Here are 100 books that Salt Fish Girl fans have personally recommended if you like
Salt Fish Girl.
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I’m an artist and writer who works with food and eating. I find inspiration for my practice in my own body processes and in caring for and advocating for my friends and family. When my grandfather lost the ability to swallow, I began to understand the fragility and vulnerability of our gastrointestinal systems. After many years of teaching, making, and writing about food art, I started to wonder about what happens after eating. The books on this list join me in arguing for digestion, metabolism, and defecation as vital cultural processes. These authors have changed how I relate to food, guts, and my body.
Laporte’s poetic and sweeping tour of turds made me realize how flushing my toilet produces and reinscribes cultural norms. Read the history behind our collective fascination with “sewer stories,” whether it’s London’s immense blobs of underground fat or urban legends about deadly crocodiles or mutant goldfish.
I love how this book has inspired and influenced contemporary metabolic artists. In 2017, Kathy High and Guy Schaffer created a mixed media project “committed to re-imaging and re-inserting feminist and queer stories into our histories of medicine and science” and called their work History of Shit as an homage to Laporte. I am moved by how High and Schaffer continue Laporte’s work within what might have been his natural lifespan had we not lost him and countless artists and philosophers to the AIDS pandemic.
"A brilliant account of the politics of shit. It will leave you speechless."
Written in Paris after the heady days of student revolt in May 1968 and before the devastation of the AIDS epidemic, History of Shit is emblematic of a wild and adventurous strain of 1970s' theoretical writing that attempted to marry theory, politics, sexuality, pleasure, experimentation, and humor. Radically redefining dialectical thought and post-Marxist politics, it takes an important—and irreverent—position alongside the works of such postmodern thinkers as Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, and Lyotard. Laporte's eccentric style and ironic sensibility combine in an inquiry that is provocative, humorous, and…
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’m an artist and writer who works with food and eating. I find inspiration for my practice in my own body processes and in caring for and advocating for my friends and family. When my grandfather lost the ability to swallow, I began to understand the fragility and vulnerability of our gastrointestinal systems. After many years of teaching, making, and writing about food art, I started to wonder about what happens after eating. The books on this list join me in arguing for digestion, metabolism, and defecation as vital cultural processes. These authors have changed how I relate to food, guts, and my body.
Alison Knowles made many of my favorite food works. I’m constantly inspired by her practice and how she reminds us that food is an environment.
This must be one of the best catalogues I’ve read, and part of that has to do with the beauty of the book itself. Each unique cover is a makeready press sheet, and the smart essays complement a real sense of the exhibition, including a comprehensive timeline.
The first survey of the Fluxus cofounder's prolific avant-garde output, from eight-foot-tall books to make-a-salad performances
The American artist Alison Knowles' (born 1933) groundbreaking experiments-from painting and printmaking to sculpture and installation, sound works, poetry and artist's books-have influenced art and artists for more than 50 years but remain relatively unknown among mainstream audiences. The first comprehensive volume on the artist, By Alison Knowles: A Retrospective presents more than 200 objects that span the entire breadth of her career, from her intermedia works of the 1960s to forms of participatory and relational art in the 2000s. The accompanying catalog features…
I’m an artist and writer who works with food and eating. I find inspiration for my practice in my own body processes and in caring for and advocating for my friends and family. When my grandfather lost the ability to swallow, I began to understand the fragility and vulnerability of our gastrointestinal systems. After many years of teaching, making, and writing about food art, I started to wonder about what happens after eating. The books on this list join me in arguing for digestion, metabolism, and defecation as vital cultural processes. These authors have changed how I relate to food, guts, and my body.
I love books that are themselves artworks. Artist’s books take this on in all kinds of fabulous ways, but when writing for academic audiences, making a book that is also art can be challenging. Teaiwa’s book pulls it off.
This book accompanies a touring art exhibition, Project Banaba (I am grateful to have seen it at the Bishop Museum in Hawai’i last year). Together, the book and exhibition communicate deep impulses that inspire many artists: mourning, loss, exile, family, and justice.
My favorite chapter is a photo essay, “Remix: Our Sea of Phosphate.” Staying close to materials, in this case, phosphate, asks writers and readers to connect to how injustices and struggles manifest, I am grateful to Teaiwa for extending her writing into the world in creative ways.
Consuming Ocean Island tells the story of the land and people of Banaba, a small Pacific island, which, from 1900 to 1980, was heavily mined for phosphate, an essential ingredient in fertilizer. As mining stripped away the island's surface, the land was rendered uninhabitable, and the indigenous Banabans were relocated to Rabi Island in Fiji. Katerina Martina Teaiwa tells the story of this human and ecological calamity by weaving together memories, records, and images from displaced islanders, colonial administrators, and employees of the mining company. Her compelling narrative reminds us of what is at stake whenever the interests of industrial…
Separating the true stories from the myths, The Duty of Memory provides a deeper understanding of the diverse motivations that drove ordinary people to join an underground network of French Resistants despite terrible odds and horrifying consequences.
