Here are 100 books that Anne Sexton fans have personally recommended if you like
Anne Sexton.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I’ve loved F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories ever since I read The Great Gatsby as a teenager. After that, I devoured all of his works, thanks to a membership in one of those book subscription services where you have to send back monthly book selections if you don’t want them. I read almost all his short stories, all his novels, including the unfinished The Last Tycoon, and everything I could find on him and his wife Zelda.When The Great Gatsby entered the public domain a couple years ago, I started daydreaming of how I'd love to revisit the story from a fresh perspective, which led me to penning Daisy.
Probably the biggest tragedy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life was his wife Zelda’s descent into mental illness.
This magnificent biography chronicles their tumultuous relationship as well as Zelda’s upbringing, and how she became the perfect flapper, independent and even a little wild. While the story is drenched in sadness as we all know its ending, this book reveals the struggles of creative women to be respected and seen as individuals, not just appendages to their famous husbands.
It also illuminates Scott’s enduring love for Zelda. Even as he had an affair at the end of his life, he never abandoned his wife to public institutions, insisting she have the best care, no matter the expense, at private ones.
“Profound, overwhelmingly moving . . . a richly complex love story.” — New York Times
Acclaimed biographer Nancy Milford brings to life the tormented, elusive personality of Zelda Sayre and clarifies as never before Zelda’s relationship with her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald—tracing the inner disintegration of a gifted, despairing woman, torn by the clash between her husband’s career and her own talent.
Zelda Sayre’s stormy life spanned from notoriety as a spirited Southern beauty to success as a gifted novelist and international celebrity at the side of her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Zelda and Fitzgerald were one of the most…
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’ve been fascinated by American women’s lives my whole life, reading and writing women’s biographies from high school through graduate school and into my career as a professional historian. I was raised in the Great Lakes region of the United States, and was educated at Bryn Mawr College and the University of Pennsylvania. I teach early American history, women’s history, and the history of sexuality at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, and am at work on a book about women’s lives in the generation after the American Revolution.
Not a biography in the strict sense, this book is an investigation into “an American controversy” by a legal scholar that demonstrates the value of historical research and analysis by showing how Jefferson’s grandchildren, and white scholars and biographers following their lead, effectively conspired to hide the truth of Jefferson’s 30+ relationship with a woman he owned. And Gordon-Reed published this book a full year before the DNA-based analysis showed that Jefferson was overwhelmingly likely to have been the only father to Hemings’s four children.
When Annette Gordon-Reed's groundbreaking study was first published, rumors of Thomas Jefferson's sexual involvement with his slave Sally Hemings had circulated for two centuries. Among all aspects of Jefferson's renowned life, it was perhaps the most hotly contested topic. The publication of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings intensified this debate by identifying glaring inconsistencies in many noted scholars' evaluations of the existing evidence. In this study, Gordon-Reed assembles a fascinating and convincing argument: not that the alleged thirty-eight-year liaison necessarily took place but rather that the evidence for its taking place has been denied a fair hearing.
As a child, I loved reading books about time travel, and now as a historian, I do a sort of time travel for my job. I have always been especially drawn to reading women’s correspondence, particularly when the women involved were pushing against gender roles and finding ways to access political power. I approach doing history as if it’s an ethnography of a group of people with entirely different beliefs, norms, and even emotions from us today; after all, the past is a foreign country. I’m especially intrigued by uncovering how personal relationships worked in the past and how relationships with political figures allowed family and friends to access power.
Kerrison brings careful scholarly research and even detective work to this fluidly-written story of Jefferson’s two white daughters, Martha and Maria Jefferson, and one Black daughter, Harriet Hemings. The book offers a more detailed chronicle of Martha and Maria, but Kerrison reveals for the reader her search for what happened to Harriet after she left Monticello and why that story ultimately remains a mystery.
The remarkable untold story of Thomas Jefferson’s three daughters—two white and free, one black and enslaved—and the divergent paths they forged in a newly independent America
FINALIST FOR THE GEORGE WASHINGTON PRIZE • “Beautifully written . . . To a nuanced study of Jefferson’s two white daughters, Martha and Maria, [Kerrison] innovatively adds a discussion of his only enslaved daughter, Harriet Hemings.”—The New York Times Book Review
Thomas Jefferson had three daughters: Martha and Maria by his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, and Harriet by his slave Sally Hemings. Although the three women shared a father, the similarities end there. Martha…
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…
When I moved to South Carolina some 25 years ago, I found understanding all the history around me challenging. Even more than that, I found it hard to talk about! Politics and history get mixed up in tricky ways. I worked with students to understand stories about plantation sites, leading me to start reading the words of survivors of captivity. I started reading slave narratives and trying to listen to what people had to say. While sad sometimes, their words are also hopeful. I now read books about our nation’s darkest times because I look for ways to guide us to a better future.
