Here are 100 books that Sleeping with the Dictionary fans have personally recommended if you like
Sleeping with the Dictionary.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
As a child I did not enjoy reading of any kind, detested English class, and loathed poetry in particular. I simply couldn’t comprehend what relevance poems had to my life. Then, while living overseas, in my mid-twenties in a country in which I didn’t speak the language well and had no friends, I took refuge in an English-language bookstore. There, I would find the slimmest books I could find, which happened to be poetry collections, and I’d pull one down hoping for commiseration. At some point, I realized that I could make certain friends with certain poems. Twenty-five years of growing friendships later, now I read and write poetry for a living.
Czesław Miłosz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. But that isn’t the reason to seek out this book. In fact, the book contains none of his poems; it’s an anthology of poems he selected from across the ages and across the globe. The poems are idiosyncratic to Miłosz’s taste—and he has excellent taste, offering us brief personal header notes to guide our reading. Most of the poems are less than half a page long, none more than a page and a half—and some just a handful of lines. These are delicate, thoughtful poems that never become syrupy or stringent. Even after decades of reading poems, I’ve returned again and again to this book when I want to remind myself of why I turned to poetry in the first place.
Selected by Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, an inspiring collection of 300 poems from writers around the world.
Czeslaw Milosz's A Book of Luminous Things—his personal selection of poems from the past and present—is a testament to the stunning varieties of human experience, offered up so that we may see the myriad ways that experience can be shared in words and images. Milosz provides a preface to each of these poems, divided into thematic (and often beguiling) sections, such as “Travel,” “History,” and “The Secret of a Thing,” that make the reading as instructional as it is inspirational and remind us…
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…
As a child I did not enjoy reading of any kind, detested English class, and loathed poetry in particular. I simply couldn’t comprehend what relevance poems had to my life. Then, while living overseas, in my mid-twenties in a country in which I didn’t speak the language well and had no friends, I took refuge in an English-language bookstore. There, I would find the slimmest books I could find, which happened to be poetry collections, and I’d pull one down hoping for commiseration. At some point, I realized that I could make certain friends with certain poems. Twenty-five years of growing friendships later, now I read and write poetry for a living.
Frank O’Hara is most talked about as a “city poet” who, on his time off from working at an art museum, walked around Manhattan writing about what he felt and saw. A poet of “I do this, I do that,” O’Hara is lauded for his finding the beautiful in the quotidian. But that’s the lesser half of the story. O’Hara’s greatest feat is writing tender, quirky and deeply satisfying love poems. If you are not enviably moved by his poem “Having a Coke with You,” there’s little reason to continue reading poems at all.
Available for the first time in paperback, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara reflects the poet's growth as an artist from the earliest dazzling, experimental verses that he began writing in the late 1940s to the years before his accidental death at forty, when his poems became increasingly individual and reflective.
As a child I did not enjoy reading of any kind, detested English class, and loathed poetry in particular. I simply couldn’t comprehend what relevance poems had to my life. Then, while living overseas, in my mid-twenties in a country in which I didn’t speak the language well and had no friends, I took refuge in an English-language bookstore. There, I would find the slimmest books I could find, which happened to be poetry collections, and I’d pull one down hoping for commiseration. At some point, I realized that I could make certain friends with certain poems. Twenty-five years of growing friendships later, now I read and write poetry for a living.
Pablo Neruda is the Chilean poet everyone knows. But Nicanor Parra is the Chilean poet everyone ought to know. If you enjoy sending up poetry’s preciousness, Parra is your poet. From daily living to romantic love and from political upheaval to climate disaster, Parra parses irreverence and satire in ways that make his sentiments cut much deeper than other poets’ straight-forward sincerity. “Butterfly:” he writes, “you have to pull off its wings / to see how it flies.”
"Real seriousness," Nicanor Parra, the antipoet of Chile, has said, rests in "the comic." And read in that light, this newest collection of his work is very serious indeed. It is an abundant offering of his signature mocking humor, subverting received conventions and pretensions in both poetry and everyday life, public and private, ingeniously and wittily rendered into English in an antitranslation (the word is Parra's) by Liz Werner. Of the fifty-eight pieces in Antipoems, the first twenty-three are taken from Parra's 1985 collection, Hojas de Parra ("Vine Leaves" or "Leaves of Parra"), two others appeared in his Paginas en…
This book is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to…
As a child I did not enjoy reading of any kind, detested English class, and loathed poetry in particular. I simply couldn’t comprehend what relevance poems had to my life. Then, while living overseas, in my mid-twenties in a country in which I didn’t speak the language well and had no friends, I took refuge in an English-language bookstore. There, I would find the slimmest books I could find, which happened to be poetry collections, and I’d pull one down hoping for commiseration. At some point, I realized that I could make certain friends with certain poems. Twenty-five years of growing friendships later, now I read and write poetry for a living.
