Here are 100 books that Flesh and Blood fans have personally recommended if you like
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I look to my bookshelf and can visit with old friends by the simple and profound act of reading. And by reading, I learn of myself and of others. These books have sharpened my attention to life’s particulars, are places of refuge, fortresses or encampments from which I/we can safely view the harsh realities and impenetrable riddles confronting us. Books create sparks. Sparks build into a fire.
The reasons for loving the books I listed below are many: The characters enchant, infuriate, and humble you. They inhabit your mind in a waking dream. Their story is your story and after reading the book, you know something about yourself which you otherwise would not have known.
Again and again, Terry Tempest Williams shows us we can live in a disaster zone, literal and emotional, and survive.
Refuge, her fourth major book, testifies to the calamities set in motion by the atomic testing that occurred in the Nevada desert during the 1950’s. The book weaves the story of her mother and grandmother’s resultant deaths from cancer and the flooding of the Great Salt Lake that has endangered native bird species.
The loss she records is human and non-human, bringing home a truth we have yet to learn: that sullying the Great Mother, our earth, threatens our own bodies and those of future generations. If Refuge is a record of lamentations, it is also a missive for restoration and regeneration and a document of hope.
In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. That same season, The Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by. One event was nature at its most random, the other a by-product of rogue technology: Terry's mother, and Terry herself, had been exposed to the fallout of atomic bomb tests in the 1950s. As it interweaves these narratives of dying and accommodation, Refuge transforms…
Beginning with a chance encounter in 1985, an unnamed narrator embarks on a physical and spiritual sojourn over four decades.
From a one-night stand in Paris with the troubled and enigmatic Louis, to Montreal, through a divided Europe, and into the Iranian desert with the sick yet determined Yuri, and…
I look to my bookshelf and can visit with old friends by the simple and profound act of reading. And by reading, I learn of myself and of others. These books have sharpened my attention to life’s particulars, are places of refuge, fortresses or encampments from which I/we can safely view the harsh realities and impenetrable riddles confronting us. Books create sparks. Sparks build into a fire.
The reasons for loving the books I listed below are many: The characters enchant, infuriate, and humble you. They inhabit your mind in a waking dream. Their story is your story and after reading the book, you know something about yourself which you otherwise would not have known.
Risk-taking writers are my heroes, and Katherine Dunn is at the top of my list.
Her astonishing book Geek Love, a cult classic, defiantly celebrates the freakish and bizarre, tearing to shreds the subjective and culturally determined definitions of normality, intelligence, and beauty. Dive into Geek Love, and you’ll be traveling with the Binewski family, owners of the “Carnival Fabulon,” whose “special” offspring are prized for their money-making monstrous endowments.
In creating Oly, an albino hunchback, or her brother Arty, born with flippers, or Chick, with telekinetic powers, Dunn risks alienating readers by turning her characters into stereotypes, comic or horrid. Instead, she has written a haunting, humorous, and existentially relevant novel about Otherness, about the afflictions of family life—alternatively claustrophobic and competitive or caring and dear.
In the matrix of family, we learn who we are and how to love. I, too, am a writer driven to explore…
A National Book Award Finalist: This 'wonderfully descriptive' novel from an author with a 'tremendous imagination' tells the unforgettable story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater- and paterfamilias have bred their own exhibit of human oddities. (The New York Times Book Review)
The Binewskis arex a circus-geek family whose matriarch and patriarch have bred their own exhibit of human oddities (with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes). Their offspring include Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan, Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins, albino hunchback Oly, and…
I look to my bookshelf and can visit with old friends by the simple and profound act of reading. And by reading, I learn of myself and of others. These books have sharpened my attention to life’s particulars, are places of refuge, fortresses or encampments from which I/we can safely view the harsh realities and impenetrable riddles confronting us. Books create sparks. Sparks build into a fire.
The reasons for loving the books I listed below are many: The characters enchant, infuriate, and humble you. They inhabit your mind in a waking dream. Their story is your story and after reading the book, you know something about yourself which you otherwise would not have known.