Washington, our first president…Mr. American Freedom himself—was not just a slave owner but a slave hunter. What was his problem, I wondered, as I read about how he and his wife positively obsessed over re-capturing Ona Judge, a woman who escaped from their bondage.
They spent years, money, and some political clout tracking her down and trying to drag her back. They had plenty of other enslaved people! They weren’t short of money! As I read this wild tale of courage and cruelty, I got the message…the Washingtons knew that if a slave could flee the President of the United States, it would demonstrate the hypocrisy of trying to found a nation on liberty that, uh,…..held men, women and children in bondage.
My spoiler for you: They failed. Judge never returned to the Washingtons and lived to tell her own tale about the ugly history of American freedoms. Dunbar’s book…
A startling and eye-opening look into America's First Family, Never Caught is the powerful story about a daring woman of "extraordinary grit" (The Philadelphia Inquirer).
When George Washington was elected president, he reluctantly left behind his beloved Mount Vernon to serve in Philadelphia, the temporary seat of the nation's capital. In setting up his household he brought along nine slaves, including Ona Judge. As the President grew accustomed to Northern ways, there was one change he couldn't abide: Pennsylvania law required enslaved people be set free after six months of residency in the state. Rather than comply, Washington decided to…
I’m the child of immigrants and grew up imagining a second self—me, if my parents had never left India. Then, when I became a writer, doubles kept showing up in odd ways in my work. In my first play, House of Sacred Cows, I had identical twins played, farcically, by the same actor. My latest novel features two South Asian women: one, slightly wimpy, married to an unsympathetic guy called Mac, and another, in a permanent state of outrage, married to a nice man called Mat. My current project is a novel about mixed-race twins born in India but separated at birth.
This is actually just the first book of Ferrante’s four Neapolitan novels, which tell a single riveting story of two girls, Lila and Lenù, from a depressed Naples neighborhood. Lenù is the narrator, taking us through fifty years of friendship and the latter half of the 20th century. (Her actual name is Elena, like the author—another doubling, especially since she writes under a pseudonym.)
I am a sucker for event: a lot happens and we get to know a huge cast of characters from the neighborhood. But our anchors are these two friends and rivals, vibrant and injured, striving to transcend their origins.
OVER 14 MILLION COPIES OF THE NEAPOLITAN QUARTET SOLD WORLDWIDE
NOW A MAJOR TV SERIES
GUARDIAN 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY
58 WEEKS ON THE BOOKSELLER'S TOP 20 ORIGINAL FICTION BESTSELLERS LIST
SHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2015
43 INTERNATIONAL RIGHTS DEALS
Now in B-format Paperback
From one of Italy's most acclaimed authors, comes this ravishing and generous-hearted novel about a friendship that lasts a lifetime. The story of Elena and Lila begins in the 1950s in a poor but…
A so-called “recovering lawyer,” after 20 dreary years shuffling papers, I decided to pursue the Life of the Mind with a degree in Historical Studies at the Graduate Faculty of the New School. For an assignment regarding a significant historian, I chose Frances Yates, whose bookGiordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition spoke to me. Culling her papers at the Warburg Institute in London led to her first biography, Frances Yates and the Hermetic Tradition. Since then, I've transformed Dame Frances into a sleuth, who explores other unorthodox faith traditions, accompanied by another “recovering lawyer,” whose story mirrors my own, thus enabling me via bio-fiction to further enhance my spirituality.
Writing a Woman’s Life ignited my interest in women’s stories. More significantly, Heilbrun’s feminist Kate Fansler mysteries, written via the pseudonym Amanda Cross, inspired me to transform Frances Yates into a fictional sleuth. To date, Dame Frances (DBE) has encountered other unorthodox faith traditions, as revealed in Tarot; the Convent of Sor Juana de la Cruz in Mexico; among Philadelphia Quakers; and women religious at the Ursuline Convent in Québec. To date, there have been four Frances Yates mysteries.
In this modern classic, Carolyn G. Heilbrun builds an eloquent argument demonstrating that writers conform all too often to society's expectations of what women should be like at the expense of the truth of the female experience. Drawing on the careers of celebrated authors including Virginia Woolf, George Sand, and Dorothy Sayers, Heilbrun illustrates the struggle these writers undertook in both work and life to break away from traditional "male" scripts for women's roles.
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I’m a memoirist living in New York and my women friends have saved my life many times. I didn’t fully understand how important they were to me until the three I write about died within a few years of each other in the early aughts. I also teach memoir as an academic. I’ve learned from my favorite writers how crucial it is to push past shame and embarrassment to try and reach emotional truth—whatever that is for each of us. Only readers can decide whether one succeeds, but for me, the most important gift memoir can bestow is the writer’s willingness to risk intimate self-disclosure.