This book will challenge your notion of what a poem is or can be. Let it. Subtitled “Diagram poems,” these works mix both word and illustration to get at their playful effects. The illustrations come from “found” or ephemeral sources, e.g., a manual on textiles, or a guide to common beetles of North America, or a grammar on computer languages, or the layouts of American playgrounds. The interplay in the poems creates a wonderful uncanniness. The friction, say, caused when you read “You are special” next to a few numbered puzzle pieces in Figure A. and “Everyone is special” next to a completed puzzle in Figure B, and yet when you try to superimpose the one on the other, you realize that some of the pieces have had to adjust themselves to fit the whole. The sudden epiphany is: How special is anyone? And yet answering that question…
With an entirely new approach to poetry and the art of collage, Jessy Randall transforms diagrams, schematics, charts, graphs, and other visual documents from very old books into poems that speak to the absurdities, anxieties, and joys of life in this modern age.
I never thought I’d be a poetry lover. I got my Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature. During that time, I took quite a few poetry classes, even though I didn’t consider myself a huge poetry fan. Over the course of those classes, I learned that poetry isn’t all about abstract, obscure themes, and academic language. It’s also a way for humans to communicate the feelings and experiences in one heart to another. Once I learned that poetry doesn’t have to be difficult and confusing, I found that I really enjoyed it, and I’d like to help other people discover that poetry can be more accessible and satisfying than what they may have studied in school.
This book blew me away. It looks deceptively simple with short poems and regular language, but the emotion of the poems is intense, direct, powerful, and breathtaking. Poem after poem just made me think “Wow!” I don’t usually read poetry for fun, but the pretty pink cover and the title of this book grabbed me at the bookstore and I bought it on a whim. It was definitely one of those cases where the right book gets you at the right time. I love this book!
International best-selling author of Love & Misadventure, Lullabies (Goodreads Readers Choice Award), and Memories, Lang Leav presents a completely new collection of poetry with a celestial theme in The Universe of Us.
Planets, stars, and constellations feature prominently in this beautiful, original poetry collection from Lang Leav. Inspired by the wonders of the universe, the best-selling poetess writes about love and loss, hope and hurt, being lost and found. Lang's poetry encompasses the breadth of emotions we all experience and evokes universal feelings with her skillfully crafted words.
* International Bestseller: Over 26K copies sold in the UK of Love…
I am a philosopher of language (and of art) and have been for 30+ years. Why philosophy of language? Well, it encourages a certain salutary kind of self-consciousness—which is extremely valuable to philosophy—and facilitates greater rigor. But it only got going some one hundred and twenty years ago. So it's modern(ish) as well as deep. And whereas it might seem a narrow slice of the philosophical pie, it isn't; it seems to provide fruitful ways of thinking for almost any philosophical subject. For example, rather than 'What is X?', we ask 'What do we mean by "X"?'; a subtle difference perhaps but the change in perspective might be a key.
I found this book's scientific rigor, systematicity, depth, and wisdom unmatchable. I liked "the passion for desert landscapes" together with the wit.
It’s not easy, at first, to see the philosophical significance of the discussion until you do, and you’re attracted to the idea that philosophy is too often a mere verbal tangle. Quine agrees, and he tries to explain why.
Willard Van Orman Quine begins this influential work by declaring, "Language is a social art. In acquiring it we have to depend entirely on intersubjectively available cues as to what to say and when." As Patricia Smith Churchland notes in her foreword to this new edition, with Word and Object Quine challenged the tradition of conceptual analysis as a way of advancing knowledge. The book signaled twentieth-century philosophy's turn away from metaphysics and what Churchland calls the "phony precision" of conceptual analysis.
In the course of his discussion of meaning and the…
Tina Edwards loved her childhood and creating fairy houses, a passion shared with her father, a world-renowned architect. But at nine years old, she found him dead at his desk and is haunted by this memory. Tina's mother abruptly moved away, leaving Tina with feelings of abandonment and suspicion.
I grew up in a bilingual environment (Welsh and English) and have been fascinated by languages ever since, and the way they reflect thought, culture, and history. An English degree course at University College London gave me an academic grounding in language and literature, and I've been exploring and writing on those subjects ever since, eventually as a professor of linguistics, and these days as an independent scholar. My website provides a complete list of my publications, along with links to other materials. And the most fascinating thing about language? Its diversity and change. Whatever a language was like yesterday, it's different today, and will be different again tomorrow.
The important word in the title is "social." The author brings together words that belong to a particular theme, such as journalism, economics, and politics. An example? A 'historical menu' from Anglo-Saxon times (bread, butter, cucumber) through Shakespearean times (tomato, potato, banana) to the present-day (pizza, tacos, hamburger). And not forgetting drinks, from beer to Coca-Cola. It's a fascinating exercise in the linguistic archaeology of social transformation.