The sonnets to her deceased father, Frank, sing of grief, despair, illness, but also of the miraculous ordinary, those lightning strikes of sudden joy or hilarity that somehow redeem us from the abyss.
Breath-takingly, Seuss is not afraid to mention the unmentionable, piss and squalor, poverty, and needles. The speaker in her poems, like the princess who found her name in my fairy tale, refuses to be domesticated and bound by values alien to her being.
In an age of conformity, what stands out about Seuss’s poetry is her compassion for the wayward, destructive, and ultimately transformative aspects of self. As a reader, I will follow her anywhere. Wherever she leads me, I will be newly awakened to the extraordinary.
A resplendent life in sonnets from the author of Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
"The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without," Diane Seuss writes in this brilliant, candid work, her most personal collection to date. These poems tell the story of a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, from Seuss's working-class childhood in rural Michigan to the dangerous allures of New York City and back again. With sheer virtuosity, Seuss moves nimbly across thought and time, poetry and punk, AIDS and addiction, Christ and motherhood, showing us…
This delightful fable about the Golden Age of Broadway unfolds the warm story of Artie, a young rehearsal pianist, Joe, a visionary director, and Carrie, his crackerjack Girl Friday, as they shepherd a production of a musical version of A Midsummer Night's Dream towards opening night.
I look to my bookshelf and can visit with old friends by the simple and profound act of reading. And by reading, I learn of myself and of others. These books have sharpened my attention to life’s particulars, are places of refuge, fortresses or encampments from which I/we can safely view the harsh realities and impenetrable riddles confronting us. Books create sparks. Sparks build into a fire.
The reasons for loving the books I listed below are many: The characters enchant, infuriate, and humble you. They inhabit your mind in a waking dream. Their story is your story and after reading the book, you know something about yourself which you otherwise would not have known.
What is a heroine’s journey, and how does it differ from Joseph Campbell’s ubiquitous description of the archetypal and mythopoetic hero’s journey?
Maria Tatar’s book acts as a corrective and a complement to the common assumption that heroic deeds are accomplished only by men. The heroine’s journey, Tatar insists, is inspired not by a desire for glory and immortality involving physical brawn and combat, but rather by a call to restore and repair what has been dissembled.
Heroines are driven by care and social justice, essentials for the survival of individuals and society, and their means involve the domestic arts of storytelling (Scheherazade), weaving (Penelope), cunning (Jane Eyre), curiosity, and courage (Nancy Drew).
How do we explain our newfound cultural investment in empathy and social justice? For decades, Joseph Campbell had defined our cultural aspirations in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, emphasising the value of seeking glory and earning immortality. His work became the playbook for Hollywood, with its many male-centric quest narratives.
Unsatisfied with Campbell's once-canonical work, Maria Tatar explores how heroines, rarely wielding a sword and deprived of a pen, have flown beneath the radar even as they have been bent on social missions. Using the domestic arts and storytelling skills, they have displayed audacity, curiosity and care as they…
As an editor, I worked with many authors before deciding to become one myself. Most of my twenty-five published books cover theatre and film, but I was especially excited to work on biographies of actors and try to get to the truth behind the public figures.
I wrote three books about my father, who became a star of the silent films during the 1920s and eventually appeared in 172 films over nearly six decades. In researching his life and work, I was astonished to find a very different man from the one I had lived with and known during my childhood and youth.
This extraordinarily candid memoir is about the complex relationship between the author and his businessman father, both of whom had a secret life.
A self-confessed gay man, young Joe spent much of his life searching for his Ideal Friend in the twilight of homosexual London, but never admitted as much to his father. And only after the latter’s death did his son discover that for many years he had maintained a mistress and their three daughters in a house in Barnes.
The author unravels this complicated tale with impressive honesty and compassion, charting his own feelings of inadequacy, waste, and loss, and lamenting the fact that both he and his father remained ignorant of each other’s hearts and minds.
NYRB CLASSICS: An adult son and acclaimed author offers a heartfelt gay memoir about uncovering his late father's secrets.
