Books like A Marsh Island — picked by fans

Mitra’s book centers on the colonial period in India, when European scholars, British officials, and Indian intellectuals, focused on sexuality, specifically the figure of the prostitute, in order to study and to understand the place of women in modern Indian society.

The specter of deviant female sexuality structured fiction and intellectual thought on topics ranging from caste domination to trafficking, to widowhood and inheritance, to abortion and infanticide.

Indian Sex Life compellingly illustrates the importance of female deviance in the imagination of scholars and writers, and how they used their ideas about women’s sexuality to solidify rigid gender ideals—and to blame women for the failures of modern society. Mitra’s accounting of this history is richly drawn and hard to put down.

A small number of Scots at the end of the Victorian era and throughout the Edwardian era were eager to live in a world ungoverned by Protestant Christianity and unrestricted by its strict sexual morality.

Cheadle introduces readers to socialists, freethinkers, and writers in Glasgow and Edinburgh who advocated for sexual freedoms grounded in new forms of political, religious, and cultural thought. One example is Jane Hume Clapperton, who was deeply involved in the suffrage movement, described birth control methods in her 1888 novel Margaret Dunmore, and demanded full sexual freedom for women. 

Sexual Progressives brings them to life, showing how they questioned dominant morality and envisioned a way of life in which people could prioritize sexual freedom and pleasure. You won’t forget them.

Interest in the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and his Institute for Sexual Science (active 1919–1933 in Berlin) has grown since the television program Transparent included him in its second season in 2015.

Laurie Marhoefer’s new book challenges his status as a queer history hero, highlighting how his views on sexual emancipation, cross-dressing (as drag was then known), and transgenderism were embedded in racism and colonialism. Marhoefer also tells the lesser-known history of Hirschfeld’s companion in later life, Li Shiu Tong, who after Hirschfeld’s death in May 1935 continued his own research on human sexuality. 

Li’s previously unknown manuscript and notes—rescued serendipitously from a waste bin soon after his death in Vancouver in 1993—is a stark reminder of how many histories of sexuality are at risk of being (almost) similarly lost.

While many books on LGBTQ+ history focus on public activism, Vider turns attention to how queer people in the post-World War II era formed homes, partnerships, and community.

For example, groups like the AIDS Action Committee in Boston in the 1980s formed buddy programs for people living with AIDS and volunteer caregivers. Caregivers could live with their buddies or visit them, providing practical assistance as well as companionship, connectedness, and a sense of belonging. 

The Queerness of Home looks at the quieter but no less political and impactful side of queer life from the late 1940s through the 1980s, showing how a sense of place and connection helped queer people feel grounded and safe in a culture in which it was not always possible to live their full truth in public.

Even though Jewett wrote the stories in this book in the late 1800s, there is a timeless feeling to her prose that reverberates today.

I love Jewett’s attention to and reverence for the natural beauty that surrounds the fictional town of Dunnet Landing. Her descriptions of the Maine coastline—a blend of craggy rocks, forest, meadows, and sea—are visceral, sensory, and alluring. Jewett also nicely captures the hardworking, humorous, quietly resilient spirit of the year-round residents of Dunnet Landing, with a particularly keen and kind eye toward her female characters.

Her care for the everyday rituals of life, the small moments that make up an existence, are lovingly rendered and evocative. There’s a reason this is a Maine classic. 

This book had me thinking on my feet and working to unravel the mysteries ahead of the plot while feeding my cravings for deeper philosophical concepts. Frank Herbert is great at writing complex stories that make me think, as evidenced by his Dune series. But unlike the Dune series, The Godmakers has quick pacing and witty banter.

I laughed while reading this, even while contemplating the deeper ideas he was weaving in, themes of belief in self, the nature of personal power, and stamina for longevity. Would I stand the test of immortality or the responsibility of godhood?

Our Beloved Kin is a unique account of King Philip’s War that centers on the history of Native resistance and their experience of the conflict. Drawing on early documents and information often overlooked in previous studies, the author, a member of the Missisquoi Band of Abenaki, presents an in-depth chronicle of the war and the events leading up to it. I wish this book had been in print when I was researching my book. While it wouldn’t have changed the basic arc of the novel, it would have given me a more complete understanding of James Printer’s perspective.

John Putnam Demos remains the “dean” of historians of the Salem witch trials. 

Entertaining Satan remains his most impactful contribution to the study of the events of 1692 by providing their cultural context in early New England, upon which historians have built over the years expanding upon Demos’ findings.

Perhaps his greatest contribution is his interdisciplinary approach invoking the research tools of psychology and sociology, as well as cultural history. His concluding chapter, “Communities: Witchcraft over Time,” provides broadly, excellent insights drawn from his extensive research.  

A ground-breaking work, which demonstrates how the theoretical witch was embodied by real women, and how a seemingly bizarre fantasy was plausible in among the shapes and rhythms of daily life. This influential study is as much a social, economic and cultural history of seventeenth-century New England as it is strictly speaking a history of witchcraft – indeed, Karlsen demonstrates clearly that the latter cannot be assimilated with an appreciation of the former. Context is everything, and without it we just fall back on stereotypes and tired assumptions.

Witches and neighbours were two-sides of the same coin, the former a projection of the hostile emotions of the latter, and, as Karlsen explains, this fraught relationship was fundamentally gendered. To appreciate how some people were accused of witchcraft, we need first to explore relationships between people in the community, including relations between women. Honour, reputation, age, status and so on, were… show more.

This is one of the nonfiction books I read as a teenager that convinced me to become a professional writer. The author, Sebastian Junger, doesn’t just describe the titular storm (which hit the U.S. East Coast in 1991) in terrifying detail—he also manages to assemble all of the weather-driven chaos into a real, gripping narrative. We don’t know a lot about what actually happened to the Andrea Gail, the fishing boat at the center of the narrative, but Junger recreates its final hours in a way that feels bracingly real—and heartbreaking.

Even if you don’t like nonfiction books, The Perfect Storm has the pacing and heart of a novel. I consider it one of the finest—maybe the finest—disaster narrative ever written, and it’s a perfect choice of book if you’re trapped inside by a raging storm.