Here are 100 books that Model City fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have published 18 books of poetry, most recently the one I have listed here, as well as a collection of literary essays, Fables of Representation. My emphasis has always been on the more progressive and risk-taking kinds of expression, as seen with the Beat poets, Ginsberg and Corso, and the New York School poets, Ashbery and O'Hara. Seeing a lack of that perspective on bookshelves, I edited two editions of a major anthology, Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, and 42 issues of the literary magazine, New American Writing. I have been reading, more recently, a lot of great writing by women, especially those writing at length, with the volume up.
One of the leading poets of Denmark, Christensen virtually invented proceduralism. An abecedarian poem, A to H, each section of this book is also guided by the Fibonacci number sequence that accretes as follows: 0, 1, 1, 2. 3, 5, 13, 21. Each section has as many lines as the two previous sections.
Every time I read the book, which I assign in my classes, I am delighted by her prose style written with brilliant clarity. It names things that exist, along with the warning that the human devastation of nature will cause them not to exist. The poet was forced to conclude the work at “H” because the Fibonacci sequence had grown too demanding to continue. Highly recommended for lovers of nature and mathematicians.
Awarded the American-Scandinavian PEN Translation Prize by Michael Hamburger, Susanna Nied's translation of alphabet introduces Inger Christensen's poetry to US readers for the first time. Born in 1935, Inger Christensen is Denmark's best known poet. Her award-winning alphabet is based structurally on Fibonacci's sequence (a mathematical sequence in which each number is the sum of the two previous numbers), in combination with the alphabet. The gorgeous poetry herein reflects a complex philosophical background, yet has a visionary quality, discovering the metaphysical in the simple stuff of everyday life. In alphabet, Christensen creates a framework of psalm-like forms that unfold like…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I have published 18 books of poetry, most recently the one I have listed here, as well as a collection of literary essays, Fables of Representation. My emphasis has always been on the more progressive and risk-taking kinds of expression, as seen with the Beat poets, Ginsberg and Corso, and the New York School poets, Ashbery and O'Hara. Seeing a lack of that perspective on bookshelves, I edited two editions of a major anthology, Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, and 42 issues of the literary magazine, New American Writing. I have been reading, more recently, a lot of great writing by women, especially those writing at length, with the volume up.
The book contains 70 sonnets, all with the same title as the book. Quick-witted, ironic, and politically dedicated to good cause, Hayes speaks from his own experience as an African-American: “Probably twilight makes blackness dangerous/Darkness. Probably all my encounters/Are existential Jambalaya.”
Winner of the National Book Award for his earlier work, Lighthead, he is a poet to watch for his moral sense and mastery of poetic form. The book was written in the first two hundred days of the first Trump presidency.
Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry
One of the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2018
A powerful, timely, dazzling collection of sonnets from one of America's most acclaimed poets, Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award-winning author of Lighthead
"Sonnets that reckon with Donald Trump's America." -The New York Times
In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the…
I have published 18 books of poetry, most recently the one I have listed here, as well as a collection of literary essays, Fables of Representation. My emphasis has always been on the more progressive and risk-taking kinds of expression, as seen with the Beat poets, Ginsberg and Corso, and the New York School poets, Ashbery and O'Hara. Seeing a lack of that perspective on bookshelves, I edited two editions of a major anthology, Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, and 42 issues of the literary magazine, New American Writing. I have been reading, more recently, a lot of great writing by women, especially those writing at length, with the volume up.
Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. I believe that her long poem, The First Water Is the Body, the centerpiece of Postcolonial Love Poem, is The Waste Land of our era.
Lyrical and fierce, beautiful and scathing, it is both a cry from the outside and a spiritual lesson. After reading that poem, go to Snake Light and Ode to the Beloved’s Hips. I was led to her work by her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, which recounts the despair into which her brother, a drug addict, had placed her family.
FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY
Natalie Diaz's highly anticipated follow-up to When My Brother Was an Aztec, winner of an American Book Award
Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz's brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages―bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers―be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let…
Delve into this internationally best-selling series, now complete! A fast paced laugh-out-loud mix of Urban Fantasy and Mystery.
I can tell when you’re lying. Every. Single. Time. I’m Jinx, a PI hired to find a missing university student, I hope to find her propped up at a bar–yet my gut…
I have published 18 books of poetry, most recently the one I have listed here, as well as a collection of literary essays, Fables of Representation. My emphasis has always been on the more progressive and risk-taking kinds of expression, as seen with the Beat poets, Ginsberg and Corso, and the New York School poets, Ashbery and O'Hara. Seeing a lack of that perspective on bookshelves, I edited two editions of a major anthology, Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, and 42 issues of the literary magazine, New American Writing. I have been reading, more recently, a lot of great writing by women, especially those writing at length, with the volume up.
Known for her long and often book-length poems, Maria Baranda is a leading poet of Mexico. This book contains two works, "From the Natural History of the Rustic"and "From the Natural History of Atlantica."