“A cross between Dickens's David Copperfield, Rousseau's Confessions, and the new pornography.” —Donald Windham, novelist and memoirist
When his father died, J. R. Ackerley was shocked to discover that he had led a secret life. And after Ackerley himself died, he left a surprise of his own—this coolly considered, unsparingly honest account of his quest to find out the whole truth about the man who had always eluded him in life.
But Ackerley's pursuit of his father is also an exploration…
As part of Gen X, I was raised by a strong mother and surrounded by steely southern women, transforming their lives from housewives to more liberated women during the turbulent 1970s as women’s rights and civil rights blossomed. I admired second-wave feminists like Gloria Steinem and attended women’s studies courses in college. I was steeped in change, optimism, and hope for a better world for all. But this awareness was rooted in a critical eye to the past injustices and an understanding that the personal is the political, and how women live their lives, what obstacles they face, and how they handle them, is a testament to their power at home and in society.
I was moved to tears reading about how Isabel Allende copes with her daughter’s coma in her memoir, Paula, a series of written letters telling her daughter about her own life and family history.
I was struck by how honest she was about her most vulnerable moments of despair when she was grieving and desperate for her daughter’s healing.
Allende’s reflections on her exile after the 1973 Chilean coup highlight the surreal nature of how we go through our daily lives when the world is literally falling apart around us in a larger political sense, and then she shows us how we cope when, on a much smaller scale, we lose the great loves of our lives.
When Isabel Allende's daughter, Paula, became gravely ill and fell into a coma, the author began to write the story of her family for her unconscious child. In the telling, bizarre ancestors appear before our eyes; we hear both delightful and bitter childhood memories, amazing anecdotes of youthful years, and the most intimate secrets passed along in whispers. With Paula, Allende has written a powerful autobiography whose straightforward acceptance of the magical and spiritual worlds will remind readers of her first book, The House of the Spirits.
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Lerner's memoir of approaching adulthood in the mid-sixties is deliciously readable, but deceptively breezy. His family is affluent, his school engaging, his friends smart and fun. He has his first car, and drives with abandon. The American moment promises unlimited possibility. But political and cultural upheavals are emerging, and irresistible.…
I have gone through the refugee experience, and it has shaped me. I grew up queer in Syria, became a man in Egypt, a refugee in Lebanon, then an author in Canada. At the expense of romanticizing something so deeply painful, I do believe that the experience has made me a better man. It matured me, offered me a deep connection with others within my community, and built an unmatched appreciation of my culture of home back in Syria and my culture of diaspora here in Canada. As a fiction writer, I am obsessed with writing queer stories about immigration.
I read this book back in 2018. As a Syrian writer, I was feeling quite lonely at the time, singular in the publishing community. Someone told me they heard about this book on NPR, and I jumped on it.
The book is a reversal of my own story. The author, a Syrian born in the US, travels back to Syria to search for her grandmother’s home. The observations feel authentic, and the storytelling feels meaningful. I was quite engrossed by the narrative; I could barely put the book down.
At the Arab Spring's hopeful start, Alia Malek returned to Damascus to reclaim her grandmother's apartment, which had been lost to her family since Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970. Its loss was central to her parent's decision to make their lives in America. In chronicling the people who lived in the Tahaan building, past and present, Alia portrays the Syrians-the Muslims, Christians, Jews, Armenians, and Kurds-who worked, loved, and suffered in close quarters, mirroring the political shifts in their country. Restoring her family's home as the country comes apart, she learns how to speak the coded language of…
When my son and son-in-law were getting married back in 2010, my cousin’s four-year-old daughter Emma was excited to be their flower girl. I wanted to buy Emma a book about a flower girl to prepare her for the wedding, but I couldn’t find anything that worked for our situation, since we were having two grooms and no bride—at an otherwise traditional Jewish wedding. Then one day, my cousin called, laughing, and said “Emma said she’s afraid to come to the wedding because of the Ring BEAR!” So I needed to write this for Emma—a story where everything isn’t what the child imagines, but it’s all joyful.
