Here are 100 books that Love in Infant Monkeys fans have personally recommended if you like
Love in Infant Monkeys.
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As a fiction writer and animal studies scholar, I’m always looking for strange historical anecdotes about human/animal relationships and literary works that help me view humanity’s complex historical relationship with our fellow creatures through fresh eyes. As these books show, whenever humans write about animals, we also write about personhood, bodily autonomy, coexistence, partnership, symbiosis, spectacle, sentience, and exploitation—themes perpetually relevant to what it means to be human!
This book immediately caught my eye with its cheeky Prince quote-as-title, then blew me away with Passarello’s meticulously researched, elegantly crafted essays, each centering around a different animal from world history.
Passarello’s prose is lyrical, whether she’s dramatizing Mozart’s creative correspondence with his pet starling, introducing us to “Mike, the headless chicken,” or whimsically “finishing” Christopher Smart’s famed 18th-century paean to his beloved cat Jeoffry.
Reading this book feels like visiting a combination zoo/museum with my smartest animal-loving friend.
Beginning with Yuka, a 39,000 year old mummified woolly mammoth recently found in the Siberian permafrost, each of the 16 essays in Animals Strike Curious Poses investigates a different famous animal named and immortalized by humans. Modeled loosely after a medieval bestiary, these witty, playful, whipsmart essays traverse history, myth, science, and more, bringing each beast vibrantly to life.
Elena Passarello is an actor, a writer, and recipient of a 2015 Whiting Fellowship in nonfiction. Her first collection with Sarabande Books, Let Me Clear My Throat, won the gold medal for nonfiction at the 2013 Independent Publisher Awards. She lives…
In River City, loyalty is everything—and nothing defines it more than warcheck, the elegantly violent game that unites the town.
Terra Laclem, daughter of a retired warcheck legend, is raised to honor family, faith, and tradition. But when her father betrays the ideals he’s always preached, Terra is forced to…
I grew up in a family of church singers. As a young man, I studied poetry and piano, literature and guitar, listening to Hank Williams and reading William Faulkner while dreaming of becoming a Nashville songwriter. Eventually, I performed as a singer-songwriter myself on three continents, so it’s entirely honest to say that music, language, and stories have always been the fabric of my life. These novels represent everything I love about music and how it connects us—to people, to worlds beyond—and I hope you find them just as meaningful (and occasionally heartwrenching) as I have.
I can think of few books in the English language with more music in the prose. Certainly, I could describe how devastating it was to journey through this story of madness, radical artistic talent, and the birth of jazz. And yes, I could describe how Buddy Bolden’s very existence seems as heartwrenching as the cornet notes he plays.
But really, for me, it’s the music of Ondaatje’s language—not the song lyrics printed on the page, but the rhythm and poetry that transforms the story into its own tragic song. It’s an absolute wonder.
Discover Michael Ondaatje's debut novel, 'a beautifully detailed story, perhaps the finest jazz novel ever written' Sunday Times
Based on the life of cornet player Buddy Bolden, one of the legendary jazz pioneers of turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans, Coming Through Slaughter is an extraordinary recreation of a remarkable musical life and a tragic conclusion. Through a collage of memoirs, interviews, imaginary conversations and monologues, Ondaatje builds a picture of a man who would work by day at a barber shop and by night unleash his talent to wild audiences who had never experienced such playing. But Buddy was also playing the…
I grew up in a culture that both fears and embraces spirits or outrightly rejects the idea that spirits live on beyond death. I grew up on stories of rolling calves and duppies that caused havoc among the living. Since then, I’ve been fascinated by what haunts us—whether it be our familial spirits that float among the living and continue to play a role in our lives, our memories, or our past actions. I’ve written three books that play with this idea of past actions lingering long into the characters’ lives and returning in unexpected ways.
Even though I grew up in Jamaica, which is about 334 miles from Haiti, I knew nothing about the 1937 Parsley Massacre, during which thousands of Haitians were executed under the orders of Dominican President Rafael Trujillo.
This book blends the personal love story of Amabelle and Sebastien with the history and politics of that time. I came away from this book with a greater understanding of survival, racism in the Caribbean, and the power of memory.
It is 1937, and Amabelle Desir is a young Haitian woman working as a maid for a wealthy family in the Dominican Republic, across the border from her homeland. The Republic, under the iron rule of the Generalissimo, treats the Haitians as second-class citizens, and although Amabelle feels a strong sense of loyalty to her employers, especially since her own parents drowned crossing the river from Haiti, racial tensions are heightened when Amabelle's boss accidentally kills a Haitian in a car accident. The accident is a catalyst for a systematic round-up of Haitians, ostensibly for repatriation but in fact a…
A quiet, unsettling literary fiction novel about damaged outsiders finding each other. Ideal for fans of Never Let Me Go, Atonement, or The Virgin Suicides. From a BAFTA-winning screenwriter, now returning to novel writing.
