Here are 79 books that Alphabet fans have personally recommended if you like
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Before I started writing, my understanding of war largely came about through its manifestation over subsequent decades in individuals. My grandfather selectively shared stories from his time as a bomber, then as a POW in Germany. Maybe it was this conjunction, a personal sense of rebuilding and of storytelling, that has driven my interest in the subject over these years, as a journalist and critic and then as an author of a book on the subject.
My own background, process, and style have me reaching for ever-tinier stories that I think I can go deep on, in order to hopefully excavate something larger. Judt’s Postwar is the opposite: a colossal swing at a multi-decade period across European history. In this, he synthesizes political, economic, social, and cultural histories to guide the reader through Europe’s development after World War II. It’s a book where you find yourself going over each line a few times in order to make sure you’ve wrung all meaning from it and every sentence returns you to your notes.
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize * Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award * One of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of the Year
"Impressive . . . Mr. Judt writes with enormous authority." -The Wall Street Journal
"Magisterial . . . It is, without a doubt, the most comprehensive, authoritative, and yes, readable postwar history." -The Boston Globe
Almost a decade in the making, this much-anticipated grand history of postwar Europe from one of the world's most esteemed historians and intellectuals is a singular achievement. Postwar is the first modern history that covers…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
I worked for the last 25 years teaching literature classes and creative writing workshops—most of that time at the University of California at Davis. The students in my classes were mainly English majors and/or young writers. They tended to be serious about the potential of a text. To be serious, today, in America, about the potential of a text is to dwell in an inherently counter-cultural position. It is to conceive of the value of a text as something surpassing entertainment, i.e., use. Such a surpassing is a blasphemous notion… still tolerated in the context of the University. Its proliferation beyond those boundaries seems unworkable.
How is a person like a novel? Both, at their core, are made of stories. Both, at their core, are the way in which various stories are imagined to hang together. But the nexus of stories at the core of a person is written in the brain (wordlessness), which is always in flux, changeable, and incomplete, forever before words and on the verge of being totally lost.
The nexus of stories at the core of a novel, on the other hand, is written in nothing other than words; as such, it makes manifest a disembodied, complete (i.e., fictive) person—a person invulnerable to death. A novel is what a person is forever wanting to turn into.
The four long narratives in The Emigrants appear at first to be the straightforward biographies of four Germans in exile. Sebald reconstructs the lives of a painter, a doctor, an elementary-school teacher, and Great Uncle Ambrose. Following (literally) in their footsteps, the narrator retraces routes of exile which lead from Lithuania to London, from Munich to Manchester, from the South German provinces to Switzerland, France, New York, Constantinople, and Jerusalem. Along with memories, documents, and diaries of the Holocaust, he collects photographs-the enigmatic snapshots which stud The Emigrants and bring to mind family photo albums. Sebald combines precise documentary with…
I’m an author, reader, and cinephile with a real appetite for all things crime. If it’s a mystery, if it’s a detective story, if there are questionable morals at play in a story with no easy answers and no clear way out, then count me in. I’m also fascinated by the WWII era and was spellbound by the stories my maternal grandfather told me about his time as an infantry soldier in Italy during the war. These passions moved me to write my own novels and continue to inspire me in my embrace of art. I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I do!
Robin Robertson’s noir narrativeThe Long Take might seem like an unusual choice for this list.
Essentially a long noir poem,The Long Takeconcerns Walker, a Canadian veteran of D-Day with acute PTSD who finds life unraveling in the urban landscapes he inhabits after the war.
With a poet’s precision, Robertson follows Walker as he moves from city to city, taking it all in. Homelessness, crime, race—nothing is spared.
Why, you’d think you were in a 40s film noir, reading about it all, and then you find Walker on the streets of LA in 1948 seeing some of those very films being shot, films likeAct of Violenceand Criss Cross.
An outstanding achievement, The Long Take is a wholly original work of art.
Winner of the 2019 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
'A beautiful, vigorous and achingly melancholy hymn to the common man that is as unexpected as it is daring.' --John Banville, Guardian
A noir narrative written with the intensity and power of poetry, The Long Take is one of the most remarkable - and unclassifiable - books of recent years.
