Here are 100 books that The Grass Arena fans have personally recommended if you like
The Grass Arena.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
As Series Editor for Unheard Voices, I believe in the importance of the public gaining access to the voice of lived experience as it relates to the intractable issue of homelessness in our cities. Having gone through a brief period of not having any permanent residence in my twenties, I always had or felt a degree of affinity for the homeless and dedicated at least part of my career as a psychiatrist and then as a social entrepreneur to their plight.
Well-known American author Jack London experienced a genuine decline into vagrancy in the US during the late nineteenth century.
In his 1907 memoir, he depicts the realities of the vagrant’s life without flinching. The detailed descriptions of begging for sustenance from strangers’ homes, risking death to evade detection on fright trains, and the life of inmates in the state penitentiary are as gripping as they are appalling.
The only US book in this collection of recommendations, The Road confirms very similar experiences and challenges facing the homeless on both sides of the Atlantic.
"I went on 'The Road' because I couldn't keep away from it; because I hadn't the price of the railroad fare in my jeans; because I was so made that I couldn't work all my life on 'one same shift'; because — well, just because it was easier to than not to." Jack London's "road" is the railroad, and these reminiscences paint a vivid portrait of life in the United States during the major economic depression of the 1890s. His compelling adventures include a month-long detention in a state penitentiary for vagrancy, as well as his travels with Kelly's Army,…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
As Series Editor for Unheard Voices, I believe in the importance of the public gaining access to the voice of lived experience as it relates to the intractable issue of homelessness in our cities. Having gone through a brief period of not having any permanent residence in my twenties, I always had or felt a degree of affinity for the homeless and dedicated at least part of my career as a psychiatrist and then as a social entrepreneur to their plight.
The go-to book about voluntary homelessness, I always appreciate George Orwell’s amazing writing. It’s hard to put down.
The first half is about his time as a lowly kitchen assistant in the basement of a Parisian restaurant in the 1930s. The brutal divide between the rich and the destitute is better depicted here than in anything else I’ve ever read. The second half describes his time back in England and provides a heart-rending understanding of why homeless people are referred to as tramps and the ultimate emptiness of church-organized aid.
Although Orwell always had the option to opt out, his study of the lived experience of homelessness and the skill with which he captured it afterwards stand out as a colossus of the genre.
From the author of 1984, the classic semi-autobiographical story about the adventures of a penniless British writer in two cities.
Down and Out in Paris and London follows the journey of a writer among the down-and-out in two great cities. Without self-pity and often with humor, this novel is Orwell at his finest-a sobering, truthful protrayal of poverty and society.
As Series Editor for Unheard Voices, I believe in the importance of the public gaining access to the voice of lived experience as it relates to the intractable issue of homelessness in our cities. Having gone through a brief period of not having any permanent residence in my twenties, I always had or felt a degree of affinity for the homeless and dedicated at least part of my career as a psychiatrist and then as a social entrepreneur to their plight.
The only work of fiction on the list, Nobel Laureate Kurt Hamson’s Hunger (1980) was a game changer for modern literature.
Firmly anchored in the point of view of the narrator, we journey painfully with a man, a writer as a matter of fact, on the way down into the depths of meaningless, despair, and hunger. Adapted into several films, the story reflects how little society values the intellectual capital of people it perceives as the dregs and describes in detail the effects of starvation on the human mind.
A worrying and unsettling read, Hunger remains the best work of fiction ever written about destitution.
One of the most important and controversial writers of the 20th century, Knut Hamsun made literary history with the publication in 1890 of this powerful, autobiographical novel recounting the abject poverty, hunger and despair of a young writer struggling to achieve self-discovery and its ultimate artistic expression. The book brilliantly probes the psychodynamics of alienation and obsession, painting an unforgettable portrait of a man driven by forces beyond his control to the edge of self-destruction. Hamsun influenced many of the major 20th-century writers who followed him, including Kafka, Joyce and Henry Miller. Required reading in world literature courses, the highly…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
As Series Editor for Unheard Voices, I believe in the importance of the public gaining access to the voice of lived experience as it relates to the intractable issue of homelessness in our cities. Having gone through a brief period of not having any permanent residence in my twenties, I always had or felt a degree of affinity for the homeless and dedicated at least part of my career as a psychiatrist and then as a social entrepreneur to their plight.
With a title good enough to inspire the naming of a famous British band, Welsh poet Davies’ 1908 love letter to tramps and hobos drew directly from his own experience as a drifter in the US in the late nineteenth century.