The project was inspired by an artist friend who would collect objects in the forest for his artworks, but first, he would talk at length about them. Written with a light hand, the poem is a gentle spoof of the friend who also shares in his wonderment: “I think of white lilies at the height of lightning. My friend has taught me.”
ATLANTICA AND THE RUSTIC is a luminous collection of verses documenting the earth in all its radiant, ravaged particularity. Like the shifting boundary between sea and sky, a tenuous horizon joins the two halves of this brilliantly translated book: the first a series of ecological encounters reported to the poet by a friend; the second a fragmented lyric from the very edge of the terrestrial world. Throughout, María Baranda's bristling, peripatetic lines remind us that "any route is an artifice," any memory stained with the "vestiges of oblivion." This translation marks an invaluable contribution to the field of Anglophone ecopoetics…
I love first contact fiction. When I was a kid, my uncle once told me about seeing a UFO, a ship landing in the Varangerfjord in northern Norway. No one believed him, of course, but the way he told that story made me feel like I was right there with him.
These books pull me in because they highlight the difference between what we experience and reality. All of them left me with more questions than answers. I am a math teacher and an indie science fiction writer, and I'm still not entirely sure if that uncertainty is a good thing or a warning.
As a math teacher, I thought Egan’s world of numbers would give me some kind of home-field advantage. I admit I lost that feeling rather quickly. The story explores post-human minds, simulation theory, and far-future consciousness, and Egan keeps the pace intense.
His skill with math makes the confusion feel real. By the end, I wasn’t sure of anything. Even now, I'm still not sure.
A quantum Brave New World from the boldest and most wildly speculative writer of his generation. "Greg Egan is perhaps the most important SF writer in the world."-Science Fiction Weekly "One of the very best "-Locus. "Science fiction with an emphasis on science."-New York Times Book Review
Since the Introdus in the twenty-first century, humanity has reconfigured itself drastically. Most chose immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software. Others opted for gleisners: disposable, renewable robotic bodies that remain in contact with the physical world of force and friction. Many of these have left the solar system forever in fusion-drive…
I’m a writer originally from the UK, but now usually found elsewhere in the world. Currently, I’m based in Sofia, Bulgaria. I have always been fascinated by the subtle art of connecting with strangers, and by the complex ways that human beings forge bonds with those they don’t know. I have an MA in anthropology and a PhD in philosophy. Hello, Stranger is my thirteenth book, and in August 2021 was selected by BBCRadio 4 to be the book of the week.
The idea of cosmopolitanism goes back to ancient Greece when the ancient philosopher Diogenes the Cynic claimed that his home—his city or his polis—was the cosmos as a whole.
In this humane, wise book, Appiah brings together philosophy, literature, and stories from his own life to update the ancient idea of cosmopolitanism, and to ask why it matters today. Along the way, he sets out a vision for how we can live better—more openly and more hospitably—in a world where almost everybody we meet is a stranger.
Drawing on a broad range of disciplines, including history, literature, and philosophy-as well as the author's own experience of life on three continents-Cosmopolitanism is a moral manifesto for a planet we share with more than six billion strangers.
On the morning of December 26, 2004, an undersea earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra in the Indian Ocean. The resulting tsunami killed an estimated 230,000 people across fourteen countries, from Indonesia to Sri Lanka to Thailand to the Maldives to India and all the way to East Africa.…
AO: I have been intrigued by the Adam and smith (a play on Adam Smith’s name due to K. Boulding) of social sciences ever since, as a graduate student, I was given the privilege to teach a history-of-thought course. I found a lot of wisdom in Smith’s works and continue to find it with every new read. BW: I first met Adam Smith when I was studying for my master’s degree in economics almost twenty years ago. Since then, I have enjoyed rereading him, always finding new sources of fascination and insights. For me, Smith's work is endlessly rich and remains astonishingly topical, three centuries after his birth.
Ryan Patrick Hanley is a Great Enlightenment scholar and one of the very best scholars on Smith (see also his Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue).
Focusing on Smith’s moral philosophy and especially on his description of the excellent character (cultivating prudence, justice, self-command, and beneficence), Hanley offers us a different and unknown picture of Smith, one of a man who was deeply concerned with, and who can still offer us deep insights into, how to live a better life and reach that “great purpose” we all strive for, happiness.
Invaluable wisdom on living a good life from the founder of modern economics
Adam Smith is best known today as the founder of modern economics, but he was also an uncommonly brilliant philosopher who was especially interested in the perennial question of how to live a good life. Our Great Purpose is a short and illuminating guide to Smith's incomparable wisdom on how to live well, written by one of today's leading Smith scholars.
In this inspiring and entertaining book, Ryan Patrick Hanley describes Smith's vision of "the excellent and praiseworthy character," and draws on the philosopher's writings to show…
I’m a classicist and historian. I've been studying the ancient Greeks since I was a teenager, and I'm passionate about ancient Athens in the time of Pericles for many reasons. I've watched brilliant performances of the Oresteia of Aeschylus, the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, the Bacchae of Euripides, and the Lysistrata of Aristophanes. As a professional historian, I'm in awe of Thucydides, whose alleged ‘trap’ still hits the headlines. No ancient Greek orator was finer than Pericles, no speech greater than his Funeral Oration as preserved by Thucydides. Socrates’ ringing declaration that only a critically examined life is worth living resonates vibrantly with me. Finally, visual art and architecture: the Parthenon. Need I say more?