This book takes the reader inside the true story of men and women…
I’m an artist and writer who works with food and eating. I find inspiration for my practice in my own body processes and in caring for and advocating for my friends and family. When my grandfather lost the ability to swallow, I began to understand the fragility and vulnerability of our gastrointestinal systems. After many years of teaching, making, and writing about food art, I started to wonder about what happens after eating. The books on this list join me in arguing for digestion, metabolism, and defecation as vital cultural processes. These authors have changed how I relate to food, guts, and my body.
Everything we do with metabolism and digestion in our bodies also happens at a planetary level. Corals help me understand this, and this project by the Wertheim sisters helps me understand corals.
They published this book themselves so they could include the names of all the crocheters and supporters who brought the Crochet Coral Reef into being. We combine and recombine to become holobionts, working together in tiny and vast symbiosis to ingest, digest, and metabolize the planet.
Now perhaps the world's largest participatory art and science project, the Crochet Coral Reef combines mathematics, marine biology, environmental consciousness-raising and community art practice. Almost 8,000 people around the world have contributed to making an ever-evolving archipelago of giant woolen seascapes, which have been exhibited at the Hayward Gallery, the Smithsonian and many other venues. This fully illustrated book, written by the project's creators--Margaret and Christine Wertheim of the Institute For Figuring--brings together the scientific and mathematical content behind the project, along with essays about the artistic and cultural resonances of this unique experiment in radical craft practice. With a…
Maybe because I grew up in San Diego, a city that boasts what ghost hunter Hans Holzer called the most haunted house in America, I’ve always loved ghost stories. I never encountered a ghost when I visited the Whaley House Museum, as Regis Philbin did when he spent the night, but I once took a photograph there that had an unexplained light streak on it. Although I conceived a passion for the printed word with my first Dick and Jane reader and wrote my first story at the age of six, it took me a few decades to fulfill my long-held desire to write a ghost story of my own.
This was a favorite of mine when I was about twelve, and probably should be considered a YA book. It’s a sweet and romantic tale with ghosts that are very real and fascinating historical details of the American Revolution.
I didn’t mind that each ghost told his or her story as if writing a novel—it worked. Charming rogue Peaceable Sherwood was a favorite character of mine as a child and was still very appealing to me when I reread it as an adult.
Newly orphaned Peggy Grahame is caught off-guard when she first arrives at her family’s ancestral estate. Her eccentric uncle Enos drives away her only new acquaintance, Pat, a handsome British scholar, then leaves Peggy to fend for herself. But she is not alone. The house is full of mysteries—and ghosts. Soon Peggy becomes involved with the spirits of her own Colonial ancestors and witnesses the unfolding of a centuries-old romance against a backdrop of spies and intrigue and of battles plotted and foiled. History has never been so exciting—especially because the ghosts are leading Peggy to a romance of her…
After a lifetime of reading fantasy, I have a career professionally writing fantasy! Whether it’s for animation, video games, or children’s books, crafting adventures in worlds of whimsy and wonder is a treat. Writing has sharpened my senses to recognize and appreciate well-crafted stories in all their forms, and the books on this list are some of the very finest romps.
From multi-award-winning Neil Gaiman comes a spectacularly silly, mind-bendingly clever, brilliantly bonkers adventure - with lip-smackingly gorgeous illustrations by Chris Riddell. Mum's away. Dad's in charge. There's no milk. So Dad saves the day by going to buy some. Really, that's all that happens. Very boring. YAAAAAAAAAWN. There are absolutely none of the following inside: GLOBBY GREEN ALIENS! INTERGALACTIC POLICE! PIRATES! And most definitely NOT a time-travelling hot-air balloon piloted by the brilliant Professor Steg ... Don't miss this gloriously entertaining novel about time-travel, dinosaurs, milk and dads.
What were America's first prisons like? How did penal reformers, prison administrators, and politicians deal with the challenges of confining human beings in long-term captivity as punishment--what they saw as a humane intervention?
The Deviant Prison centers on one early prison: Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in Philadelphia, one of the…
Realms of the imagination have always called to me. My father had shelves ofAstounding Science Fictionand Galaxy magazines. The covers alone were enough to streak me to far-off worlds, aliens, and spaceships. Here, I discovered Robert E. Howard, creator of sword and sorcery. A walk in the woods was a quest to find pixies in a magic kingdom. And a much-loved babysitter read every Oz book to me, easing me to sleep. With all this to get lost in, it’s a wonder I earned a PhD in psychology. Or not. The mind is a limitless universe. Who knows what we might discover in our dreams?
Dean Koontz has influenced my writing more than any other author. For decades, his books have been at the top of my reading list. Year after year, he consistently writes top-tier, inventive page-turners. His villains are evil. His heroes and heroines are likable and easy to relate to. He gets that one can’t traverse a frightening world without humor, and by analogy, neither can we. Elsewhere is one of his best in a long time. Equal parts bone-chilling, creepy, nerve-racking, and sinister, balanced by love, compassion, loyalty, and second chances, it doesn’t get better than this.
