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…
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 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,…
Reading historical mysteries with a touch of romance is a delicious chocolate dessert after a day of work. I’m the author of 16 romantic suspense novels. Why not double the excitement with both romance and mystery/suspense. I began reading mysteries because my mother read them. Once I’d read all the Nancy Drews, I moved on to Erle Stanley Gardner and Agatha Christie. I wrote a few mystery manuscripts that remain in a box in the attic, but then all-grown-up me discovered romantic suspense novels and found my niche. I love throwing the hero and heroine together under extraordinary circumstances and pitting them against a clever villain.
Amanda Quick writes a variety of fiction, all of which include romance—romantic suspense, historical romance, and historical mysteries.
This is the start (you guessed it, right?) of a series set in 1930s California at an exclusive resort enjoyed by Hollywood stars. The heroine sleuth, a rookie reporter, hopes to get a scoop on a new leading man from an actress, but instead finds her dead in a swimming pool.
With the handsome owner of the hotel, she investigates, and finds that this glamorous paradise hides dark and dangerous secrets.
Amanda Quick, the bestselling author of 'Til Death Do Us Part, transports readers to 1930s California, where glamour and seduction spawn a multitude of sins ...When Hollywood moguls and stars want privacy, they head to an idyllic small town on the coast, where the exclusive Burning Cove Hotel caters to their every need. It's where reporter Irene Glasson finds herself staring down at a beautiful actress at the bottom of a pool ...The dead woman had a red-hot secret about up-and-coming leading man Nick Tremayne, a scoop that Irene couldn't resist - especially since she's just a rookie at a…
I am an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice who came of age in the 1960s at the UC Berkeley School of Criminology where I developed a passion for the administration of criminal justice and the securing of human rights. I have authored more than 20 books, including five award winning titles such as: Criminology on Trump (2022) and Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy (2024). My third book to complete the Trump trilogy is underway, Regime Change, Authoritarian Treason, and the Outlaw-in-Chief: President Donald Trump’s Struggle to Kill U.S. Democracy & Realign American Global Power.
The winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting, David Cay Johnston is also a specialist in social inequality, political economy, and taxation who has written several best-selling books on these topics, such as Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense and Stick You With the Bill. Johnston has interviewed Trump and has been investigating Donald since the late 1980s.
This book was the first and most inclusive overview of Trump’s shady business career in real estate, highlighting his six casino and hotel bankruptcies in the 1990s and up to his run for the presidency in 2016.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER that connects the dots from Donald Trump's racist background to the Russian scandals
"A searing indictment." — Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Johnston has given us this year's must-read Trump book." — Lawrence O'Donnell, host of MSNBC's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell
The international bestseller that brought Trump's long history of racism, mafia ties, and shady business dealings into the limelight. Now with a new introduction and epilogue.
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist David Cay Johnston, who had spent thirty years chronicling Donald Trump for the New York Times and other leading newspapers,…
