Here are 100 books that Casa No Name fans have personally recommended if you like
Casa No Name.
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I am mainly known as an Interiors Photographer and although accidentally falling into photographing Interiors, it has become a passion, always interested in the story these places tell and alongside my husband we have built our own home creating a unique space using recuperated materials. As part of my work, I am always looking for interesting and inspirational books and places. It is how I train my eye, drawn to the unusual. I am as happy photographing a chateau in Provence as I am in a small and remote cabin in Norway.
As quoted by Axel Vervoordt his philosophy “is a belief that a home should be a personal expression of your soul. It should represent the way you want to live, the ideas that define your tastes, perspectives, and connections to the world. The spaces where people share private experiences with family and friends should restore and give energy. ” Vervoordt is a master of Interiors and this quote sums up my belief towards my own Interiors. This book is outstanding. It has been a big influence in my life and as a photographer. He incorporates the Japanese philosophy of Wabi Sabi - acceptance of transience and imperfection - and I see this in many aspects of what we have tried to create in our own home.
Interior design guru Axel Vervoordt shares his latest inspirations for the home. Axel Vervoordts intense curiosity has fueled his work as an interior designer, spurring him to explore and draw inspiration from cultures around the globe. He was first exposed to Eastern art and philosophy years ago, but today it has become the guiding principle in his work, particularly the concept of Wabi. Developed in the twelfth century, Wabi advocates simplicity and humility, the rejection of all that is superfluous or artificial. Through extraordinary photographs from Japan and Korea to Belgium and Switzerland, Vervoordt invites us to explore the elements…
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 am mainly known as an Interiors Photographer and although accidentally falling into photographing Interiors, it has become a passion, always interested in the story these places tell and alongside my husband we have built our own home creating a unique space using recuperated materials. As part of my work, I am always looking for interesting and inspirational books and places. It is how I train my eye, drawn to the unusual. I am as happy photographing a chateau in Provence as I am in a small and remote cabin in Norway.
This book was not only an inspiration for my first book but a book that visually spoke to me not only through the photography, but the spaces and places included in it. There are many Interiors books on the market but this one is up there as one of my all time favourites. It inspires me to be a better photographer and I find myself looking at this book over and over again.
If you have read The House that Pinterest Built, Smart Spaces, The Alchemy of Things, or Elements of Style you're going to love Perfect Imperfect.
Wabi-sabi and new creative interior design expressions: Perfect Imperfect is a stunning collection of homes and studios of creatives from all over the world, with thought-provoking text by Karen McCartney and stunning visuals by Sharyn Cairns and Glen Proebstel. Perfect Imperfect takes as its founding principle the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi. Wabi-Sabi advocates the beauty to be found in imperfection, impermanence and the authentic. Importantly this is done without losing sight of the benefits of…
I am mainly known as an Interiors Photographer and although accidentally falling into photographing Interiors, it has become a passion, always interested in the story these places tell and alongside my husband we have built our own home creating a unique space using recuperated materials. As part of my work, I am always looking for interesting and inspirational books and places. It is how I train my eye, drawn to the unusual. I am as happy photographing a chateau in Provence as I am in a small and remote cabin in Norway.
A recent purchase, when I discovered this book on Instagram (secondhand) I immediately wanted to buy it.
First published in 1993 it is still relevant today as I am sure it was then. We are all in love with Cabins, sheds, corrugated iron, escapism and there are many books on this subject. Marie France Boyer works for The World of Interiors amongst other magazines and has a wonderful eye and this book inspires me in my research for cabins in the world.
Intriguing and strangely magnetic, cabins fulfil the longing in all of us to indulge again in our childhood reveries of secret hideaways, built of branches and leaves or whatever is to hand; to enter our own private world; to commune with nature and with our own selves. Hidden in the forest, up in the treetops, by the side of still or moving water, down at the end of the garden, the cabin is the most magical of dwellings. Magical, but real too, as these photos from all over the world testify: fishing cabins in Maine; the shed in Wales to…
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…
I am mainly known as an Interiors Photographer and although accidentally falling into photographing Interiors, it has become a passion, always interested in the story these places tell and alongside my husband we have built our own home creating a unique space using recuperated materials. As part of my work, I am always looking for interesting and inspirational books and places. It is how I train my eye, drawn to the unusual. I am as happy photographing a chateau in Provence as I am in a small and remote cabin in Norway.
