Here are 93 books that The Country between Us fans have personally recommended if you like
The Country between Us.
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I have published 18 books of poetry, most recently the one I have listed here, as well as a collection of literary essays, Fables of Representation. My emphasis has always been on the more progressive and risk-taking kinds of expression, as seen with the Beat poets, Ginsberg and Corso, and the New York School poets, Ashbery and O'Hara. Seeing a lack of that perspective on bookshelves, I edited two editions of a major anthology, Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, and 42 issues of the literary magazine, New American Writing. I have been reading, more recently, a lot of great writing by women, especially those writing at length, with the volume up.
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.
Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry
One of the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2018
A powerful, timely, dazzling collection of sonnets from one of America's most acclaimed poets, Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award-winning author of Lighthead
"Sonnets that reckon with Donald Trump's America." -The New York Times
In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the…
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 was fortunate enough to receive a fellowship to study in Washington, DC, at the Library of Congress. I wrote a paper on cities and urban spaces that I later published. But this period of study coincided with the creation of early sections of Drifter, and the work in this collection draws from the books I’ve listed as energy sources, inspiration, and confirmation. I love anything that tries to open the mind to the limited ways we see and feel. That’s what I’m after on this journey, and these books are worthy companions and teachers.
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 Situationist International Anthology is the most comprehensive and accurately translated collection of situationist writings in English.
In 1957 a few European avant-garde groups came together to form the Situationist International. Picking up where the dadaists and surrealists had left off, the situationists challenged people’s passive conditioning with carefully calculated scandals and the playful tactic of détournement (“rerouting, hijacking”). Seeking a more extreme social revolution than was dreamed of by most leftists, they developed an incisive critique of the global spectacle-commodity system and of its “Communist” pseudo-opposition, and their new methods of agitation helped trigger the May 1968 revolt in…
I was fortunate enough to receive a fellowship to study in Washington, DC, at the Library of Congress. I wrote a paper on cities and urban spaces that I later published. But this period of study coincided with the creation of early sections of Drifter, and the work in this collection draws from the books I’ve listed as energy sources, inspiration, and confirmation. I love anything that tries to open the mind to the limited ways we see and feel. That’s what I’m after on this journey, and these books are worthy companions and teachers.
I love the distinction Debord makes between the flaneur of Baudelaire and the wanderers practicing the dérive. It’s worth meditating on, and you just might spot what he means as you read these poems that paint a picture of Paris as an urban kaleidoscope of images, strange and alluring.
As much as I might want to switch labels on cans in the grocery store (derive, in one version), I can’t help but see a throughline from “When the cruel sun redoubles it's sharp stroke/I walk alone, absorbed in my curious exercise” and Debord’s observation: “the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres.”
The bilingual, illustrated, and National Book Award-winning edition of Charles Baudelaire's masterpiece. The complete French text is accompanied with an English translation by Richard Howard.
Charles Baudelaire's 1857 masterwork was scandalous in its day for its portrayals of sex, same-sex love, death, the corrupting and oppressive power of the modern city and lost innocence, Les Fleurs Du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) remains powerful and relevant for our time.
In "Spleen et ideal," Baudelaire dramatizes the erotic cycle of ecstacy and anguish-of sexual and romantic love. "Tableaux Parisiens" condemns the crushing effects of urban planning on a city's soul and…
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
I was fortunate enough to receive a fellowship to study in Washington, DC, at the Library of Congress. I wrote a paper on cities and urban spaces that I later published. But this period of study coincided with the creation of early sections of Drifter, and the work in this collection draws from the books I’ve listed as energy sources, inspiration, and confirmation. I love anything that tries to open the mind to the limited ways we see and feel. That’s what I’m after on this journey, and these books are worthy companions and teachers.
They hit you like a brick in the forehead: solid poems that look like letters from an exile. Both personal and strange, these poems capture the feeling of the wanderer where “it isn’t a mirror anymore but a window.” That’s what I want as I go: shots of wake-up words. Something to charge the eyes for the spectacles on the way.
A genre-bending collection of prose poems from Pulitzer Prize–winner Franz Wright brings us surreal tales of childhood, adolescence, and adult awareness, moving from the gorgeous to the shocking to a sense of peace. Wright’s most intimate thoughts and images appear before us in dramatic and spectral short narratives: mesmerizing poems whose colloquial sound and rhythms announce a new path for this luminous and masterful poet.