I love this beautiful new two-mommies book which features a little girl who misses a parent who is away on a work trip. That the parent happens to be one of her two moms is not at all the point, which is part of what makes this book so sweet and so relatable to any child who has ever achingly missed someone close.
A little girl stays home with Mama when Mummy goes off on a work trip in this tender, inviting story that will resonate with every child who has missed a parent. For one little girl, there's no place she'd rather be than sitting between Mama and Mummy. So when Mummy goes away on a work trip, it's tricky to find a good place at the table. As the days go by, Mama brings her to the library, they watch films, and all of them talk on the phone, but she still misses Mummy as deep as the ocean and as…
I'd like to claim that my expertise in these matters stems from the fact that I am a supernatural entity—and a funny one at that. But my origin’s more mundane; when I was growing up on a corn & soybean farm miles outside of a rural village, I became a voracious reader. I was always intrigued by writers who could explore a world outside the bounds of reality and do it with style. Over the years, I’ve been a short-order cook, a corn detasseler, a summer camp counselor, a college professor, and a middle-grade author, and I’ve learned that you can find a little magic anywhere if you look hard enough.
I loved Ellen Raskin’s much-lauded The Westing Game when I was nine years old, but I never got around to reading her 1974 middle-grade book Figgs & Phantoms, until recently. It’s a weird and whimsical story about family and grief with a magical realist touch.
Once a month, Mona Lisa Newton stands on the shoulders of her diminutive Uncle Florence Figg and dons a cloak to form the “Figg-Newton giant” so they can reach the rare not-for-sale books on the top shelf of a local bookstore. Their family has its own private mythology, including a version of heaven called Capri, and when a death occurs, Mona is determined to follow the clues and find it.
The text and illustrations manifest Raskin’s wry sense of humor, though some of the book’s mature themes might be too much for younger readers.
From the Newbery Award-winning author of THE WESTING GAME, more clever riddles and wordplay, clues to be found, and mysteries to be solved!
A Newbery Honor book
The Amazing Dancing Figgs! While Mona hates all the attention her eccentric relatives bring to her in town, there is one Figg family member she likes: her Uncle Florence, the book dealer. But Uncle Florence keeps hinting that he's going to find his way to Capri, the Figg family heaven. And that means leaving Mona behind. Can Mona find Capri before it's too late, or will she learn that things are seldom what…
I am a care aide (aka personal support worker) who has happily worked at an extended care facility for more than twenty years, and as such, I have been a compassionate listener to many a family member suffering from the tsunami of feelings involved when coping with aging parents or spouses, so I thought I would be well-positioned and emotionally prepared to cope when it was my turn to face my own mother's deterioration. How wrong I was! Thank goodness for the generous souls who write memoirs. Each of the books that I have chosen was an education and an affirmation to me as I tried to maintain my equilibrium while supporting my mother and my mother-in-law through their final years.
Most of us have complicated feelings about our parents, and Elizabeth Hay is no exception. The time Hay spends filling in the family back story pays off by making the elder-care journey more poignant and nuanced than a sparser portrait would have produced. I read this memoir at the height of my own care-taking marathon, and while I appreciated every gorgeous word, the whole book would have been worth it for this sentence alone: "Yes, I volunteered to take [the care of my aging parents] on, but there was never a moment when I didn't wish to be let off the hook." I breathed a huge sigh of relief: I am not a monster, and I am not the only one to feel that way. I still feel grateful for that sentence.
From Elizabeth Hay, one of Canada's beloved novelists, comes a startling and beautiful memoir about the drama of her parents' end, and the longer drama of being their daughter. Winner of the 2018 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonficiton.
Jean and Gordon Hay were a colourful, formidable pair. Jean, a late-blooming artist with a marvellous sense of humour, was superlatively frugal; nothing got wasted, not even maggoty soup. Gordon was a proud and ambitious schoolteacher with a terrifying temper, a deep streak of melancholy, and a devotion to flowers, cars, words, and his wife. As old age collides with…