The memoir helped me come to terms with the loss of three of my closest friends. Let’s Take the Long Way Home is an elegy to a beloved friend. It’s a book about grieving, of course, but also about recapturing loving memories of an intense relationship. The title, however, doesn’t hint at the story’s unusual major theme: the two women, both writers, meet over their love of and care for dogs! I confess that am not a dog lover, but I ended up captivated by the women’s passionate devotion to their animals and by seeing how this attachment strengthened their human bond. You don’t have to share a canine passion to be moved by this intimate portrait.
They met over their dogs. Gail Caldwell and Caroline Knapp (author of Drinking: A Love Story)became best friends, talking about everything from their love of books and their shared history of a struggle with alcohol to their relationships with men. Walking the woods of New England and rowing on the Charles River, these two private, self-reliant women created an attachment more profound than either of them could ever have foreseen. Then, several years into this remarkable connection, Knapp was diagnosed with cancer. With her signature exquisite prose, Caldwell mines the deepest levels of devotion, and courage…
As a full-time writer of creative non-fiction, I am passionately interested in what makes us human. Like most people. I have always been fascinated by friendship and have had many friends throughout my life. I decided to write about friendship when a good friend 'pruned' me, that is, ended our friendship. I was bewildered and hurt and wanted to understand what had happened, which led me to write True Friends. When I discussed the topic with others, it turned out that most people had also experienced a friend break-up, but it was not much written about—until now!
Ann Patchett is a successful American novelist, and Truth and Beauty is her memoir about her friendship with the poet, Lucy Grealy. She writes beautifully about Grealy, her talent and her warm, engaging personality, but also about her struggles and eventual death. Patchett conveys the depth of a passionate friendship by letting the reader see all her thoughts and feelings, courageously looking at how we can love someone, but how they can also try us to our limits. It is a book for those who love literature and are fascinated by the depth and intricacy of a creative connection between humans.
From the bestselling author of The Dutch House, Commonwealth and Bel Canto, Winner of The Women's Prize for Fiction and the Pen/Faulkner Award.
When Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy met in college they began a friendship that would define their lives. Lucy Grealy lost part of her jaw to childhood cancer, and a large part of her life to chemotherapy and endless reconstructive surgeries. Stoic but vulnerable, damaged by bullying but fascinated by fame, Lucy had an incandescent personality that illuminated those around her.
In this tender, brutal book, Ann Patchett describes Lucy's life and her own platonic love for…
I teach literature, Labor Studies, and writing at San Diego City College and have written three San Diego-based novels: Drift, Flash, and Last Days in Ocean Beach, along with Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See, a radical history of San Diego that I co-wrote with Mike Davis and Kelly Mayhew. Both as a writer and as a daily wanderer on the streets of San Diego, I have a passion for the psychogeography of the city space and a deep curiosity for and love of the people I encounter there.
Jim Thompson’s novel is arguably San Diego’s greatest classic noir work.
While not a crime novel, it captures wartime San Diego through the glass darkly, and I was moved and unsettled by Thompson’s unsparing forays into the alienation of those who were the most exploited in the city.
San Diego in the years before World War II. James Dillon is barely scraping by working a menial job in manufacturing, trying to raise a family and support his elderly mother and sister Frankie at the same time. He drinks too hard -- just like his father and nearly everyone in his extended family. With so many people crammed into one home, sometimes there's so much fighting he can barely stand it. But if James can survive the chaos of everyday life long enough, maybe -- just maybe -- there's a chance it'll all get better.
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
In my “day job” I write about architecture, which means I often write about things I see in photos. When I began writing fiction, I continued using photos as inspiration and research. My novels are inspired by my family’s circumstances at the end of World War II and my fascination with the work of the Monuments Men. Photos show me details like a little girl playing with her doll under a sign that declares her building to be at risk of collapse, or a woman using the ruins of a building to hang out the wash. I love finding ways to use these elements in my writing.
Technically about World War II, this work covers Chim’s work depicting culture, politics, and life before and after the war, so the circumstances leading to conflict and its aftermath. Chim was the co-founder of Magnum Photos, so his contribution to photojournalism is immense, and his photos are beautifully lit and composed even as they capture fleeting moments: Polish school children waiting for a bus in the rain, a baby reaching for bread at a displaced person’s camp or a boy playing in the ruins of a bombed building. The book also includes later photos of celebrities and movie stars, which, when seen alongside his earlier work creates an interesting narrative of a world putting itself back together and once again seeking out joy and beauty.
Born Dawid Szymin in Warsaw, Chim began his career in the early 1930s photographing for leftist magazines in Paris. In 1936, one of these magazines, Regards, sent him to the frontlines of the civil war in Spain, along with comrades Robert Capa and Gerda Taro. Although war formed the backdrop of much of his reportage, Chim was an astute observer of twentieth-century European politics, social life, and culture, from the beginnings of the antifascist struggle to the rebuilding of countries ravaged by World War II. Like millions of other Europeans, Chim had suffered the pain of dislocation and the loss…