In 1986, with Chernobyl smouldering on the news and the Cold War casting a…
I spent most of my life as a professor of mathematics at the University of Vienna, faithful to my first boyish infatuation. Yet, I always had an eye for the dangerous charms of philosophy. In the end, I succumbed and wrote The Waltz of Reason, convinced that the countless interactions of mathematics and philosophy provide the greatest adventure stories of reason, the scientific sagas which will remain as the most enduring and the most romantic account of humanity’s progress.
This book is a novel, unabashedly. It describes the lives of our old friend Humboldt and the math genius Karl Friedrich Gauss, culminating in their 1828 encounter in Berlin.
This meeting is a well-documented fact. Not everything else is. Daniel Kehlmann takes his liberties with history. He even boasts of his leger-de-main, like Alexandre Dumas.
The overall outcome is splendidly funny and uncannily wise. The cap-stone irony is that the most implausible episodes of the book are not the ones that the author invented.
Measuring the World recreates the parallel but contrasting lives of two geniuses of the German Enlightenment - the naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt and the mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss. Towards the end of the 18th century, these two brilliant young Germans set out to measure the world.
Humboldt, a Prussian aristocrat schooled for greatness, negotiates savannah and jungle, climbs the highest mountain then known to man, counts head lice on the heads of the natives, and explores every hole in the ground.
Gauss, a man born in poverty who will be recognised as the greatest mathematician since…
Three of my five novels have largely tragic historical settings—the siege of Leningrad, the Great Flood of 1927, and Hurricane Katrina—and I’ve always been fascinated and awed by how people survive the things they do. The origin of “May you live in interesting times” is disputed, but undoubtedly it's more curse than blessing. I’m also just fascinated by the way writers bring real people and events to life in new ways. As the daughter of scientists, I’m often drawn to works of fiction that feature scientists, real or invented.
I’m the daughter of two scientists, and this book was deeply important to me when I first read it. It helped me understand my parents’ passion for and pursuit of botanical knowledge. Many of the characters in this collection (a novella and stories) are fictional botanists, but historical figures appear in several stories. For instance, “The English Pupil” features an elderly Carl Linnaeus and explores themes of botany and regret.
The elegant short fictions gathered hereabout the love of science and the science of love are often set against the backdrop of the nineteenth century. Interweaving historical and fictional characters, they encompass both past and present as they negotiate the complex territory of ambition, failure, achievement, and shattered dreams. In "Ship Fever," the title novella, a young Canadian doctor finds himself at the center of one of history's most tragic epidemics. In "The English Pupil," Linnaeus, in old age, watches as the world he organized within his head slowly drifts beyond his reach. And in "The Littoral Zone," two marine…
As a fiction writer and animal studies scholar, I’m always looking for strange historical anecdotes about human/animal relationships and literary works that help me view humanity’s complex historical relationship with our fellow creatures through fresh eyes. As these books show, whenever humans write about animals, we also write about personhood, bodily autonomy, coexistence, partnership, symbiosis, spectacle, sentience, and exploitation—themes perpetually relevant to what it means to be human!
Colin Dayan’s book is a memoir of her 1960s Southern childhood, so lushly described that I can smell the magnolias. Using the fauna of her youth as touchstones, Dayan’s interrogations of race, gender, and place illuminate how Americans treat animals and each other.
Her research into the song “The Old Gray Mare” becomes a meditation on female aging and filial tension. Photographs of the violent bullfights her parents enjoyed on their honeymoon seem prescient considering their doomed marriage.
Meanwhile, Lucille, Dayan’s African-American nanny, forms the book’s emotional core. She takes her young charge, Possum, hunting while teaching her how unfairly humankind excludes beings they deem “less-than.”
Colin Dayan meditates on the connection between her personal and family history and her relationship with animals in this lyrical memoir about her upbringing in the South. Unraveling memories alongside family documents and photographs, Animal Quintet takes a raw look at racial tensions and relations in a region struggling to change while providing a disquieting picture of a childhood accessible only through accounts of the non-human, ranging from famed Southern war horses led by Civil War generals and doomed Spanish fighting bulls to the lowly possum hunted by generations of Southerners. Placing the reader in the mind's eye of a…
As a fiction writer and animal studies scholar, I’m always looking for strange historical anecdotes about human/animal relationships and literary works that help me view humanity’s complex historical relationship with our fellow creatures through fresh eyes. As these books show, whenever humans write about animals, we also write about personhood, bodily autonomy, coexistence, partnership, symbiosis, spectacle, sentience, and exploitation—themes perpetually relevant to what it means to be human!
Grounded in philosophy and law, Thalia Field’s book explores how human/animal relationships are codified by human systems. Like Field’s other ecocritical work, this one is formally bold, blurring the lines between lyric essay and poetry.
I am particularly intrigued by 'Happy/That You Have The Body (The Mirror Test),' where Field uses the legal concept of habeas corpus and the Mirror Self-Recognition test to discuss the rights of a captive elephant named Happy, isolated from her own kind for 40 years.
This book is exactly the kind of animal writing I love because each piece asks loudly why “some animals are more equal than others.”