Davies captures the life of jumping freight trains, joining the gold rush, and paying “boodle” to stay in the relative comfort of American jails. I love this book because it depicts the romanticism of the wandering mendicant without painting over the cracks of the hardships of roofless life (including parting company with one of his legs under a train).
There also are moments of humor (e.g., learning how to sleep standing up!) and the fascinating account of struggling to get his writing published on his return from his travels. It’s a classic.
A vagrant de Tocqueville gives an eloquent, dry-eyed report of his tramping adventures in the violent underworld of late 19th century America and Britain
An untutored Welsh tramp who became a popular poet acclaimed by the conservative Georgians and the vanguard Ezra Pound alike, W. H. Davies surprised his contemporaries with the unlikeliest portrait of the artist as a young man ever written.
After a delinquent childhood Davies renounced home and apprenticeship and at twenty-two sailed to America—the first of more than a dozen Atlantic crossings, often made by cattle boat. From 1893 to 1899 he was schooled by the…
We stumble onto games very early on in life and yet one game alone stood apart for me and hundreds of millions of other people over the centuries: chess. Across 1500 years of the games existence, chess has attracted players numbering in the billions regardless of language, culture, or creed, they were all unified in a passion for the irresistible allure of this remarkable game. In 2016, I was hired by Simon and Schuster to cover the world chess championship featuring arguably the greatest player ever to wield chess pieces, Magnus Carlsen. Fully immersing myself into the game during the researching and writing of the book, I collided with powerful themes.
The brilliance of Shenk’s book is that even someone who didn’t know the basic rules of chess would be enthralled by the backdrops of the game he introduces to the reader. Chess is played around the world by hundreds of millions of people and Shenk delves into the reasons why the game has such perversely addictive appeal.
A fresh, engaging look at how 32 carved pieces on a Chess board forever changed our understanding of war, art, science, and the human brain.
Chess is the most enduring and universal game in history. Here, bestselling author David Shenk chronicles its intriguing saga, from ancient Persia to medieval Europe to the dens of Benjamin Franklin and Norman Schwarzkopf. Along the way, he examines a single legendary game that took place in London in 1851 between two masters of the time, and relays his own attempts to become as skilled as his Polish ancestor Samuel Rosenthal, a nineteenth-century champion. With…
I first saw a chessboard at the age of 7 and became a professional chess player at 16, achieving the grandmaster title after just 3 years. Many years later – and no longer a professional – that childhood love for a beautiful game still burns brightly. My particular passions are chess engines – which offer a glimpse into the chess of the future – and the lives and games of historical chess players. I’ve reviewed hundreds of books for New in Chess magazine and I particularly love books that challenge my understanding of chess and show me new facets to old knowledge. I hope you love these books too!
As a child fascinated by chess, I devoured chess books about the old masters – colourful, eccentric geniuses who drew me into a world that I’ve never since wanted to leave!
Chess in those days was not just about who was the strongest, but also on a philosophical level about who was playing the “chess of the future”.
Hendriks examines the long rivalry between the first World Champion Steinitz and his challenger Zukertort through their writings – often conducted via fierce polemics in their respective newspaper columns – and their 1886 World Championship match.
It’s a moving human story which highlights that the winner’s narrative (“Steinitz won, and defeated an old-fashioned player with modern chess”) is not always the correct one!
The rivalry between William Steinitz and Johannes Zukertort, the world's strongest chess players in the late nineteenth century, became so fierce that it was eventually named The Ink War. They fought their battle on the chessboard and in various chess magazines and columns. It was not only about who was the strongest player but also about who had the best ideas on how to play the game.In 1872, Johannes Zukertort moved from Berlin to London to continue his chess career. Ten years earlier, William Steinitz had moved from Vienna to London for the same purpose; meanwhile, he had become the…
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…
Kubrick has fascinated me since I watchedPaths of Gloryat MoMA, one of Stanley’s old haunts, in the early 1960s. I first saw 2001 in London and then once a year after that back home in New York. I taught courses devoted to Kubrick, and when I taught the course online at the University of Virginia, welcomed his brother-in-law, Jan Harlan, to talk to us long distance. With each move, I drew closer and closer to our subject. I visited the Manor at Childwickbury and had lunch with Kubrick’s wife, Christiane. I studied documents in the Kubrick Archive in London. There became a point of recognizing myself in Kubrick himself and his films. A biography was inevitable.
Until David wrote his book, there hadn’t been a biography of Kubrick in over twenty years. While his book is short, it is very readable, and I found it the most intriguing of the short biographies.
Mikics conducted new interviews and visited Kubrick’s archive in London. His readings of Kubrick’s films are precise and elegant.
