100 Books Like Tales of the Dervishes

Apart from the existential fiction that I love (Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus, etc.), this is one of my favorite books of all time. The editor, Walter Truett Anderson, gathered together the best collection ever of essays on the topics of postmodernism, deconstruction (and reconstruction), the wobbly nature of truth in the twentieth century (and now, the twenty-first century), and how we might go about reconstructing the truth now that we have so beautifully and mercilessly deconstructed it.

Authors included are Umberto Eco, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Richard Rorty, Bell Hooks, and a ton of other great thinkers on the subject of our postmodern malaise and the difficulties of belief … in anything. If you don’t know this book, you will really, really want to get to know it.

When I was growing up, Paris was the world center for thinkers on existentialism and postmodernism, my two favorite subjects. I knew the names of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir better than the names of my classmates.

John Sturrock has written the best essays ever on the thinkers of that pivotal period in intellectual thought, among them, in addition to Camus and Sartre, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan. If you want a smart, eloquent, and accessible introduction to the postmodern thought revolution about the truth—how “true” lost its meaning and how it might mean something again—this is your book!  

My love for books of quotations began when my publisher, Jeremy Tarcher, asked me to create a “quote campaign” for my book. Ever since then, I have loved quotation books—and this is my favorite, by far. James Haught has culled (pre-Internet!) thousands of quotes from skeptics, doubters, and freethinkers who wanted to know for themselves—who wanted to arrive at the truth about the truth through their own experiences and the evidence of their eyes.

The list of quoted authors would run for pages, but among them are the great ancients like Epictetus, Aristophanes, Cicero, and Euripides, through the Renaissance, the European Enlightenment, and the first American Rationalists, all the way to our modern times of the British language philosophers (like Bertrand Russell) and the French existentialists (like Sartre). If you are the least bit skeptical, this will become your favorite bedside reading ever!

One of the top freethinkers of the early 1900s, Chapman Cohen, is all but lost in the mists of history and obscurity. But he is one of my favorite sharp-eyed debunkers of humbug, without which debunking the truth stands no chance.

Cohen wrote on a wide variety of subjects, from how tyrants target scientists to the contemporary witch trials of his times to the connection between religious zealotry and a preoccupation with other people’s sexual practices to the differences between English and French atheism.

If you’ve read smart essays by the likes of Bertrand Russell and George Orwell, you will enjoy the essays of Chapman Cohen, a thinker you likely have never heard of—but might love to get to know.

So, first things first with this list of recommendations to unlock your creativity: you got to get yourself out of the way. There’s no better way to do this than acquainting yourself with Sufism, even on an introductory level.

I am very close friends with the pre-eminent American translator of the 13th-century Sufi poet Jalal al-Dīn Rumi, and it still took me many years to get to this book. Maybe everything happens at the right time, but you still need to settle with yourself to get any ball rolling, especially the powerful tool of your own creativity–the only medicine, the single refuge. 

Since ancient times people have gathered outdoors to celebrate all sorts of things, generating joy through dancing, marching, singing, and feasting. In the past most had some religious aura, but in the present, many are political gatherings, deeply satisfying ways of expressing moral visions. In this romp through history Ehrenreich shows us the sheer fun of political (and other) gatherings, which modern elites have tried hard to suppress.

This engrossing and inspiring book portrays the author’s wondrous encounters with Sufi master, Hazrat Inayat Kahn, first as a beginning student and then as his assistant. He witnesses the experiences of this sage as he moves through the stages of illumination, dark night of the soul, and unitary consciousness. Interspersed throughout the book are the essential teachings of Sufism as taught by Inayat Khan, its message of love, harmony, and beauty, the Ten Sufi Thoughts, meditation, and the workings of the inner life. Memories of a Sufi Sage is a great introduction to Sufism and one of its great mystics. 

Written for contemporary audiences by a living Sufi philosopher and world-renowned authority of comparative philosophy and mysticism, The Garden of Truth is a must-read for anyone who wants to have an understanding of, awaken to, and joyously live in the present moment. Unlike any book I’ve seen in English, this work explains how the Sufi path of liberation is all about realizing that one can only return to the present moment by proceeding from where we are in the here-and-now. Once we get There, we realize that Here is Now, since Now was always Here.

Written by the renowned Sunni scholar and Sufi teacher Abu ’l-Qasim al-Qushayri (986–1074) of Khorasan in Eastern Iran, this is probably the most popular Sufi training manual ever. It is still widely used by Sufis today, so you can begin your Sufi journey by reading it. It also serves as a window onto the life of “Sufi friends of God” or “saints,” whom the author depicts as uncrowned kings of this world. We see them in a variety of contexts: suffering from hunger and thirst in the desert during a pilgrimage to Mecca, participating ecstatically or quietly in spiritual concerts, reciting and interpreting the Qur’an, waging war against outward enemies (“infidels”) and their own demonic desires, earning livelihood, meditating in a retreat, praying, working miracles, interacting with the commoners, their family members and peers, dreaming, and dying.

This book is based on Middle Eastern poems from the 1300s which cuddle up close to you and turn you around, such that the world will never be the same again. You find yourself illuminated in new ways with every poem. How amazing to be so intimate with a great being from so far in the past.