Here are 100 books that Litany for the Long Moment fans have personally recommended if you like
Litany for the Long Moment.
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COVID killed my father early on during the pandemic. Every day, I blogged about him. First, when he was in the ICU and I was begging the universe to save him. Then, after he died, as I grieved in a world that seemed cold and lonely. I wrote about Dad, telling stories of happier times, to keep him alive through my memories and to share his life with others. Soon, friends started recommending books about grief. In reading, feeling, and absorbing the pain of others, I somehow felt less alone.
A friend recommended this book to me when I was blogging about my Dad’s death. I took his advice and I’m glad I did.
In the wake of my dad dying, I felt disjointed from the world, and it felt as if nothing was real, as if I was living in an altered reality.
In reading The Year of Magical Thinking, I was able to take comfort from Joan Didion. Even though her circumstances were different, I was able to relate to her experience.
From one of America's iconic writers, a portrait of a marriage and a life - in good times and bad - that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. A stunning book of electric honesty and passion.
Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill. At first they thought it was flu, then pneumonia, then complete sceptic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later - the night before New Year's Eve -the Dunnes were just…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
After my dad died, I didn’t know where to turn. People felt uncomfortable talking to a seventeen-year-old girl about her dead dad. They felt even more uncomfortable talking to me about it one, two, ten years later. Still, I couldn’t, can’t, stop thinking about it. I turned, then, to books. These books made and make me feel seen. They aren’t about “moving on” or “letting go” but the ways in which leaning into grief’s deep well connects us to love’s true depths. These books are honest and pure, and if you don’t know what to say to a friend who’s mourning, let these authors speak for you.
Joy might not be the first thing you think of when
considering grief, but then maybe you haven’t read Ross Gay.
Gay understands
that joy exists because of grief, not as a counterbalance, but in a deeply
reciprocal relationship. As his father is dying, he presses their faces
together, and in his father’s freckles, he sees seeds, a garden. It is just one
instance in this book where Gay recognizes that what grows from loss is love.
His book clarifies what I know to be true: that when we fall into the hole of
loss, we find ourselves in a deep well of love.
A collection of gorgeously written and timely pieces in which prize-winning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life's inevitable hardships.
In "We Kin" he thinks about the garden (especially around August, when the zucchini and tomatoes come on) as a laboratory of mutual aid; in "Share Your Bucket" he explores skate-boarding's reclamation of public space; he considers the costs of masculinity in "Grief Suite"; and in "Through My Tears I Saw," he recognizes what was healed in caring for his father as he was dying.
I’m only a writer because I was a musician first. I worshiped music—as a performer, listener, and later a critic—for its ability to enshrine me in a purely emotional world. My favorite lyrics were poetry in motion; my favorite melodies escaped description. And through sharing my feverish acclamations of particular albums and songs, I found community with others who also pledged themselves to art that’d definitively split their lives into “before” and “after.” My writing career was born from cathartic devotion and remains devoted to recounting the rapture of self-formation, of being reflected in the mirror of something that saw you before you even knew to see yourself.
I was so moved by Hua Hsu’s memoir, an elegy to a college best friend whose shocking murder forever haunts him, because it spoke to a certain kind of young friendship. One of the things that bound Hsu to Ken was the art they did (and didn’t) like but which they always talked about.
I was reminded of the chance encounters of my most important friendships—the Sunday nights spent watching Mad Men in a dorm room or the hours spent swapping Photoshop edits of anime characters—and transported back to those days of limitless dreaming. How big the world seemed then, and how much art we were so desperate to make for, and about, each other.
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art, by the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu
“This book is exquisite and excruciating and I will be thinking about it for years and years to come.” —Rachel Kushner, New York Times bestselling author of The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room
In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken—with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity—is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
After my dad died, I didn’t know where to turn. People felt uncomfortable talking to a seventeen-year-old girl about her dead dad. They felt even more uncomfortable talking to me about it one, two, ten years later. Still, I couldn’t, can’t, stop thinking about it. I turned, then, to books. These books made and make me feel seen. They aren’t about “moving on” or “letting go” but the ways in which leaning into grief’s deep well connects us to love’s true depths. These books are honest and pure, and if you don’t know what to say to a friend who’s mourning, let these authors speak for you.
This book is a cold-water plunge: shocking, disorienting yet grounding, a reminder of the body and its limits.