An engrossing biography of one of the most influential filmmakers in cinematic history
"A cool, cerebral book about a cool, cerebral talent. . . . A brisk study of [Kubrick's] films, with enough of the life tucked in to add context as well as brightness and bite."-Dwight Garner, New York Times
"An engaging and well-researched primer to the work of a cinematic legend."-Library Journal
Kubrick grew up in the Bronx, a doctor's son. From a young age he was consumed by photography, chess, and, above all else, movies. He was a self-taught filmmaker and self-proclaimed outsider, and his films exist…
When I was a small child I used to stare long and hard at playing cards, absorbed in the mediaeval-ish drawings and with the feeling that they were trying to tell me something beyond the obvious; which was that they simply represented numbers and suits for the purpose of playing Whist or Rummy or whatever. Gradually I learned that the instinct was true, that ordinary playing cards have long been used for fortune-telling and are related of course to Tarot cards, which take the divination angle to a whole other level (and conversely can equally, if rather frivolously, be used for playing Poker if you leave out the Major Arcana cards).
This book was my first introduction to One-dimensional Chess. I assumed the idea was as ridiculous as other impossible games in the story, such as Spotless Dominoes, but then it occurred to me that maybe not.
I devised a version with a King, Queen, Knight and three or four pawns facing each other along a single line of spaces and amazingly it does kind of work, though it is probably more of a puzzle than a game. I later learned that there are many other versions of One-dimensional Chess devised by chess fanatics over the years.
Apart from that, the story is a thought-provoking triple fantasy that plays with the notion that perhaps life itself is just a game, a puzzle we have to solve before we can move on.
Her eyes were black, wide as though with some sustained surprise, the skin from their outer corners to her small ears taut. Her lips were pale, and nearly too full for her small mouth, like something bled but bruised. He had never seen anyone or anything quite so beautiful in his life.'
Graham Park is in love. But Sara Fitch is an enigma to him, a creature of almost perverse mystery. Steven Grout is paranoid - and with justice. He knows that They are out to get him. They are. Quiss, insecure in his fabulous if ramshackle castle, is forced…
Teaching middle school made me painfully aware of the disparity in our students’ lives. Some kids have every advantage, while others struggle to survive without enough food, clean water, or a safe, dry place to sleep for the night. All these kids, with their diverse backgrounds, sit side-by-side in class and are expected to perform at the same academic and social levels. In my novels, I feature ordinary teens that are strong, smart, and resilient, like so many of the students who taught me as much as I taught them.
Catherine Ryan Hyde does a masterful job of showing us the stark reality of teen homelessness through the eyes of Jordy and Chloe. The content of the first few chapters was hard for me to read because of what young people must do to survive on the street and what traumas lead them there in the first place. As the story unfolded, though, Hyde took me on a warm and loving journey as Jordy set out to show Chloe that there truly is a lot of beauty in the world.
Meet Jordy. He’s on his own in New York City. Nobody to depend on; nobody depending on him. And it’s been working fine. Until this girl comes along. She’s 18 and blond and pretty–her world should be perfect. But she’s seen things no one should ever see in their whole life–the kind of things that break a person. She doesn’t seem broken, though. She seems . . . innocent. Like she doesn’t know a whole lot. Only sometimes she does. The one thing she knows for sure is that the world is an ugly place. Now her life may depend…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
In March 2020, in the middle of a pandemic that had all but crippled New York City, my husband and I became homeless advocates. For months, we woke up each morning, made dozens of sandwiches, and walked the deserted city streets trying to feed the homeless, who were struggling to survive. Deserted streets meant no panhandling, which in turn, meant no food. In doing so, we became friends with many of the homeless men and women in our neighborhood. Fear and suspicion were replaced by trust and love, and our eyes and hearts were forever opened to people who had once been objects to be avoided.
Liz Murray’s riveting memoir tells of her unlikely rise from homelessness to being accepted to Harvard. It is another classic triumph over adversity story of someone beating the odds. I picked this book because of my own personal experience with homelessness. During the pandemic, my husband and I walked the deserted New York City streets helping to feed the homeless in our neighborhood. This led to the writing of my third book. Like Westover’s story, my book also tells the story of one woman’s rise from living on the streets of New York City to becoming sheltered, employed, and admitted to college.
____________________________________ Liz Murray never really had a chance in life. Born to a drug-addicted father who was in and out of prison, and an equally dependent mother who was in and out of mental institutions, she seemed destined to become just another tragic statistic; another life wasted on the brutal streets of New York.
By the age of 15, Liz found herself homeless with nowhere to turn but the tough streets, riding subways all night for a warm place to sleep and foraging through dumpsters for food. But when her mother died of AIDS a year later, Liz's life changed…