Walker is a D-Day veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder; he can't return home to rural Nova Scotia, and looks instead…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
Before I started writing, my understanding of war largely came about through its manifestation over subsequent decades in individuals. My grandfather selectively shared stories from his time as a bomber, then as a POW in Germany. Maybe it was this conjunction, a personal sense of rebuilding and of storytelling, that has driven my interest in the subject over these years, as a journalist and critic and then as an author of a book on the subject.
Wars take a long time to end. Work is done to bury the loss, grief, and guilt described above as quickly as possible. Oftentimes the forces that stand to profit from this forgetting succeed, except among those groups which are either ignored or for whom the loss is too deep. What Layli Long Soldier’s brilliant Whereas discloses is how the acts of government, the papers generated like planks over a well, seek to hide that grief and loss, and how those groups might reclaim the stories those papers hope to disappear.
WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations.
I have published 18 books of poetry, most recently the one I have listed here, as well as a collection of literary essays, Fables of Representation. My emphasis has always been on the more progressive and risk-taking kinds of expression, as seen with the Beat poets, Ginsberg and Corso, and the New York School poets, Ashbery and O'Hara. Seeing a lack of that perspective on bookshelves, I edited two editions of a major anthology, Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, and 42 issues of the literary magazine, New American Writing. I have been reading, more recently, a lot of great writing by women, especially those writing at length, with the volume up.
The book contains 70 sonnets, all with the same title as the book. Quick-witted, ironic, and politically dedicated to good cause, Hayes speaks from his own experience as an African-American: “Probably twilight makes blackness dangerous/Darkness. Probably all my encounters/Are existential Jambalaya.”
Winner of the National Book Award for his earlier work, Lighthead, he is a poet to watch for his moral sense and mastery of poetic form. The book was written in the first two hundred days of the first Trump presidency.
Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry
One of the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2018
A powerful, timely, dazzling collection of sonnets from one of America's most acclaimed poets, Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award-winning author of Lighthead
"Sonnets that reckon with Donald Trump's America." -The New York Times
In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the…
I am a British poet living in the Peak District in Derbyshire, which is perhaps why I can’t stop the natural world from coming into my poems. My writing shed at the top of the garden looks out over a field and up to a limestone outcrop with a stand of beech trees. When there are no poems, I sit and watch the birds and wait for the sheep to trundle down the hill at the end of the afternoon. I read poems about nature because those are the ones I love best–poems that might capture something I’ve noticed but that put it into a beautiful and startling new language.
I love this dazzlingly original collection, which evokes a childhood in rural Cumbria. Jackself is the title character, but there are plenty of other Jacks in the poems, too – Jacks from nursery rhymes and folklore and English legend.
Jackself is a mostly solitary boy, and the poems take us into the strange, funny, frightening world of a child who lives on the edge of nature, sometimes seeming to become a feral creature himself. I was struck by the startlingly wild and fearless imagery of the poems, which make the natural world a darkly compelling place.
Jackself is the fourth collection from one of Britain's finest poets, and sees Jacob Polley at the height of his powers. In one of the most original books of poetry to appear in the last decade, Jackself spins a kind of 'fictionalized autobiography' through nursery rhymes, riddles and cautionary tales, and through the many 'Jacks' of our folktale, legend, phrase and fable - everyman Jacks and no one Jacks, Jackdaw, Jack-O-Lantern, Jack Sprat, Cheapjack and Jack Frost. At once playful and terrifying, lyric and narratively compelling, Jackself is an unforgettable exploration…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I am a British poet living in the Peak District in Derbyshire, which is perhaps why I can’t stop the natural world from coming into my poems. My writing shed at the top of the garden looks out over a field and up to a limestone outcrop with a stand of beech trees. When there are no poems, I sit and watch the birds and wait for the sheep to trundle down the hill at the end of the afternoon. I read poems about nature because those are the ones I love best–poems that might capture something I’ve noticed but that put it into a beautiful and startling new language.
I read this book and immediately recommended it to my book club because I loved it so much. I’ve not read a collection quite like it. It is a long poem about the River Dart in Devon, but the word ‘about’ doesn’t quite capture it.
What’s remarkable is that the river seems to have found its own language–a sinuous, twisting, turning, stopping, starting rhythm of words. The poem flows forward, shifting and shape-shifting as it goes and making new worlds of language along the way.
Over the past three years Alice Oswald has been recording conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she creates a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. The voices are wonderfully varied and idiomatic - they include a poacher, a ferryman, a sewage worker and milk worker, a forester, swimmers and canoeists - and are interlinked with historic and mythic voices: drowned voices, dreaming voices and marginal notes which act as markers along the way.
