Books like Heartbreak Tango — picked by fans

How is a person like a novel? Both, at their core, are made of stories. Both, at their core, are the way in which various stories are imagined to hang together. But the nexus of stories at the core of a person is written in the brain (wordlessness), which is always in flux, changeable, and incomplete, forever before words and on the verge of being totally lost.

The nexus of stories at the core of a novel, on the other hand, is written in nothing other than words; as such, it makes manifest a disembodied, complete (i.e., fictive) person—a person invulnerable to death. A novel is what a person is forever wanting to turn into.  

Eva Saulitis’ gorgeous book is a meditation on how humanity has wounded nature and how those wounds manifested in her own body as she lived with breast cancer till the end of her truncated life. Widely published as both a poet and a marine biologist who studied orca whales, Eva Saulitis spins together lyrical phrasing with her deep knowledge of science.

The language is stunning, even more remarkable when the reader remembers that she is recording her thoughts when she knows they will soon come to an inevitable end. Here’s an example of her beautiful writing when Saulitis recalls her childhood by the Great Lakes: “Lake Erie could be untamed, wild, a shape-shifter. Midwinter, it froze into a sastrugi-chiseled white expanse, the shoreline berg-choked.”

André Breton’s book is a patchwork of literary forms, crazy-quilted together to form an amazing image of the world during World War II. At that time, Breton was in exile from Nazi-occupied France, and he visited Quebec in Canada to experience again the comfort and familiarity of being in a French-speaking land.

The book is part poetry and part prose, sometimes a journal, at other times a political meditation, and then a series of stories from mythology and the mystic Tarot. Breton’s ultimate take on living through a world war for the second time is that our daily existence needs to be re-impassioned to prevent violence from becoming the alternative to the mundane. I was fortunate to translate this classic from French to English. 

When it comes to writing and reading history, I’m particularly partial to the “group portrait.” Don’t get me wrong—I love a good biography of a single person—but there’s just something about telling the story of multiple people in the same position or movement that really makes for a dynamic story.

This book sheds light on the remarkable story of the Black women nurses who cared for the poorest victims of New York’s tuberculosis epidemic of the 1930s. It’s a deeply researched and caringly written tale showing the dedication and persistence of some of the most important, yet underappreciated medical professionals in history.  

Life Beside Itself is a startling book not only because of what it reveals about the history of settler-colonial government care imposed upon Arctic communities during the tuberculosis crisis (1940-60s) and the suicide crisis (1980s onwards) but for the raw emotional proximity that it provides to the individuals whose lives were changed by policies that, ironically, were derived from care itself.

It is a well-researched book that unnerved me with the haunting emotional intimacies its ethnographic and imagistic approach brought through the pages. The intractable longing of a young man waiting each year at the harbour for the ship, the C.D. Howe, that took his grandmother away to a southern hospital is just one of the things in this book that wounds its readers by recounting different forms of care.

Stephen Crane is most famous for his 1893 novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, but it is his lost companion novel, about a male sex worker in late nineteenth-century New York, which is the focus of Edmund White’s Hotel de Dream. White moves between a frame story about Crane’s last days with his “wife” Cora and the story of Elliott, the supposed inspiration for the manuscript. I’m a New Yorker by choice so love reading books set in the city and I very much enjoyed this gritty portrayal of love and sex between men in the past. Crane isn’t the only writer who makes an appearance here—there’s a cameo from Henry James too!

This contemporary retelling of The Secret Garden sets the story in a closed-down tuberculosis sanitarium. Roo's journey to uncover the mysteries of the house and bring life to the garden tucked away inside it unfolds beautifully on the page. With well-developed characters, a deeply haunting revelation, and a setting that springs to life with vivid detail, this was a great take on a classic.

This nonfiction book on tuberculosis, published the same year as my book, begins with the discovery of a skull marked by the scars of tuberculosis. Turns out it belonged to a young man who died over 500,000 years ago from the disease. The authors trace the devastating effects of tuberculosis to modern day when our drugs can no longer fully guarantee treatment. This book tells a fascinating, yet worrisome, story about a most dreaded disease.

I *adore* Katherine Mansfield’s work. She wrote short stories, not novels.

She was still rather young when she died of tuberculosis. Her portrayals of love, family, and especially of children, are for me gloriously wonderful with insight and perceptiveness about relationships. From the New Zealand settings of many of her stories (where she was born and grew up), she emigrated to London, then to France (where she received medical treatment for TB), and Switzerland (also for treatment for TB—unsuccessful).

She seems to me a lonely genius—perceiving deeply not only other persons (of many sorts) on whom she modeled her short stories but also herself. Her seemingly idyllic childhood in NZ is perhaps the core source of her accomplishment—especially the novellas At the Bay and Prelude. But her adult life was difficult and she seems to have been uncertain about her writing, even though to me she seems a genius… show more.

This 1974 book, by the founder of one of the world’s great picture libraries, was a real eye-opener to me when I first read it. We are all nostalgic and look at the past through rose-tinted glasses, and so do I. But then we forget about the hunger and the crime, tuberculosis, smallpox and heaps of trash on the streets, the child labor, and the despair of the aged. This richly illustrated book, with its multitude of stories, set me straight. For instance, did you know that New York had 150,000 horses in 1900, each producing around 20 pounds of manure a day? The past stank. It makes you deeply grateful for science, technology, and economic growth.