The fate of the world is in the hands of a father and daughter in an epic novel of wonder and terror by Dean Koontz, the #1 New York Times bestselling master of suspense.
Since his wife, Michelle, left seven years ago, Jeffy Coltrane has worked to maintain a normal life for himself and his eleven-year-old daughter, Amity, in Suavidad Beach. It’s a quiet life, until a local eccentric known as Spooky Ed shows up on their doorstep.
Ed entrusts Jeffy with hiding a strange and dangerous object—something he calls “the key to everything”—and tells Jeffy that he must never…
One of my favorite sections in the library is the collections of folk and fairy tales. Especially the lesser-known tales. My novel, Vasilisa, is inspired by the Russian folktale Vasilisaand Staver, plus my question of “how did Vasilisa get so strong?” I love combining folk tales with extensive research of the culture and history of their settings, as well as delving into characters who have vastly different experiences than mine. And I love reading character and detail-rich novelizations of traditional tales. It was difficult to pick only five novels based on lesser-known fairy tales. Enjoy, then go find some others!
This book blended fantasy and science fiction in a way that caught me and didn’t let go. I appreciate the moral dilemma of: is it better to interfere and stop a wrong if the interference might cause an even greater wrong? I like to make decisions based on facts rather than emotion, but this book shows how both are needed in balance. And how even doing good comes at a cost—are we willing to pay the cost?
Rediscover this beloved Newbery Honor-winning classic, Featuring a brand-new cover and a foreword by Lois Lowry!
Elana, a member of an interstellar civilization on a mission to a medieval planet, becomes the key to a dangerous plan to turn back an invasion. How can she help the Andrecians, who still believe in magic and superstition, without revealing her own alien powers? At the same time, Georyn, the son of an Andrecian woodcutter, knows only that there is a dragon in the enchanted forest, and he must defeat it. He sees Elana as the Enchantress from the Stars who has come…
As a journalist and author and a young father, I’ve come to seek more vigorously things that make me smile, things I can cherish and appreciate. My most recent book is dedicated to “the troubled, in trouble, and once troubled.” In promoting the book, I’ve often said I still feel fairly troubled—which is true. Demons never die, we just live to learn with them. So while reading the below books I’ve discovered hallowed moments which fill a person to the brim. After each of these reads I felt that I could surmount most anything.
I’ve owned a number of homes. Most were small, one or two were fairly large. When I set about building my own writing shed I had a clue where to begin, but most frequently—when bashing a nail, jigsawing a piece of wood—I knew very little about why I was making one decision over another much beyond practical considerations. A window could only fit here, and the door must swing this way, lest it hit that support beam. Having a companion to that process, letting not my hammer but the Earth fine-tune my space gave that writing shed life far beyond its function.
A captivating personal inquiry into the art of architecture, the craft of building, and the meaning of modern work
“A room of one’s own: Is there anybody who hasn’t at one time or another wished for such a place, hasn’t turned those soft words over until they’d assumed a habitable shape?”
When Michael Pollan decided to plant a garden, the result was the acclaimed bestseller Second Nature. In A Place of My Own, he turns his sharp insight to the craft of building, as he recounts the process of designing and constructing a small one-room structure on his rural Connecticut…
Pioneer Paddles of the Colonial South
by
William D. Auman,
Award-winning novelist William Auman, author of If Trees Could Testify..., takes the reader on a time-traveling odyssey featuring 345 bodies of water in six states within the historical context through which they unfold.
Journey into remaining Colonial-era wilderness with stories of pirate treasure, epic frontiersmen, Indigenous Peoples, and Revolutionary…
Growing up I devoured science-fiction and spy stories by the boatload—the only person I wanted to be more than James Bond was probably Han Solo. Of course, I couldn’t really become either of them, but I always knew the next best thing would be telling stories about those kinds of characters. Ultimately, I couldn’t decide whether to focus on space adventures or spies, so the only real answer was to smash those two genres together. Five years and four novels later, the world of the Galactic Cold War is humming along quite nicely. But I’m still always on the lookout for the next great sci-fi spy novel.
I love a good space opera, and John Scalzi’s second to none in that department. In some ways, this book (and the two that follow it in The Interdependency series) remind me of the original Foundation, as an immense space empire under a new and untried leader struggles to come to terms with an imminent catastrophe that could bring it to its knees. I personally found the foul-mouthed and irreverent Lady Kiva Lagos a particular delight, as a force of nature that bulls her way through any obstacle.
The Collapsing Empire is an exciting space opera from John Scalzi, the first in the award-winning Interdependency series.
Does the biggest threat lie within?
In the far future, humanity has left Earth to create a glorious empire. Now this interstellar network of worlds faces disaster - but can three individuals save their people?
The empire's outposts are utterly dependent on each other for resources, a safeguard against war, and a way its rulers can exert control. This relies on extra-dimensional pathways between the stars, connecting worlds. But 'The Flow' is changing course, which could plunge every colony into fatal isolation.