I am a British poet living in the Peak District in Derbyshire, which is perhaps why I can’t stop the natural world from coming into my poems. My writing shed at the top of the garden looks out over a field and up to a limestone outcrop with a stand of beech trees. When there are no poems, I sit and watch the birds and wait for the sheep to trundle down the hill at the end of the afternoon. I read poems about nature because those are the ones I love best–poems that might capture something I’ve noticed but that put it into a beautiful and startling new language.
This beautiful collection stopped me in my tracks. In many ways, it’s a quiet book – the poems celebrate moments of observation and intense connection with the natural world. Many are in the first person, a speaking ‘I’ or ‘we’ caught up in a tender encounter with creatures, stones, water, and grass.
In the words of one of the poems, “the world comes in by the ear,” and these delicate poems echo with music and the simple language of everyday speech. One of the things I love is the way our human lives always hover close – the worlds of work, of love, of our children growing up and moving away. All is brought closer by the quiet lessons of the natural world.
In Earth House, Matthew Hollis evokes the landscape, language and ecology of the isles of Britain and Ireland to explore how our most intimate moments have resonance in the wider cycle of life. Beginning in the slate waters of the north, the book revolves around the cardinal points and the ancient elements: through the wide skies of the east and the terrain of a southern city, to the embers of places lost to us, to which we can no longer return.
What emerges is a moving meditation on time and the transformative phases of nature that calls many forces into…
I am a British poet living in the Peak District in Derbyshire, which is perhaps why I can’t stop the natural world from coming into my poems. My writing shed at the top of the garden looks out over a field and up to a limestone outcrop with a stand of beech trees. When there are no poems, I sit and watch the birds and wait for the sheep to trundle down the hill at the end of the afternoon. I read poems about nature because those are the ones I love best–poems that might capture something I’ve noticed but that put it into a beautiful and startling new language.
Although the poet Michael Longley was a Titan of the Irish literary landscape, many of my favorites among his poems are the tiniest of things. In this collection (which is almost his last), he catalogs the birds and creatures that populate his little corner of Ireland.
Like the ‘peasant poet’ John Clare before him, he has an eye for the particular–for the sound a bird makes or the shape of its nest. These miniatures are exquisitely beautiful and I treasure each one for its precision and truth.
Michael Longley’s new collection takes its title from Dylan Thomas—“for the sake of the souls of the slain birds sailing.” The Slain Birds encompasses souls, slayings, and many birds, both dead and alive. The first poem laments a tawny owl killed by a car. That owl reappears later in “Totem,” which represents the book itself as “a star-surrounded totem pole/ With carvings of all the creatures.” “Slain birds” exemplify our impact on the creatures and the planet. But, in this book’s cosmic ecological scheme, birds are predators too, and coronavirus is “the merlin we cannot see.” Longley’s soul-landscape seems increasingly…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I have published 18 books of poetry, most recently the one I have listed here, as well as a collection of literary essays, Fables of Representation. My emphasis has always been on the more progressive and risk-taking kinds of expression, as seen with the Beat poets, Ginsberg and Corso, and the New York School poets, Ashbery and O'Hara. Seeing a lack of that perspective on bookshelves, I edited two editions of a major anthology, Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, and 42 issues of the literary magazine, New American Writing. I have been reading, more recently, a lot of great writing by women, especially those writing at length, with the volume up.
The book is a haunting description of a model city, written in Berlin and other cities, that answers the question: “What was it like?” Each of the seventy pages of the book contains four long sentences in prose, each of which begins, “It was like.”
Every time I read the book, which I teach in my classes, I am delighted by her prose style and awed by Stonecipher’s ability to depict both presence and absence. Stonecipher is exclusively a prose poet and has written a book about that poetic form. Her writing also displays proceduralism, which is the invention of a procedure rather than an existing poetic form. Architects and gardeners will be enthralled.
Model City answers its own inaugural question 'What was it like?' in 288 different ways. The accumulation of these answers offers a form of sustained and refined negative capability, which by turns is wry, profound and abundant with an unspecified longing for the passing ghost of European idealism. In the various enquiries and explorations of Model City this is also the mapping of a lived condition and its relationships not readily found on every street corner - nor in the broken ideologies from the populist bargain basement proffered by our political cadres. What becomes apparent is that the model city/Model…