In these journeys, we hear the constant murmured “yes” of creation—“it will be packing its small suitcase soon; it will leave the keys dangling from the lock and set out at last,” Wright tells us.…
Ever since I can remember, during difficult periods, or just when I needed inspiration, I have turned to poetry. Eventually, I became so in love with poetry that I became a poet. I believe these five books of poetry will offer even a reader who is generally not drawn to poetry solace and strength and inspiration. I would go so far as to say each of these poetry collections has changed me for the better.
Brigit Pegeen Kelly finds the profoundest of truths in these poems set in an imaginary garden full of ruined statuary, and, more than that, she finds stories. From the garden, she brings forth myths and fables that riveted me. A sleeping child found nestled around a black swan, a dog that is a wolf that is a dog.
I have never been so deeply affected by a collection of contemporary poetry. The depth of her poetic vision will shake your world.
Richly allusive, the poems in Brigit Pegeen Kelly's The Orchard evoke elements of myth in distinctive aural and rhythmic patterns. Her poetic strength lies in her ability to cast poems as modern myths and allegories. Propelled by patterned repetitions and lush cadences, the poems move the reader through a landscape where waking and dream consciousness fuse. Brigit Pegeen Kelly teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her poetry collections are Song (BOA Editions), the 1994 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the 1995 Los Angeles Times Book Award, and To…
I started writing poetry when I was eight or nine, inspired by the way song lyrics stirred my soul. The poetry of songs like Bowie’s Space Oddity or Dylan’s Johanna made me want to write. I read Allen Ginsburg’s Howl as a young man and found a new language, rhythm, and way of seeing the beauty and sadness of the world. Over the years, I’ve written many songs and more than many poems. My first collection, OWL, is out now. Poetry feeds my heart and soul and entices my senses. I love the books on this list and hope you enjoy them as much as I do!
The poems in this book are intimate conversations between the living, the dead, and the soul. I love these poems because they are at once piercingly direct and also delicate and loving. As my parents enter the final years of their lives, I find myself both celebrating my time left with them and also pre-grieving their loss.
Clifton courses this transom, above and below the ground, with a surety of craft that I can only aspire to in my own work. This collection includes a daily poem journal covering the seven days starting with 9/11. I am struck by this sequence of poems in their ability to cover the nation’s fear and grief, the commonality of the global experience, and the minutely personal, all in a few short lines.
Lucille Clifton's poetry carries her deep concerns for the world's children, the stratification of American society, those people lost or forgotten amid the crushing race of Western materialism and technology. In turns sad, troubled and angry, her voice has always been one of great empathy, knowing, as she says, "the only mercy is memory." In this, her 12th book of poetry, the National Book Award-winner speaks to the tenuous relationship between mothers and daughters, the debilitating power of cancer, the open wound of racial prejudice, the redemptive gift of story-telling. "September Song," a sequence of seven poems, featured on National…
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
As a poet and a novelist, I'm fascinated by the places where these two genres meet, undo each other, and create something new again. That sounds a lot like what love can do, and whenever I read a long poem that achieves a unique aesthetic unity, I feel the writer has found a new way to love the world, to love the reader. And, as usual, both the world and the reader are challenged by that love—to grow.
When I worked at the Academy of American Poets many years ago, I found a record of Stanford’s submission to the Walt Whitman Award. The Editors told him his submission could not be accepted because it exceeded the page limit—by about 500 pages.
The poem he submitted was The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, and if you’re interested in archetypal imagery that will shatter your heart and put it back together again differently, entirely differently, this wild ride is for you.
Poetry. Frank Stanford was called by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Alan Dugan a brilliant poet, ample in his work, like Whitman. He was the founder of Lost Roads Publishers and the author of a number of important works, among them the epic THE BATTLEFIELD WHERE THE MOON SAYS I LOVE YOU, reprinted by Lost Roads under the editorship of Forrest Gander and C.D. Wright. Frank Stanford said his purpose in his writing and with his press was to 'reclaim the landscape of American poetry' - The Arkansas Times. Stanford ended his own life in 1978 when he was 29. The reprinting…
I'm a writer and a botanist with a lifelong interest in nature. I grew up in southern England where I spent my time running around the fields and woods searching for birds, insects and wild plants (as one does). As well as writing about nature, I run plant identification training courses and have a genetics PhD.