In recounting the death of her son, Naja Marie Aidt explicitly invokes Didion (as well as Anne Carson, C.S. Lewis, and Nick Cave), wrestling with the inability of language to hold grief. She returns to the death scene again and again, like a stitch through the book.
Each refrain adds more context and pushes us further into the moment before digressing, ruminating, and exploding the narrative. The book is a lyric essay, written in fragments, because Aidt understands this, in the end, is what we’re left with.
'Extraordinary. It is about death, but I can think of few books which have such life. It shows us what love is.' Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing With Feathers and Lanny
'There is no one quite like Naja Marie Aidt' Valeria Luiselli
'Devastating, angry, challenging, fragmented and filled with the beautiful hope that the love we have for people continues into the world even after they're gone.' Culturefly
'Fragmented, poetic, informative and truthful, Aidt faces the greatest loss we can ever know with all the force of great elegy writers like Anne Carson and Denise Riley. Essential.'…
I wrote this book to give my mother an alternate life. She was a mother at age fifteen, mother of five by twenty-seven, and a grandmother by thirty-three. Being a parent defined her life, but she did not enjoy motherhood and was very frank on the subject. Thanks, Universe is my way of giving Mom her freedom and even though she never read anything I wrote, I like to think she would have approved of Pauline and the choices she made.
A contemporary family saga, this book highlights the struggles of mothers and the difficult choices they face to keep their children safe.
A nature vs. nurture story that contains shocks and surprises and will bring you to tears. The structure is interesting as the reader knows more about what’s going on than the three main characters, creating suspense and tension.
What happens when two sisters who were torn apart when their young mother abandoned them-and grew up in tragically different circumstances-reunite thirty-five years later to find her? For readers who love Jodi Picoult, acclaimed author Amy Hatvany fearlessly explores complex family issues in her gripping, provocative new novel.
Natalie Clark knew never to ask her sensitive adoptive mother questions about her past. She doesn't even know her birth mother's name-only that the young woman signed parental rights over to the state when Natalie was a baby. Now Natalie's own daughter must complete a family tree project for school, and Natalie…
As a Korean transracial adoptee, it seems like I’ve always been thinking about family, or even if I didn’t want to, other people’s intrusive questions about my family makeup forced me to. More than solely thinking about my own family–whether my Korean biological family or my white adoptive family–it led me to be curious about the broader systems, policies, and practices behind something that seems so personal and private. It’s no surprise that I formalized my inquiry into the social world by becoming a sociologist and professor. As a sociologist, my primary research interests are race, identity, and belonging, and yes, Korean transnational transracial adoption is part of that focus.
I vaguely remember hearing about the tragedy of the Hart children–six Black and mixed-race children who were adopted out of foster care and killed by their two white adoptive mothers. I wasn’t aware of all of the intricate details of their case or the foster care system that allowed this to happen.
I am in awe of Roxanna’s investigative journalism and the nuance and empathy in which she tells this story. While it is the Hart story that’s at the center of this book, I learned so much more about the child welfare system overall and how it’s set up to promote child separation. Heartbreaking.
“A riveting indictment of the child welfare system . . . [A] bracing gut punch of a book.” ―Robert Kolker, The Washington Post
“[A] moving and superbly reported book.” ―Jessica Winter, The New Yorker
“A harrowing account . . . [and] a powerful critique of [the] foster care system . . . We Were Once a Family is a wrenching book.” ―Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
The shocking, deeply reported story of a murder-suicide that claimed the lives of six children―and a searing indictment of the American foster care system.
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I’m fascinated by our connections to animals, our similarities and differences, and how we communicate. Large mammals have always been my favorites, but like many people, I started noticing birds in my backyard during the pandemic lockdowns. As an author of middle-grade novels, my stories have been inspired by something interesting I’ve learned about a particular animal. I started writing my novel after learning that whooping cranes had nested in Texas for the first time in over a century. I knew I had to give that momentous nest sighting to a bird-loving girl who’d appreciate the visitation by these rare and majestic birds!
This book has so many of my favorite things—laughter and tears on the same page, a character with a strong connection to an animal, and a funny, caring, resilient kid who’s wrestling with a difficult decision.
I enjoy seeing characters who cause their own problems, like Coop does when he derails his basketball plans by climbing a tree to check out a bird's nest! I also love it when antagonists aren’t villains; Coop and his family might be at odds about what he should do with his mockingbird, but they’re loving parents and grandparents.