Whether investigating refugee parrots, indentured elephants, the pathetic fallacy, or the revolving absurdity of the human role in the "invasive species crisis," Personhood reveals how the unmistakable problem between humans and our nonhuman relatives is too often the derangement of our narratives and the resulting lack of situational awareness. Building on her previous collection, Bird Lovers, Backyard, Thalia Field's essayistic investigations invite us on a humorous, heartbroken journey into how people attempt to control the fragile complexities of a shared planet. The lived experiences of animals, and other historical actors, provide unique literary-ecological responses to the exigencies of injustice and…
As a fiction writer and animal studies scholar, I’m always looking for strange historical anecdotes about human/animal relationships and literary works that help me view humanity’s complex historical relationship with our fellow creatures through fresh eyes. As these books show, whenever humans write about animals, we also write about personhood, bodily autonomy, coexistence, partnership, symbiosis, spectacle, sentience, and exploitation—themes perpetually relevant to what it means to be human!
Hannah Tinti’s debut collection is a darkly funny book of stories about how people coexist with animals. The stories are both harrowing and heartfelt. Her sense of humor is just the right level of disturbing for me.
Slim’s Last Ride, the bizarre tale of a little boy convinced his pet rabbit can fly, narrated by his equally unwell mother, realistically depicts mental illness and dysfunction.
How To Revitalize the Snake in Your Life is an icy revenge fable involving an ex-boyfriend’s abandoned snake, repurposed as dinner.
Unlike my other picks, many animals in this one are inconvenient, unwanted, or misunderstood by their human companions, leading to tension and danger.
A zoo worker, cautiously washing down Marysue the elephant, thinks of the strange, grim stories his co-workers have told him about their lives. Giraffes in another zoo demand better living conditions and stage a mock group suicide to attract public notice. A girl escapes her repressive finishing school by running off with her lover to the African jungle but takes longer to give the slip to the private detectives hired by her father. Hannah Tinti s debut collection combines the virtues of traditional story-telling with utter freshness and modernity. Snake or dog, buffalo or turkey, the animals in her brilliant,…
I come from a family of eaters. Food was often at the center of family stories and celebrations. I first became fascinated with apples while I was working on my Ph.D. in history, and my interest has since expanded to include all things related to food history. I’ve taught classes on food history, and a few years ago, I started collecting cookbooks. I blog about my cookbook collection and other historical food oddities on my website.
This book is delightful. Shapiro is one of my favorite food historians. I recommend all her books, but if you’ve never read her before, start here.
It’s full of surprising and unexpected stories. Eleanor Roosevelt extracts culinary revenge, Eva Braun drinks champagne while worrying about her weight, and Helen Gurley Brown binges on sugar-free gelatin. These stories left me thinking about my own relationship with food and what that says about the society we live in.
'If you find the subject of food to be both vexing and transfixing, you'll love What She Ate' Elle
Did you know that Eleanor Roosevelt dished up Eggs Mexican (a concoction of rice, fried eggs, and bananas) in the White House?
Or that Helen Gurley Brown's commitment to 'having it all' meant dining on supersized portions of diet gelatine?
In the irresistible What She Ate, Laura Shapiro examines the plates, recipe books and shopping trolleys of six extraordinary women, from Dorothy Wordsworth to Eva Braun. Delving into diaries, newspaper articles, cook books and more, Shapiro casts a different light on…
I grew up in Bordeaux, a city that became prominent during the eighteenth century. My hometown inspired my love of eighteenth-century French studies, which led me to the Sorbonne, then to Yale University where I earned a PhD. Today, I am an Associate Professor at The Ohio State University. I am the author of eight novels and monographs published in France and the US, including American Pandemonium, Posthumous America, and Sentinel Island. My work explores numerous genres to question a number of recurring themes: exile and the representation of otherness; nostalgia and the experience of bereavement; the social impact of new technologies; America’s history and its troubled present.
Antoine Lilti’s ground-breaking study about celebrity demonstrates that a phenomenon we generally associate with modern culture and cinema has much older roots: roots that go back to eighteenth-century Europe. Thanks to the rise of the press and the development of new advertising techniques, such figures as Voltaire, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Marie-Antoinette, or Napoléon saw their private lives on public display and learned to navigate the privileges and pitfalls of a new form of social prestige. Elegantly written and accessible to non-specialists, this book is particularly useful to differentiate between forms of public recognition that are connected but ultimately distinct, such as glory, reputation, celebrity, and posterity. The work of a major historian of eighteenth-century France,The Invention of Celebrityexplains why the age of Enlightenment was a laboratory in which our modern sense of self was invented, while also uncovering the origins of our longing…
Frequently perceived as a characteristic of modern culture, the phenomenon of celebrity has much older roots. In this book Antoine Lilti shows that the mechanisms of celebrity were developed in Europe during the Enlightenment, well before films, yellow journalism, and television, and then flourished during the Romantic period on both sides of the Atlantic. Figures from across the arts like Voltaire, Garrick, and Liszt were all veritable celebrities in their time, arousing curiosity and passionate loyalty from their fans. The rise of the press, new advertising techniques, and the marketing of leisure brought a profound transformation in the visibility of…