Miriam Darlington is my favourite author and Otter Country is one of the most thumbed, tatty-cornered, precious books that I own. I love it: for its voice, its humour and its beautiful prose. Darlington takes you on a gentle meander through the world of the otter in the most relatable of writing styles. She doesn’t start out as an otter expert; she learns as she goes, and so do you. Everything about this book is wonderful, and I would say the same about her other book, Owl Sense, which I have only left off this list because I wanted to cover five different authors!
Over the course of a year, Miriam Darlington travelled around Britain in search of wild otters; from her home in Devon to the wilds of Scotland; to Cumbria, Wales, Northumberland, Cornwall, Somerset and the River Lea; to her childhood home near the Ouse, the source of her watery obsession. Otter Country follows Darlington's search through different landscapes, seasons, weather and light, as she tracks one of Britain's most elusive animals. During her journey, she meets otter experts, representatives of the Environment Agency, conservationists, ecologists, walkers, Henry Williamson's family, Gavin Maxwell's heir; zoo keepers, fishermen, scientists, hunters and poets. Above all…
As the Director of the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University, I’m excited to stay on top of all that’s being done in the field of Texas Music and let me assure you that it is a great way to spend one’s days. Texas music and culture reflect the state’s diverse and contested past, and every month, it seems that there is not only a new artist appearing on the stage to sing her or his truth but a writer helping us to understand how those truths fit into the larger narratives of Texas history.
If the Armadillo World Headquarters is one central node of countercultural country music in Texas, Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Picnics was the other. Where the Armadillo closed down in 1980, though, Willie’s picnics persist as an annual institution to this day. Author Dave Thomas has extensively researched the phenomenon and crafts its half-century history well.
The resulting volume is a riveting account that uses the sun-baked Texas ritual as a launching pad for stories encompassing all of America. A newspaper journalist, Thomas has an eye for detail and an ear for turns of phrase that kept me turning the pages long after I should have turned out the lights. If you ever wanted to read about a sort of country music, Woodstock Groundhog Day, this is that book.
In 1973, a forty-year-old country musician named Willie Nelson, inspired by a failed music festival the year before, decided he was going to hold his own party. He would stage it in the same remote and rocky field where the previous festival had withered. And he’d do it in July: not the hottest part of the Central Texas summer, but “damn sure close enough,” according to music journalist Dave Dalton Thomas. As unlikely as it seemed in 1973, Willie kept the event going, minus a year off here and there, for half a century.
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
If you regard science fiction, fantasy, and horror as throwaway literature, think again. It is within such tales that the contest between good and evil is given center stage, wherein heroic acts are celebrated, and virtue discussed in all its many permutations. I would call speculative fiction a worthy successor to the medieval morality play, a dramatic form that used allegorical characters to teach moral lessons. To wit—stories are an instrument of culture, a way to promote common values and an important activity for any civilization that intends to stick around. You won’t find an abundance of this vibe in ‘serious’ fiction—and when you do, it’s not as much fun.
A short story compilation, within which the title ‘Uncle Einar’ made such an impression that I still, to this day, remember what it was about, who wrote it, and when I read it. I found it on my dad’s nightstand 65 years ago. That’s how much I liked it. Although the collection falls mostly into the fantasy genre, the title Uncle Einar is something of a crossover (Mutants!) and heartwarming to boot.
Many of these stories were first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales, but keep in mind we’re talking about the 1940s and 50s. They called it ‘macabre fiction’. These days, we call it YA.
But this is, first and foremost, a work of literature, a timeless classic upon which the author made a splendid reputation, replete with lyrical prose, imaginative concepts, surprise endings, and persuasive dialogue. Also, an example of Magical Realism, a literary approach I…
The October Country is Ray Bradbury’s own netherworld of the soul, inhabited by the horrors and demons that lurk within all of us. Renowned for his multi-million-copy bestseller, Fahrenheit 451, and hailed by Harper’s magazine as “the finest living writer of fantastic fiction,” Ray Bradbury proves here that he is America’s master of the short story.
This classic collection features:
The Emissary: The faithful dog was the sick boy’s only connection with the world outside—and beyond . . . The Small Assassin: A fine, healthy baby boy was the new mother’s dream come true—or her worst nightmare . . .…
