Here are 100 books that The Annual Migration Of Clouds fans have personally recommended if you like
The Annual Migration Of Clouds.
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As both a high school teacher and an activist, I am preoccupied by the world we are leaving to the next generation. And as a long-time Toronto resident, I also just love seeing my city get destroyed in fiction, which is far more cathartic than watching it get bungled up in real life. I am drawn to the type of story that exposes the wounds that run deep in our political, economic, and social structures. The best dystopian fiction shines a mirror on our history and our present, and brings the experiences of marginalized voices—for whom the apocalypse is not merely theoretical—to a broader audience.
Hopkinson’s stunning debut plunges the reader into a wildly inventive future Toronto. She seamlessly weaves together the politics of race, class, and gender, inflected with the rich culture and history of the Caribbean diaspora.
Despite the grim post-apocalyptic setting, the characters are part of a community, surviving through solidarity and mutual aid. There are no easy answers or neat resolutions to be found here—the fraught, tenuous connections between families and lovers are messy and grounded.
Sadly, many of the elements of this 1998 novel have proven prophetic, and this book is still a clarion call 25 years later.
The rich and the privileged have fled the city, barricaded it behind roadblocks, and left it to crumble. The inner city has had to rediscover old ways -- farming, barter, herb lore. But now the monied need a harvest of bodies, and so they prey upon the helpless of the streets. With nowhere to turn, a young woman must open herself to ancient truths, eternal powers, the tragic mystery surrounding her mother and grandmother. She must bargain with gods, and give birth to new legends.
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I've been in love with ecological writing, the effort to communicate love for and grief over the destruction of the profound beauty of the natural world, since I wrote my first play about rainforest clear-cutting in fifth grade—if not before. In 2016, I started Reckoning, a nonprofit journal of creative writing about environmental justice, because I wanted to encourage others doing this work, to provide an independent platform for it in ways profit-driven traditional publishing wasn't, and to build a community where those writers could share and inspire each other. Seven years later, that community defines me; it's the most rewarding thing I've ever done.
Christopher Rowe's prose is beautiful, vivid, and engrossing. His vision of a future mid-South dominated by rogue artificial intelligence conceals amid its wild phantasmagoria a surprisingly perceptive tenderness for the ways people cling together as they struggle to adapt and make space for each other in a complex and massively changed world. These stories also communicate an engrossing, evangelical love for bikes and cycling like nothing else I've read.
There are ten stories here including one readers have waited ten long years for: in new novel-la The Border State Rowe revisits the world of his much-lauded story The Voluntary State. Competitive cyclists twins Michael and Maggie have trained all their lives to race internationally. One thing holds them back: their mother who years before crossed the border into Tennessee.
Praise for Christopher Rowe:
"Rowe's stories are the kind of thing you want on a cold, winter's night when the fire starts burning low. Terrific." Justina Robson (Glorious Angels)
"As good as he is now, he'll keep getting better. Read…
I've been in love with ecological writing, the effort to communicate love for and grief over the destruction of the profound beauty of the natural world, since I wrote my first play about rainforest clear-cutting in fifth grade—if not before. In 2016, I started Reckoning, a nonprofit journal of creative writing about environmental justice, because I wanted to encourage others doing this work, to provide an independent platform for it in ways profit-driven traditional publishing wasn't, and to build a community where those writers could share and inspire each other. Seven years later, that community defines me; it's the most rewarding thing I've ever done.
In this profound and devastating novella, Campbell gives us a complex, multi-generational window on a post-warming, post-collapse world rebuilding itself. A cathedral grown, not built, out of living trees. A masterwork violin made from dying old-growth Sitka spruce that will long outlast the hand of its creator. A decaying library salvaged, its wealth of knowledge distributed to the living hands that need it most. Through these touchstones of human resilience and ingenuity, we're shown a path forward into a new world that doesn't escape loss or ignore it, but is burgeoned up by it into new vitality.
A NOVELLA-LENGTH EXPANSION OF THE 2020 THEODORE STURGEON MEMORIAL AWARD WINNER
A professor in pandemic isolation rescues books from the flooded and collapsing McPherson Library. A man plants fireweed on the hillside of his depopulated Vancouver Island suburb. An aspiring luthier poaches the last ancient Sitka spruce to make a violin for a child prodigy. Campbell's astonishing vision pulls the echoing effects of small acts and intimate moments through this multi-generational and interconnected story of how a West coast community survives the ravages of climate change.
Stealing technology from parallel Earths was supposed to make Declan rich. Instead, it might destroy everything.
Declan is a self-proclaimed interdimensional interloper, travelling to parallel Earths to retrieve futuristic cutting-edge technology for his employer. It's profitable work, and he doesn't ask questions. But when he befriends an amazing humanoid robot,…
I've been in love with ecological writing, the effort to communicate love for and grief over the destruction of the profound beauty of the natural world, since I wrote my first play about rainforest clear-cutting in fifth grade—if not before. In 2016, I started Reckoning, a nonprofit journal of creative writing about environmental justice, because I wanted to encourage others doing this work, to provide an independent platform for it in ways profit-driven traditional publishing wasn't, and to build a community where those writers could share and inspire each other. Seven years later, that community defines me; it's the most rewarding thing I've ever done.