This book is one of my most recent purchases. I really love Sean Scherer’s style and it speaks to both myself and my husband.
The photography is great in this book and Sean has a wonderful eye for detail. It’s a feast for the eyes. It has that ‘cabinet de curiosité’ style and so many details I want to keep looking at. I have visited the Catskills area and this book certainly makes me want to go back there again. It is a well-thought-out and inspiring book.
Interior designer, artist, and collector Sean Scherer shares his secrets about applying the principles of two-dimensional art to home design
Sean Scherer’s Kabinett & Kammeris equally a celebration and a guide to both collecting and showing how lively design can integrate disparate objects into beautifully layered ensembles. Scherer’s interiors feature vintage display cabinets housing discarded collections of whittled songbirds, stunning 19th-century maps and school teaching aids, ferns in cast-iron planters, and photomurals. The effect is a supercharged nod to American Gothic heightened by Scherer’s sophisticated palette and sense of proportion. Each photograph by William Abranowicz is a lesson on color…
I fell in love with Latin American literature when I was in the Peace Corps in the late 1960s in the highlands of Colombia. My husband and I were in a program of rural community development. The Colombian writer, Gabriel García Márquez, published his now-famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, while we were there (in 1967), and when I read it, I said, “This is the kind of fiction that I want to keep on reading and studying forever!” And so I have. I am on the faculty of the University of Houston, where I teach Latin American literature and history, including a course on Magical Realism.
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.
Winner, Fred Whitehead Award for the Best Design of a Trade Book from Texas Institute of Letters Western Books Exhibition Selection, Rounce & Coffin Club, 2003 Deserted villages of rural Mexico, where images and memories of the past linger like unquiet ghosts, haunted the imaginations of two artists-writer Juan Rulfo and photographer Josephine Sacabo. In one such village of the mind, Comala, Rulfo set his classic novel Pedro Paramo, a dream-like tale that intertwines a man's quest to find his lost father and reclaim his patrimony with the father's obsessive love for a woman who will not be possessed-Susana San…
As a second-generation immigrant, I knew very little of my family’s migration story. My grandparents never really learned English despite living in the US sixty or more years. In my twenties when the country was undergoing turmoil about immigration reform once again, I began looking at the immigrants all around me (and in literature) and identifying what we had in common—how our lives intertwined and were mutually dependent on one another. In 2007 I traveled 8,500 miles around the perimeter of the US by bicycle on a research trip to collect stories from immigrants and those whose lives they impacted. I wrote two books based on that experience.
I read The Brick People when it was first published in 1988.
At the time, I was already familiar with Morales’ work, but this historical novel about the Simons Brick Factory in Southern California and the Mexican migrants who the Simons brother depended upon for their success seized my imagination.
The author blends folklore, history, myth, and magical realism into a novel that relates the story of Mexican migrants and their complicity with or rebellion against the Simons brothers and the mores of the early 20th Century Los Angeles region.
Morales shows how history from the ground up is manifested in people’s lives. His characters work and play hard as they seek to build community and pursue dreams of social mobility even when customs and laws prohibit them.
This engrosing historical novel traces the growth of California from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries by following in the development of the Simons Brick Factory. With an attention to historical reality blended with myth and legend, the prolific Morales recounts the epic struggle of a people to forge their destiny, along with Califonia's.
Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of…
I am fascinated by the places where cultures intersect and the means by which they do so. I am an American lucky to live in gorgeous San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and previously in Hirakata, Japan; Shanghai, China; Suva, Fiji; and Oxford, England. Each move entailed a challenging but rewarding effort to absorb a new set of unwritten societal rules. A great way to grow is to immerse yourself in the unknown and have things you took for granted about how the world works suddenly come into question. Another is to learn from those who have gone before us, so I am delighted to share these wonderful books with you.
I read The Old Gringo in college before I had any inkling that I would one day be a not-too-old gringa making her home in San Miguel de Allende.
Fuentes imagines meaningful final days for Ambrose Bierce, an American journalist who in 1913 headed off into Mexico at the age of 71, never to be heard from again. I love this book for the way Fuentes captures and probes profound differences and lingering mistrust between our cultures as well as the universal human struggles for meaning, opportunity, security, and belonging.
