Books like frank — picked by fans

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.

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… show more.

Michael Cunningham is an author empathically attuned to the travails of individual souls trapped by the external circumstances of their lives.

Flesh and Blood is his masterpiece about the hidden desperation seething within families and the crushing transgenerational legacy of class and the immigrant experience. 

Constantine Stassos, a Greek-American and family patriarch, is determined to live out the American Dream. The novel unfolds over his lifetime and explores the emotional and physical costs on his children and wife to simultaneously embrace and reject the entrapment of rigid family values. 

Cunningham explores societal issues of gay rights, the AIDS epidemic, suicide, and depression with great sensitivity in prose that elevates and illuminates the human struggle against loneliness and isolation. 

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).

In line after line, Gilbert proves that poetry—more than any other medium—has the power to fully encapsulate the human condition and express emotions that very often seem beyond the power of speech.

I read this book as a lament and elegy. The title poem charts her mother’s descent into dementia and death, all recounted with a journalist’s sense of detail and an artist’s sense of compassion. I love the way her deft handling of form—in this case, a sonnet sequence—drags the reader into the slow decline.

The fourteen poems create sort of a meta (or mega) sonnet, with the last line of one poem repeated or echoed in the first line of the next. Every page has a line or phrase that stops me cold—I just have to reread it and let it fully sink in. Gilbert is well known for her books of feminist criticism, but in my view,… show more.

I have always had old-fashioned tastes when it comes to poetry, and sonnets in particular are a form I have been attracted to. This anthology has the best sonnets from Chaucer to contemporary poets, a real education in the form, and one of my favourites here is by e.e. cummings, titled “I like my body when it is with your body.”

Marilyn Nelson’s poetry is staggeringly good, particularly the way she writes formal poems—sonnets!—in a humble voice, like her sonnet “From an Alabama Farmer.” Nelson’s poem “To the Confederate Dead,” with its epigraph by Allen Tate is a better poem than Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead,” with which it is in conversation. Nelson’s ‘wreath’ of sonnets, “A Wreath for Emmett Till,” is simply sublime.

This book once again shows that dead white men do not hold a monopoly on great formalist verse. Espaillat hails from the Dominican Republic, and Spanish is her first language.

Many of the poems in this book deal directly with the difficulties, ambiguities, and opportunities of straddling two languages and cultures—particularly the troubling association with colonialism and imperialism inherent in both English and Spanish (conquistadors, anyone?).

I admire her easy handling of traditional forms—sonnets are apparently her favorite. What I love most is how these poems behave like the poems we knew as children, with satisfying rhyme and meter, while entertaining the themes we ponder as adults—power, history, exile, and language itself.

I find it interesting that this book—her first—was published relatively late in her life; perhaps that’s why it marries the energy of an author’s first book with the wisdom and understanding of an author’s last. 

Every time I wade into a play or see a production, I discover the language that describes the human condition perfectly. Pithy moments of insight juxtaposed and embedded in meaningful testimonies of why we do the things we do. As a writer, I believe there is no better teacher of the magic of the English language.

As a fan of Catholic history and historical fiction, this story is surely one of my favorites. Set during the Great War, WWI, twenty-one-year-old Julia has her heart set on meeting her future husband. She makes and purchases expensive gifts for him–she's ready. Surely, she will meet her beloved soon.

When Julia is sent overseas with the Red Cross, she finds herself caring for injured soldiers in a field hospital in France. As she matures, Julia begins giving the gifts she'd made or purchased to the injured soldiers. A touching addition to this book was the addition of beautiful sonnets between Julia and her beloved.