Lisbon. I’d say read it to remind you of how hauntingly elliptical and daring a book can be.

I love it for its mysterious quality—how it evokes, invokes moods—how it stays ahead of you—always inviting you to come back to it. It taught me to welcome the unfinished and fragmentary, the evasive and the atmospheric, the creation of new identities in a book, that enigma and precise description can exist side by side, the alchemical mix of disbelief and mystique, the sense of something getting ready to be uttered, the sheer beauty of its expressiveness.

It taught me to overcome the sense that a book must be linear or systematic, or even accessible and lucid: it revels its embryonic obscurities and vivid atmospheres of thought and impression. It’s unclassifiable therefore always open to rereading, interpretation.

A poignant, perceptive memoir of the author’s time in Africa—and her experiences there, her discovery of love and the loss of that love; evocations of people and sky, contemplations of weather and landscape unlike any other I’ve read.

It should be read (and always honoured) because it’s as close to a reverie on sorrow and wonder, the mystery of stark wildernesses and solitudes, as I’ve found. It’s the book I wish I’d written, above so many others.

A magnificent depiction of the coming of age of a writer, through youth to old age, in Naples, Italy, with a powerful depiction of a friend who is a magnetic enigma. It describes Italy through the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s—and addresses, engages, creativity, historical crises, family schisms, politics, sexuality, female rage, literary politics, and breakdown and loss, the consolations of artistic endeavor. Passionate, complex, rich, epic in its scale, attentive to small details, acute in its charting of minds and spirits. Ferrante has invented the memorable characters of Lila and Elena in her pages.

Blake: an indispensable visionary of poetry—whose multi-media approach to poetry—his art, visual designs, words, images, mythic stories, lyrics, dramatic monologues, polemics on behalf of opening the doors of perception—continue to haunt and provoke, inspire and lift, perplex and illuminate, prophetically anticipate and speak from the frontiers of the wild, countering imagination. Blake is the Romantic poet par excellence, whose vocation of finding inspiration and vision through poetry itself goes beyond his time and place, reaching to us in our troubled, sometimes disabled pandemia times, ecological catastrophe times. With Blake's books, one work opens to another, and to another: and we see worlds in his words. He helps us to apprehend the whorling fluidities, emanating energies, in our circuit cosmos. 

Inimitable, devastating, audacious, irreducibly strange, unexpectedly compassionate, charged with memorable writing, irreplaceable. McCarthy’s book is a literary event, like Elena Ferrante’s Naples Quartet. To be placed in a time capsule to show what great writing is. McCarthy has also created the memorable character of John Grady Cole in these pages.