While Fuentes’ old gringo, we are told, came to die a worthy soldier’s death in Mexico, the gringos of my generation are here to live fully and well.
One of Carlos Fuentes's greatest works, The Old Gringo tells the story of Ambrose Bierce, the American writer, soldier, and journalist, and of his last mysterious days in Mexico living among Pancho Villa's soldiers, particularly his encounter with General Tomas Arroyo. In the end, the incompatibility of the two countries (or, paradoxically, their intimacy) claims both men, in a novel that is, most of all, about the tragic history of two cultures in conflict.
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.
Known for her long and often book-length poems, Maria Baranda is a leading poet of Mexico. This book contains two works, "From the Natural History of the Rustic"and "From the Natural History of Atlantica."
The project was inspired by an artist friend who would collect objects in the forest for his artworks, but first, he would talk at length about them. Written with a light hand, the poem is a gentle spoof of the friend who also shares in his wonderment: “I think of white lilies at the height of lightning. My friend has taught me.”
ATLANTICA AND THE RUSTIC is a luminous collection of verses documenting the earth in all its radiant, ravaged particularity. Like the shifting boundary between sea and sky, a tenuous horizon joins the two halves of this brilliantly translated book: the first a series of ecological encounters reported to the poet by a friend; the second a fragmented lyric from the very edge of the terrestrial world. Throughout, María Baranda's bristling, peripatetic lines remind us that "any route is an artifice," any memory stained with the "vestiges of oblivion." This translation marks an invaluable contribution to the field of Anglophone ecopoetics…
I grew up in Mexico listening to my father´s stories about the Mexican revolution. His storytelling abilities drew me in as he described his childhood memories and those of his father, who lived through the revolution. That's why I became a historian writing about the Mexican Revolution with a preference for biographies. As the Latin Americanist historian at St. John's University in New York City, I've written two books: Maximino Avila Camacho and the One Party State, Pancho Villa: A Biography, and edited A Brief History of Mexico by Lynn V. Foster. I hope you enjoy the list of books on significant personalities that shaped the first major social revolution of the twentieth century.
This book is one of my all-time favorites. The Death of Artemio Cruz is a historical novel by one of the most acclaimed literary figures of the Spanish language, Carlos Fuentes. It is a captivating narrative of intertwined memories experienced by Cruz while on his deathbed; this novel is a harsh condemnation of the post-revolutionary political class. It shows the path of idealist revolutionaries becoming corrupt politicians once in power. While a work of fiction, the book describes real corrupt and abusive attitudes and straight-out crimes committed by numerous revolutionary leaders turned politicians. There were many Artemio Cruz among the revolution leaders, which helps explain why the revolution failed to achieve real social change.
As the novel opens, Artemio Cruz, the all-powerful newspaper magnate and land baron, lies confined to his bed and, in dreamlike flashes, recalls the pivotal episodes of his life. Carlos Fuentes manipulates the ensuing kaleidoscope of images with dazzling inventiveness, layering memory upon memory, from Cruz's heroic campaigns during the Mexican Revolution, through his relentless climb from poverty to wealth, to his uneasy death. Perhaps Fuentes's masterpiece, The Death of Artemio Cruz is a haunting voyage into the soul of modern Mexico.
For me, books have always been an incredible way to escape, most especially when life is overwhelming. I read books as an escape when I was young, and now as an author, I write books to escape as well. My favorite books to escape into always include heart pounding adventure, fantastical magic, and characters I wish I could know in real life. These are the sorts of books I write; ones that give readers the chance to exist as someone else in another place, perhaps go on a wild adventure. My hope as an author is that my books allow readers to leave their own world and their own worries behind.
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.
When a powerful desert spirit kidnaps her sister, Cece Rios must learn forbidden magic to get her back, in this own voices middle grade fantasy perfect for fans of The Storm Runner and Aru Shah and the End of Time.
Living in the remote town of Tierra del Sol is dangerous, especially in the criatura months, when powerful spirits roam the desert and threaten humankind. But Cecelia Rios has always believed there was more to the criaturas, much to her family's disapproval. After all, only brujas-humans who capture and control criaturas-consort with the spirits, and brujeria is a terrible crime.…
