12 Books Like The Cabin at the End of the World

In her exquisite debut novel, Laura Stanfill crafts a story that bursts with heart, grit, and a sense of whimsy that is truly rare in today’s fiction. At the heart of the novel lies Henri Blanchard, a young man whose talent and curiosity rebel against the path set out for him by lineage and tradition. Henri’s journey—from a small-town boy navigating his father’s expectations to a fugitive accused of murder—plunges readers into a world as rich and complex as his innermost desires.

Stanfill deftly balances suspense and charm, as Henri's misadventures range from laugh-out-loud escapades to tense encounters with high stakes. The town of Mireville, vividly painted, is populated by characters who are as endearing as they are peculiar, with friendships—like Henri’s bond with Aimée—that feel authentic and layered. The story’s essence lies in its exploration of identity and belonging, themes Stanfill captures beautifully through Henri’s odyssey to find a… show more.

In The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place, Andrew Bertaina has crafted a refreshingly candid and poignant collection of essays that grapples with the aches, absurdities, and surprising beauties of mid-life. Bertaina’s honesty feels almost revelatory as he navigates failed relationships, the challenges of parenthood, and an existential malaise that will resonate with anyone who has paused to wonder, “What now?” With each essay, he peels back layers of human experience, often with a sardonic nod to life’s unpredictability and a deep respect for the wisdom of Michel de Montaigne.

Bertaina’s prose is both thought-provoking and incredibly relatable. His insights are sharp, yet his voice remains down-to-earth, merging reflections on love, masculinity, and time with humor that ranges from laugh-out-loud funny to quietly introspective. In essays as varied as attempting to woo a French woman on a train and reckoning with the bittersweet riddle of time, Bertaina captures how life’s… show more.

Patti Smith’s book beautifully chronicles her intense and formative friendship with the groundbreaking artist Robert Mapplethorpe as they navigated the vibrant and often gritty art scene of late 1960s and 1970s New York City.

Theirs wasn’t a fairytale romance, but a complex, evolving bond between two flawed yet undeniably brilliant creatives. Reading about their struggles, their artistic pursuits within the legendary Chelsea Hotel, and the wider New York City scene evoked a strong sense of nostalgia for me, a time and place I've always found artistically inspiring.

The exploration of their creative partnership, the push and pull between them as individuals finding their artistic voices, is something I’ve often yearned for but haven’t quite experienced in such a profound way.

When I want to be astonished by the fierce and tender realities of the natural world—which is pretty much always—I read the late poet Mary Oliver. These are immersive essays by a writer who infused the very act of observation with a sacred energy—in her own words, “attention is the beginning of devotion.”

The essays are alive with animal life and soar with Oliver’s signature, forthright voice. In one essay, she rescues an injured gull. In another, she forages the eggs of a snapping turtle for dinner. Oliver humbly witnesses and partakes of the mystery and turns companionably to her reader with stirring questions: “Do you think there is anything not attached by its unbreakable cord to everything else?”

Once, on a weeks-long gig far from home, I stayed in a bare attic room with no TV, no internet, not even a radio. I didn’t mind. I had this translation of the Odyssey to settle down with every evening after work. I would think about it all day long: the vivid language, the fantastical events, the struggle and suffering of the protagonist. Reading it was like going to a technicolor movie every night, except that the movie was inside my head.

Talk about an essential human story—the Odyssey is four thousand years old, but its characters have the same emotions, fears, vices, and virtues we have today. Their struggles make my heart race and my eyes tear up. My imagination goes into overdrive, and I revel in the wonder.

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.

A book with this title for an End of the World reading list? I want this one in the stack! Why? First of all, it’s poetry. Wait, it’s prose. It’s poetry and prose! I love those writers who wriggle out of the straight-jacket of the genre, and Simic’s book is just that: a mind-adventure.

I devour these little dream nuggets as if they were communion wafers. I love the way these movie-poems train the mind for the big adventure! The bardo might just be a little easier to traverse after a good read through the flash pieces in Simic’s book.  

Where do you go when all the political and social circuses have taken the last ounce of energy you can muster? Mountains and Rivers! This is where my book began. In fact, I can still see the cherry blossoms that fell into the central book margin while I read the twisting, turning, makes-meaning-in-any-direction-you-read “Star Guage” by Su Hui.

What mind conceived this brilliance? And West Cove on Orcas Island became miraculously superimposed by the natural world of Wu Wei! The Chinese poets opened a door, and now there’s no going back. The only way forward is The Cabin at the End of the World. Create it! Read it!

This collection includes Guy DeBord’s essay on dérive, a form of playful examination of urban spaces, exploring what draws us, what repels us, and breaking from the routines and pathways of our day-to-day survival. It’s a call to wonder.

Debord’s ideas inspired my approach to Drifter and how I organized not only the construction of individual poems but the connecting themes of the whole book. Debord’s writing is typically French in its intense and passionate thought and delightfully wistful way of liberating yourself from tired perceptions.

“The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house,” Forche writes in her famous poem from this collection, “The Colonel.” I knew there was a connection between what I saw in Forche’s poetry and what I was after as I was cooking up my aesthetic with a good dose of Debord and Baudelaire and others.

I love that these are little dream movies, narrative flashes that spike up in your mind and then drift away like something you caught a glimpse of on that river moving quickly out of sight. And like Debord, there’s a little of the political, a little psychological, and more mystery to keep me coming back.