I cheered for Coop to discover where he fits in, and he's a character I’ll remember long after closing the book.
Coretta Scott King Honor winner Brenda Woods's poignant, heartfelt story of an adopted boy and the bird he rescues
Everyone expects Coop to be musical like his beloved parents, but he's not. That's one of the few things he finds awkward about being adopted-well, that and the fact that he sometimes wonders why his birth mother didn't love him enough to keep him. This summer, he's stuck at home with a broken arm after falling out of a tree trying to get a closer peek at a mockingbird nest. Later, when the eggs in the nest have hatched and the…
I am an adoptive mom twice, both in open arrangements where we maintain lifelong contact with our children’s birth moms and birth dads. My husband and I had little guidance to navigate the complexity of raising adopted children. I do not want others to be ill-prepared, as fortunately for the children, most adoptions today are open. We followed our instincts and looking back, we got a lot right, but we sure could have used some help with the tougher challenges. I am beyond grateful for my journey and I write to give back by sharing our story to help others who come after me.
This book is the ONE book that would have helped me the most in the early days after I brought my adopted baby home from the hospital. My beautiful, healthy three-day-old baby was unhappy, fussy, and cried all the time. Little did I know that she was missing her birth mom. I was told by the adoption counselors that this baby was a clean slate, and I would do all the loving and nurturing and could raise her as if I gave birth to her.
Verrier explained so much about how the wound that my child still carries with her today affects her behaviors. And she also gave me hope and insights that acknowledging the wound can lead to healing and hope even when the trauma cannot be erased.
The Primal Wound is a seminal work which revolutionizes the way we think about adoption. It describes and clarifies the effects of separating babies from their birth mothers as a primal loss which affects the relationships of the adopted person throughout life.. It is a book about pre-and perinatal psychology, attachment, bonding, and loss. It gives adoptees, whose pain has long been unacknowledged or misunderstood, validation for their feelings, as well as explanations for their behavior. It lists the coping mechanisms which adoptees use to be able to attach and live in a family to whom they are not related…
I don’t know how much of who we are is determined by genetics, and how much is from the environment, but I enjoy using characters and stories to explore the question. My scientific and medical background allows me to pull from my training, clinical patients, and scientific studies to create stories that explore characters who are at the precipice of a problem and need to fight against their inner beliefs to learn who they truly are. It’s like a chess game, moving the pieces around the board to see which side will win!
I love the title, and the story takes off immediately after.
Three siblings, all put up for adoption, who have different families and meet for the first time as teenagers. I love how Benway explores the importance of blood relatives and how, most times, a found family may be more important.
But it’s the characters of this novel that are the true stars. They are emotionally raw and, at times, heartbreaking individuals who learn about who they are.
WINNER OF THE U.S. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2017 FOR YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE!
'Sometimes, family hurts each other. But after that's done you bandage each other up, and you move on. Together. So you can go and think that you're some lone wolf, but you're not. You've got us now, like it or not, and we've got you.'
When 16 year-old Grace gives up her baby for adoption, she decides that the time has come to find out more about her own biological mother. Although her biological mum proves elusive, her search leads her to two half-siblings she never knew existed.…
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’m fascinated by these themes – love, France, mystery, women’s lives, war, and peace. My parents took me to France when I was 12 and I’ve spent years there in between and go back whenever I can. I started reading in French when sent to be an au pair in Switzerland when I was 17. My own novel, The Lost Love Letters Of Henri Fournier was absorbing to write as it contains all of the above. I found an unpublished novel of Fournier’s in a village in rural France a few years ago and decided I had to write about him and his lover, Pauline, who was a famous French actress.
Although it begins in California, this novel develops into a story set in France. Two sisters, separated by their father after a violent incident, search for each other and eventually connect via a French recluse, whose life one sister is researching. I love Michael Ondaatje’s writing and this book in particular for its daring sweep of geographical and emotional territory.
It is the 1970s in Northern California. A farmer and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work the land with the help of Coop, the enigmatic young man who lives with them. Theirs' is a makeshift family, until they are riven by an incident of violence - of both hand and heart - that 'sets fire to the rest of their lives'. This is a story of possession and loss, about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory. Written in the sensuous prose for which Michael Ondaatje's fiction is celebrated, "Divisadero" is the work of a master story-teller.