I love Cambridge (University Press) Companions—over 900 have been published so far, including many in my own field of ancient Greek history.
There is even a Cambridge Companion to the Age of Pericles. But that’s not the one I’ve chosen here, partly because Pericles has—rightly—had his fair share of attention and praise in my other choices, but mainly because the city of Athens, especially during Pericles’ lifetime, was one of the great cities of the world in any age.
The volume co-edited by Professors Neils and Rogers has many virtues and strengths, but what I love about it most is its vast breadth of coverage and its tight integration both between and within its 33 chapters of literature, history, and material culture.
It’s invidious to select, but space requires me to, so I’m going to recommend just six: those on the Acropolis, on animals in Athenian life, on…
Named for a goddess, epicenter of the first democracy, birthplace of tragic and comic theatre, locus of the major philosophical schools, artistically in the vanguard for centuries, ancient Athens looms large in contemporary study of the ancient world. This Companion is a comprehensive introduction the city, its topography and monuments, inhabitants and cultural institutions, religious rituals and politics. Chapters link the religious, cultural, and political institutions of Athens to the physical locales in which they took place. Discussion of the urban plan, with its streets, gates, walls, and public and private buildings, provides readers with a thorough understanding of how…
As a writer of seven historically themed books, fiction and nonfiction, I’ve loved the intense, deep dive into World War I, World War II, the Civil War, and the Paris Commune that researching my books entailed. It’s been particularly fascinating to explore how women, whether on or near the front lines, or on the home front, negotiate life during war and how their behavior illuminates character. My protagonists are all women, and I’ve found that writing their lives offers a sharp opportunity to see the moral ambiguities of war. What’s more, their stories often transcend the personal to symbolize the spirit of a particular time and place at war.
I greatly admire how this book subverts the traditional form of biography in a way that perfectly suits the subject.
Mildred Harnack, the author’s great-great-aunt, was an astoundingly brave young woman from Wisconsin who, starting in the early 1930s, had a central role in Berlin’s homegrown opposition to the Nazis and was eventually beheaded on orders from Hitler.
Drawing on diaries, letters, photographs, interviews, and declassified intelligence documents, Donner tells an extraordinarily intimate story that reads like a literary novel and has the pace of a thriller.
Born and raised in America, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six when she enrolled in a PhD programme in Germany and witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. In 1932, she began holding secret meetings in her apartment - a small band of political activists that by 1940 had grown into the largest underground resistance group in Berlin.
She recruited Germans into the resistance, helped Jews escape, plotted acts of sabotage and collaborated in writing leaflets that denounced Hitler and called for revolution. When the first shots of the Second World…
Nelson West, a former Chicago homicide detective, is hired by wealthy heir Lionel Bing to discreetly help “fix” scandals and legal problems for his father’s wealthy friends.
Bing, a brilliant but troubled investigator, suffers from PTSD symptoms as a result of being kidnapped and witnessing the murder of his mother…
Dina Gold is the author of Stolen Legacy: Nazi Theft and the Quest for Justice at Krausenstrasse 17/18, Berlin. After postgraduate degrees from London and Oxford universities, Dina spent over twenty years working as an investigative journalist and television producer at the BBC in London. She now lives in Washington DC and is a senior editor and film critic at Moment magazine.
Uwe Westphal has spent many years researching and writing about the Jewish contribution to the Berlin fashion industry between 1836 - 1939. This is a story that has never been told before. Jewish entrepreneurs invented ready-to-wear, mass-produced, fashionable clothing. By the early 1900s, Berlin was the hub of world fashion with the majority of clothing firms being Jewish-owned. In 1933 the Nazis swiftly foreclosed and “Aryanized” these businesses and their owners fled into exile or were murdered. After 1945, the now non-Jewish fashion firms, which had taken over their predecessors’ companies, enjoyed a tremendous increase in worldwide sales due to the glaring absence of their pre-war Jewish competitors. But the sophistication of the Jewish designers was gone. Today’s German fashion industry is a long way from recovering its former international status.
This book enables the reader to appreciate the immense loss of Jewish talent wrought by the Nazis. Westphal’s archival…
AT HAUSVOGTEIPLATZ Something unique emerged in the heart of Berlin in the nineteenth century: a creative centre for fashion and ready-made clothing. The hundreds of clothing companies that were established here manufactured modern clothing and developed new designs that were sold throughout Germany and the world.
This industry reached the height of its success in the 1920s. Freed from their corsets, sophisticated women of the time dressed in the "Berlin chic" sold by Valentin Manheimer, Herrmann Gerson, or the Wertheim department stores. After 1933, however, most Jewish clothing industrialists were confronted with hatred and violence. Many of their companies were…