A ridiculously fun and eerily prescient folktale, about the rise of a Robin Hood figure and the community that rallies around her in a droughted, post-warming Portland, Oregon, I can basically never not recommend this book. Like Brown Girl in the Ring, this is one of the books that made me want to read and write about speculative community-building and environmental justice. Parzybok's clever, inviting prose makes this substantial novel a deceptively fast and joyful read, and I'm never not sad when it's over.
"Parzybok does this thing where you think, 'this is fun!' and then you are charmed, saddened, and finally changed by what you have read. It's like jujitsu storytelling."—Maureen F. McHugh, author of After the Apocalypse
In drought-stricken Portland, Oregon, a Robin Hood-esque water thief is caught on camera redistributing an illegal truckload of water to those in need. Nicknamed Maid Marian—real name: Renee, a twenty-something barista and eternal part-time college student—she is an instant folk hero. Renee rides her swelling popularity and the public's disgust at how the city has abandoned its…
When I started college in 1974 as a young radical feminist I had zero interest in history—it was all wars and men. But in a course about the Russian Revolution I learned the most thrilling thing: historians don’t simply relay facts, they argue with one another. I fell in love, and I never looked back. I am especially fascinated by what societies label “unthinkable,” and how that shapes, contains, and controls radical ideas. I've always been intrigued by what is "out of the question" and then poke at it, see what lies underneath, and try to figure out why things remain, or are kept, invisible.
On one level, this is a book about housework in the pre-Civil War northern United States. Much more profoundly, it shatters ideas about unpaid labor in early industrial capitalism. It completely changed my—and many readers’—ideas of what constitutes “work,” what it means to contribute to a household economy, and how ideas about wages (and, especially, work done by men outside the home) obscured early capitalists’ dependence on women’s unwaged work. After reading this, you’ll never refer to “women who worked” and “women who didn’t” again. It should be essential reading not only for women’s historians, but for anyone interested in ideologies of labor, capitalism, and the history of work.
[Full disclosure: I met Jeanne Boydston on my second day of graduate school and we collaborated closely on our dissertations (later books). She was my best friend and best teacher until her much-too-early death in 2008.]
Over the course of a two hundred year period, women's domestic labor gradually lost its footing as a recognized aspect of economic life in America. The image of the colonial "goodwife," valued for her contribution to household prosperity, had been replaced by the image of a "dependent" and a "non-producer." This book is a history of housework in the United States prior to the Civil War. More particularly, it is a history of women's unpaid domestic labor in the context of the emergence of an industrialized society in the northern United States. Boydston argues that just as a capitalist economic…
I have long found it mysterious how we can live in what is truly one interconnected global order. Traders, merchants, deal-makers have long been viewed with suspicion. I wrote Compass of Societyto explore how one country, France, with its tradition of land-based elites, could contemplate remaking itself as a “commercial society.” Adam Smith said that even in his time, everyone “becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society itself... a commercial society.” Revisionists are finding high levels of commercialization even in premodern China and India. In this list, I picked five of my favorite books that reshaped our understanding of where European “capitalism” came from.
Though not bursting with colorful anecdotes, this book is absolutely authoritative, and along with the author’s journal articles, it transformed our understanding of medieval life in at least three ways. It showed how pervasive the monetary exchange of goods and services was in the so-called age of feudalism. It demonstrated the importance of informal modes of exchange, away from the publicly visible formal markets. And it went far toward clarifying how, when, and for what purpose monetary exchange took place in a society dominated by vertical bonds of personal loyalty and reciprocity.
The Commercialisation of English Society offers an interpretation of social and economic change in England over five centuries. By 1500 English livelihoods depended more upon money and commercial transactions than ever before; the institutional framework of markets had been transformed and urban development was more pronounced. These changes were not, however, caused by any unilinear development of population, output or money supply. This pioneering study examines both institutional and economic transformation and the social changes that resulted and stresses the limited importance of formal trading institutions for the development of local trade. Commercial transition is throughout analysed from a broader…
Nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife—mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice—near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. She guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marks…
I became fascinated with geography as a teenager and spent my life studying it. I always wanted to understand how we transform our planet, for better or worse. Part of this is understanding what happens in particular localities, which I have been able to look at closely by visiting places across all continents (except Antarctica). Part of it is understanding how the complex relations between human society and everything else shape global futures. My long-standing passion, however, has been understanding how what happens in one locality is shaped by its evolving connections with the rest of the world. These books pushed me to see the world differently through these connections.
I found this book so interesting because it documents how European prosperity was also shaped by deep historical ties with Asia. Digging through a huge trove of historical archives, the authors document how Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire brought capitalist practices to Europe in the 13th century.
