100 Books Like Atlantica and the Rustic

One of the leading poets of Denmark, Christensen virtually invented proceduralism. An abecedarian poem, A to H, each section of this book is also guided by the Fibonacci number sequence that accretes as follows: 0, 1, 1, 2. 3, 5, 13, 21. Each section has as many lines as the two previous sections. 

Every time I read the book, which I assign in my classes, I am delighted by her prose style written with brilliant clarity. It names things that exist, along with the warning that the human devastation of nature will cause them not to exist. The poet was forced to conclude the work at “H” because the Fibonacci sequence had grown too demanding to continue. Highly recommended for lovers of nature and mathematicians.

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.

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.

Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. I believe that her long poem, The First Water Is the Body, the centerpiece of Postcolonial Love Poem, is The Waste Land of our era.

Lyrical and fierce, beautiful and scathing, it is both a cry from the outside and a spiritual lesson. After reading that poem, go to Snake Light and Ode to the Beloved’s Hips. I was led to her work by her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, which recounts the despair into which her brother, a drug addict, had placed her family.

Texas schools do an incredible job of acculturating their students in Texas history. The school system starts by telling the story of true Texans. Unfortunately, some of those tales were what we called “stories.” 

In college, I took a course called The History of Mexico. The course book used by Professor Macias (if I remember his name correctly) was a small book, less than 200 pages, called The Compact History of Mexico. What a wonderful course and wonderful book. 

I have not looked at the book in years, even though I ordered a copy when writing this. I felt like a child reading the book, being told a different story than I had been told over the years, providing to me – a black student – the why and how history and both sides of a story are so important. Always feeling left out of the discussion, hearing a distorted… show more.

If you ask American expats in San Miguel de Allende how they “discovered” this beautiful city in the central highlands as far from a beach as one can be in Mexico, a significant percentage of us will mention Tony Cohan’s lovely memoir, On Mexican Time, set in the San Miguel of 1985.

San Miguel is often referred to as magical, and most of us tend to think of whatever moment we personally arrived as peak San Miguel magic. The longer we’re here, the more nostalgic we grow for that lost era. The thing about magic, though, is that it can evolve. Today’s San Miguel de Allende is less sleepy and quirky than the town Tony described, but it is still abundantly charmed.

I could have picked almost any of Bowden’s books on the border, for example, the excellent Murder City, but I’m choosing Laboratory of the Future as it’s the first piece of his writing I came across. Bowden, who lived on both sides of the US/Mexican border for many years, was intimate with his subject, and the brutal power of his journalistic writing puts most novelists to shame. He is not afraid to question us or confront us, or hide his anger, but it is never unwarranted. In this book, he, and the thirteen Mexican photographers whose frequently shocking images accompany the text, paints a grim picture of the nature of ultra-capitalism when allowed to run free just south of the border – it is, he says, an experiment: it is the laboratory of our future.

In this masterpiece of historical narrative, Paul Sullivan investigates the 1875 sacking of a sugar plantation (called Xuxub) and the murder of its American manager by Maya rebels. Located on the geographical frontier between “Ladino” and Maya society, Xuxub became a microcosm of all of the conflicts that haunted Mexico as it entered its “Guilded Age”: inter-elite rivalries, international competition in the wake of the U.S.-Mexico War, and the overwhelming fear that the nation’s Indigenous population would rise up against encroaching liberal capitalism. It all comes together in a murder mystery, written more like true crime than an academic text, right down to the final poetic twist. This is an immensely enjoyable read, so much so that I have read it no fewer than fifteen times. 

When Cece’s older sister is kidnapped by a powerful, dark criatura, she must travel into Devil’s Alley and become a bruja to save her. To me, what makes this book special is Cece’s big, all-encompassing heart. She loves deeply and while it’s her heart that gets her into trouble, but it’s also what ultimately saves her. This was an incredibly meaningful theme to read into a book! I highly recommend this book as an escape; step into Cece’s life to glimpse the shadowy magic of the criaturas and also to experience the deeply moving love in her world.

This short novel is by a Mexican writer and takes place underground. At first, we cannot tell who is living and who is dead, but we eventually accept the fact that the characters are ghosts. 

The ghosts come and go, remembering their past lives together. They remind each other of the events of the Mexican Revolution that they lived through, and they especially remember the strongman in the village. Pedro Páramo runs things with an iron hand, and he also pines for a woman who is beyond his control—the only thing he wants that he can’t have.

The voices in this novel are like a chorus of whispers breathing the picture of a poor village. I love the beauty and mystery of the writing. Many Mexicans consider this their greatest novel, and for all readers, it is a small masterpiece.