The word "blurb" derives from a "pulchritudinous young lady" of that fictional name who appeared on a book-cover at the turn of the century. Quarrying the "Oxford English Dictionary" for its evidence, this book traces the extraordinary way in which English words have changed their meanings over the past millennium. These shifts both reflect Britain's rich history and reveal the social determinants of the language. In English vocabulary is stored the "archaeological" evidence of such great social transformations as the Norman Conquest, the growth of capitalism, the coming of the Reformation and the evolution of feudal hierarchy into democracy. The…
I never thought I’d be a poetry lover. I got my Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature. During that time, I took quite a few poetry classes, even though I didn’t consider myself a huge poetry fan. Over the course of those classes, I learned that poetry isn’t all about abstract, obscure themes, and academic language. It’s also a way for humans to communicate the feelings and experiences in one heart to another. Once I learned that poetry doesn’t have to be difficult and confusing, I found that I really enjoyed it, and I’d like to help other people discover that poetry can be more accessible and satisfying than what they may have studied in school.
This is unlike any poetry collection I’ve read before. The language is accessible, the material is creative, rich, and a little on the dark side. There’s so much unique imagery and beautiful phrasing that it just delighted me to read it. It’s the kind of poetry book that doesn’t try to be verbose and obtuse just for the sake of poetry. Although it explores some gritty themes, it’s a lot of fun.
That’s the sound of the clocks getting ready to fall back. The nights stretch longer as the days shrink shorter. Creatures of the night come out to play; to fill autumn’s twilights and winter’s chills.
And at the edge of this mist infused scene, Derek R King stands and drinks in this dream. Muse by his side (or is she within), her whispered breath caresses his ears, as she drapes him in words: “Let the poetry begin.”
Corey Anton is Professor of Communication Studies at Grand Valley State University, Vice-President of the Institute of General Semantics, Past President of the Media Ecology Association, and a Fellow of the International Communicology Institute. He is an award-winning teacher and author. His research spans the fields of media ecology, semiotics, phenomenology, stoicism, death studies, the philosophy of communication, and multidisciplinary communication theory.
Kenneth Burke was Shakespeare scholar, biblical scholar, poet, novelist, literary critic, rhetorical theorist, the father of “Dramatism,” and a ferocious homegrown, self-taught intellect, and this book is Burke at his best. It boldly addresses the vital role that language plays in human life and religious thought, advocates a thoroughgoing study of theology not to assess any veracity therein, but rather, as a specimen of language use, for, whatever else theology may be, it is, at the least, verbal, and, the study of religious language reveals much about human motives and self-understanding. This book also touches upon some of the interesting relations between money, guilt, and the Christian notion of redemption. It ends with an “Epilogue: Prologue in Heaven,” which is a lengthy mind-blowing fictional dialogue set in Heaven between “The Lord” and “Satan” regarding “the word-animal,” and it playfully draws out important connections between language, negativity, property rights, time, and…
"But the point of Burke's work, and the significance of his achievement, is not that he points out that religion and language affect each other, for this has been said before, but that he proceeds to demonstrate how this is so by reference to a specific symbolic context. After a discussion 'On Words and The Word,' he analysess verbal action in St. Augustine's Confessions. He then discusses the first three chapters of Genesis, and ends with a brilliant and profound 'Prologue in Heaven,' an imaginary dialogue between the Lord and Satan in which he proposes that we begin our study…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I never thought I’d be a poetry lover. I got my Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature. During that time, I took quite a few poetry classes, even though I didn’t consider myself a huge poetry fan. Over the course of those classes, I learned that poetry isn’t all about abstract, obscure themes, and academic language. It’s also a way for humans to communicate the feelings and experiences in one heart to another. Once I learned that poetry doesn’t have to be difficult and confusing, I found that I really enjoyed it, and I’d like to help other people discover that poetry can be more accessible and satisfying than what they may have studied in school.
I love this book because it’s like a collection of very short stories, in poem form. It reads like slices of real life, captured in verbal snapshots.
Again, one of my favorite things is poetry which uses everyday language and captures the beauty, sorrow, struggle, and joy of normal life. This book is excellent to dip in and out of for a quick little glimpse of life to enjoy and inspire. There’s something in this book for everyone.
I have published a great many novels and stories and been translated into more than 20 languages, but long before I began to publish fiction I wrote poems, a number of which were published in poetry magazines, newspapers and suchlike – until the day I decided that, while continuing to write poems, I no longer wanted to see them in print. NUDES & VICTIMS contains a hundred of the poems written from 1967 to 2001, plus 30 song lyrics written between 1975 and 2012.