It’s not an easy read, but I found that careful study pays off because it offers such an original perspective on Europe’s success. I liked how their evidence buttresses Blaut’s more speculative critique of Eurocentrism, also extending it by showing that Asian initiative shaped European success—it was not just colonialism and slavery.
*Winner of International Studies Association (ISA)'s International Political Sociology Best Book Prize for 2017*
*Winner of British International Studies Association (BISA)'s International Political Economy Working Group Book Prize of 2016*
*Shortlisted for the ISA Book Prize*
Mainstream historical accounts of the development of capitalism describe a process which is fundamentally European - a system that was born in the mills and factories of England or under the guillotines of the French Revolution. In this groundbreaking book, a very different story is told.
How the West Came to Rule offers a interdisciplinary and international historical account of the origins of capitalism.…
I have cross-disciplinary expertise (ethics and moral philosophy, philosophical anthropology and moral psychology), and my work focuses on personalist virtue ethics, moral human development, and the links between ethics and economics; I am a person who loves nature and animals, and I’m thrilled to do good work. I was educated and worked internationally, with academic degrees in different Europe countries and the USA, and 30 years of work and academic experience in Europe, the USA, and SE Asia. I live with my family near London, U.K.. I am passionate about enabling a more sustainable society that however remains rooted in human dignity and avoids instrumentalizing the person
It attempts an evaluation of capitalism from within ethics and various disciplines.
Although universal moral rules in capitalism have clear difficulties in implementation, this challenge pushes us to reflect on the moral inadequacy of pragmatist/utilitarian ways of responding to ethics in capitalism, as they are myopic. The book suggests a universal ethic of duty for dignity is better ethics, even if it is still assuming a global universal moral rule.
This work provides a critical look at business practice in the early 21st century and suggests changes that are both practical and normatively superior. Several chapters present a reflection on business ethics from a societal or macro-organizational point of view. It makes a case for the economic and moral superiority of the sustainability capitalism of the European Union over the finance-based model of the United States. Most major themes in business ethics are covered and some new ones are introduced, including the topic of the right way to teach business ethics. The general approach adopted in this volume is Kantian.…
As both a scholar and a citizen I have spent my adult life seeking to better understand the dynamics of power, especially power wielded in flagrantly unjust fashion in societies otherwise founded on notions of life, liberty, and happiness for all. This has led me to study the history of the economy, not just as a material but as a cultural system that encodes the categories of modern life: self and society, private and public, body and soul, and needs and desires.
Jeffrey Sklansky is that rare academic with a writer’s literary imagination, which serves the reader well in engagingThe Soul’s Economy, a riveting and dense intellectual history of the market’s emergence as the organizing principle of not only economic life, but of a distinctly new moral sensibility between 1820 and 1920.
Sklansky explores this far-reaching turn of events through a series of dedicated readings of America’s leading philosophers and pundits of the times, ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson to John Dewey, who collectively recast the pursuit of wealth into an ethic of personal rectitude and even the source of society’s general welfare.
Socializing the psyche; Tracing a seismic shift in American social thought, Jeffrey-Sklansky offers a new synthesis of the intellectual transformation entailed in the rise of industrial capitalism. For a century after Independence, the dominant American understanding of selfhood and society came from the tradition of political economy, which defined freedom and equality in terms of ownership of the means of self-employment. However, the gradual demise of the household economy rendered proprietary independence an increasingly embattled ideal. Large landowners and industrialists claimed the right to rule as a privilege of their growing monopoly over productive resources, while dispossessed farmers and workers…
The Bridge provides a compassionate and well researched window into the worlds of linear and circular thinking. A core pattern to the inner workings of these two thinking styles is revealed, and most importantly, insight into how to cross the distance between them. Some fascinating features emerged such as, circular…
I began this veil as a mathematics major and a first generation college student. It was not easy and I had no great plans or ambitions. I was good at math. But as I read books like these, and many others, I changed my horizons altogether, saw a place for myself and a purpose previously lacking. Economic History resembles my first love of math, but with persons and human behavior included. The latter is endlessly fascinating, as is the tendency of “experts” to misread and make broad assumptions that I, ever skeptical, wish to test where I can. I like being engaged intellectually for its own sake, and, from books like Tristram Shandy, have always endeavored to take my work seriously, but not myself as a human being.
The book is, like the others I have recommended, decidedly distinctive and untraditional. It traces the convoluted history of capitalist thought prior to its advent (which is itself the subject of ceaseless debate). Reducing forces to “passion” and “order” made me look at a complicated subject in a new way.
In this volume, Albert Hirschman reconstructs the intellectual climate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to illuminate the intricate ideological transformation that occurred, wherein the pursuit of material interests--so long condemned as the deadly sin of avarice--was assigned the role of containing the unruly and destructive passions of man. Hirschman here offers a new interpretation for the rise of capitalism, one that emphasizes the continuities between old and new, in contrast to the assumption of a sharp break that is a common feature of both Marxian and Weberian thinking. Among the insights presented here is the ironical finding that capitalism…
