35 Books Like A Place to Stand

By now, McCarthy is well known for his books on the Southwest. Cities of the Plain is painfully overlooked.

I read it in college as a precocious creative writing major and fell in love because the towns mentioned (Belén, where my grandmother was born, as example) were familiar to me and yet I had no idea these nowhere places of my youth were known to anybody else in the world, to say nothing about their value to any artistic form.

Unlike All the Pretty Horses, Cities of the Plain has zero romanticism to it: it’s a contemporary, hard-driven tale of ranching in the badlands of New Mexico. McCarthy focuses on the pumpjacks and the stench of creosote that encapsulate the southern part of the state.

There’s also a gruesomely funny passage about an Oldsmobile and dozens of jackrabbits. 

The Gen X memoir that I didn’t know I needed.

Most memoirs of Native life describe Native-White relationships. Taffa dives into relationships among Native communities and between Native and Chicanx neighbors and family members in both the Fort Yuma Quechan Reservation and Farmington, New Mexico.

Threaded throughout are the TV shows and diner dinners and dusty hikes and radio soundtracks that almost any New Mexican who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s will remember.

Another jealous-worthy book, this collection of essays explores the fallout from atomic testing.

It goes beyond that. 

My favorite essay in the collection is “Living Room.” The piece centers around a television gifted to the writer after the death of a high school classmate he doesn’t remember. From there, it weaves together the philosophical notion of memory with the more tangible, hard-luck details of Werther’s candies, peach sherbert, a red leather sofa.

The title of the book is spot-on, and any fan of Denis Johnson’s prose will love this collection. 

In the United States, New Mexico is a habitual contender for both poorest and most violent/dangerous.

Stan Hoig’s comprehensive examination of the conquistador expeditions into the region leads one to believe the place never had a chance. Men like Nuno Beltrán de Guzmán and Coronado worked under the guise of spreading the word of God to the New World. 

The reality is much different: the kingdom of Castile had bankrupted itself with their defeat of the Moors on the Iberian Peninsula. What Spain really needed was gold, and the kingdom was willing to do anything to stay solvent. From its inception, what we now know as New Mexico had little time for justice: justice takes time. 

For anybody planning a visit to New Mexico—and its natural beauty is, to my mind, second-to-none—Came Men on Horses provides a pivotal, historical context to its continued milieu.

My list would not be complete without a work of scholarship. Of the texts I encountered during my research, this one stayed with me. It helped me develop a deeper, more philosophical insight into solitary experience. This book begins in the early days of the penitentiary system in the US, analyzing the inmates' experiences through a phenomenological approach. It discusses sensory deprivation, the way the disorienting experience of time in solitary interferes with basic sensory perception, and what this type of confinement does to the human mind. The author shows that all the justifications about the redemptive, corrective or reformative potential of this form of punishment are weak attempts at concealing what it is: an effective tool for the annihilation of human subjectivity.

Charles Dickens the novelist needs no introduction, but not many people appreciate how fine a nonfiction writer he was. The American Notes is a testament to this, especially the famous solitary confinement chapter. Dickens traveled widely in the US, and he visited the first solitary confinement compound in Philadelphia. The people in charge, excited by the arrival of such an esteemed visitor, took him around the premises and allowed him to speak with a few prisoners. After that, Dickens wrote a passionate, brutal attack on solitary confinement as a barbaric form of torture, interspersing his indictment with heart-wrenching accounts of his meetings with the demoralized inmates.

The American carceral system is notorious for long, senseless solitary confinement sentences. While this is now public knowledge, we have actually heard very little from the people who have undergone such brutality. Hell Is A Very Small Place aims to give a platform to these people. This book is an invaluable collection of first-person accounts, composed by the people who lived this horror, many of them for unconscionably long periods. In their distinct voices, they articulate myriad ways time in solitary leads to the destruction of the human soul.  

Before I read this book, I had only the vaguest idea of what happens in supermax prisons or even solitary confinement in regular prisons. In this book, Rhodes shares her observations of a maximum-security prison–really inside. She had incredible access to the guards, the cell blocks, and the prisoners.

I already knew that Rhodes is a brilliant anthropologist–I loved her book Emptying Beds: The Work of an Emergency Psychiatric Unit (the bit that has stayed in my mind is the practice of offering patients a one-way ticket to California to get these pesty mentally ill, homeless people out of the overcrowded Chicago unit).

This book is, in some ways, the next step in that story, but in some ways, the opposite. Where the emergency unit tried to get rid of patients, the supermax prison tried to hold onto them. I was especially fascinated by the detailed descriptions of interactions between… show more.

This is my all-time favourite book. I heard the author tell her story and her resilience over a zoom conference and I immediately knew that my life would never be the same. I didn’t know how but I knew I would be different.

Stolen Time is about a woman wrongly convicted for murder who spent 17 years incarcerated, five of those years were spent in solitary confinement on death row. Her partner was also sentenced and in fact executed two years before Sunny was exonerated. It's the beautiful way Sunny speaks that made this my all-time favourite read. It’s a love story with real tragedy but told in the most resilient and forgiving way. I found it totally inspiring. Sunny taught me that no matter what the circumstances we have a duty to love and forgive no matter what if we want to live free. No one can steal our… show more.

After the news came out that Norman Mailer was writing a book about the life of Gary Gilmore, which came to be his magnum opus, The Executioner’s Song, he received a letter from a convict named Jack Henry Abbott. An avid reader of philosophy and literature who was also serving a life sentence, Abbott wrote to warn the renowned author against misapprehending American prisons and to teach him how to write about the violence of incarceration. The two men exchanged long, detailed letters. Eventually, Mailer collected Abbott’s letters in this book. In his letters, in a tone both detached and lyrical, Abbott writes unforgettably about what spending long years in prison does to one’s soul and body. In my view, the letter on solitary confinement is the finest and most harrowing chapter of this book.