Books like The Poet as Believer — picked by fans

I was very interested to read Sylvia Gorelick's translation of Mallarmé's The Book. Since I've spent years studying unfinished works and dream projects, this translation of Mallarmé's mysterious masterwork really spoke to me. Gorelick manages to capture not just Mallarmé's words but the haunting sense of an artist struggling with an impossible project—one that consumed him for decades.

What I particularly appreciate is how she makes Mallarmé's complex ideas about poetry and the sacred accessible without simplifying them. Reading her translation helped me better understand why this unfinished work became such a significant influence on modern literature. For anyone interested in how artists grapple with their most ambitious visions, this book is essential reading.

I found White's book deeply resonant with my own biographical work on Genet. While my book Genet: la vie écrite focused on his artistic trajectory, White masterfully illuminates the personal dimensions of this complex figure's life.

What particularly moved me was how White's intimate understanding of both French culture and queer experience complements my analysis of Genet's theatrical works. His biography provides rich psychological insights that deepen and enrich my own research into Genet's creative process.

For anyone who, like me, has spent years studying the intersection of Genet's life and art, White's work is an indispensable companion that reveals new layers of understanding about this enigmatic literary genius.

I found Hollis Alpert's book refreshing because it cuts through all the myths about Fellini and shows us the real person. After watching Fellini's films for years, I was glad to finally read a biography that explains how he developed his unique style.

The book helped me understand his evolution from cartoonist to filmmaker and showed me how his early experiences influenced his later work. While other biographers sometimes get caught up in Fellini's larger-than-life personality, Alpert stays focused on helping us understand the director's creative process. This is a straightforward, honest look at one of cinema's most interesting figures.

I was interested by Stanley Kubrick's book because it shows just how deeply Kubrick researched and planned his films. As someone who studies unfinished film projects, I was fascinated to see all the detailed work that went into this movie that was never made—from the costume designs to the battle plans to Kubrick's handwritten notes.

The book lets us peek into Kubrick's creative process through the thousands of photos, documents and research materials he gathered. What makes this book special is that it doesn't just tell us about the film that could have been—it helps us understand how Kubrick's mind worked when developing his projects. This is a rare look at the early stages of what might have been his greatest film.

Mary Midgley was in her nineties when she wrote this book, yet it’s alive with ideas and energy – and the insistence that philosophy should be “for” something in the most urgent, practical sense; that it should help us explore such questions as to how to live and to do good. Midgley was both highly scientifically literate and fiercely opposed to the claim that science will ever answer every question. We humans, she believed, are brilliant animals who need to understand our biological heritage as richly as possible if we’re to grapple fruitfully with our planetary future. I can think of few more urgent themes for the present century.

Like Golding, Garner is best known for his children’s books – tales that spring from the ancient mythology of his local Cheshire and wander into realms of high fantasy. But it is this slim novella, a collection of four stories binding as many generations of Garners (they have inhabited the region for centuries and they were, all of them - up until Alan, craftsmen, builders, laborers) that moves me to raptures. Beginning with a wide-eyed child’s discovery of cave drawings, the stories haul stone up above ground to lay out the longwalls of Garner’s mason progenitors and erect the spire of the local church, worn by Garner’s grandfather "like a dunce-cap.” The imagery and wordplay are stunning, binding dialect and landscape like a spell.

I picked up this book because the back cover made it sound like this funny romp where a rock competition decides the fate of the Earth—and who doesn’t want that? But this isn’t just a more uplifting version of that one Rick and Morty episode about “Gettin’ Schwifty.”

With vivid worlds and deeply flawed characters, Space Opera is like a psychedelic trip with that brilliant, probably-drunk friend whose gorgeous mind you could listen to for days. (Stop looking at me like that! I’m not in love with her syntax, you are!)

Don’t get me wrong: there are so many behaviors in Space Opera that I recommend against as a sexual health physician—they’d increase your risk of disease and mental illness—and I’ve got moral positions that don’t jive with Valente’s vision, either. But there’s a scene where Valente touches on immigration and deportation that made me weep and left an indent… show more.

Golding was living in Salisbury when he wrote The Lord of the Flies, and his day job as a teacher at a local boys' school left a clear imprint on his dystopic view of young men left to their own hierarchical devices. But the classroom also provided a very literal view of the inspiration for The Spire, a dense and disturbing parable in which rationality and physics crumble under evangelical mania and corporal lust. It is the story of Jocelin, Dean of a medieval cathedral, who, obsessed with a divine “vision in stone,” insists that the spire be raised to impossible heights. There is no happy ending in this cautionary tale of construction hubris, yet I return to it regularly in search of solace.

Sri Aurobindo is, in my opinion, the greatest writer of them all. His poetic prose hypnotizes while swirling around the most profound ideas of all — What is the divine? How can we know the truth? What is the best way to live? The Life Divine is Aurobindo’s magnum opus, his articulation of the path to self-realization and how to use it to make the world a better place. In other words, it’s everything you need to know.

Moore’s book seems exemplary to me because it offers a broad historical picture of alternatives in modern philosophy, based on the simple idea that metaphysics is ‘the most general attempt to make sense of things’. 

This connects philosophy to everyday experience, which relies precisely on how we make sense of things.

I like the fact that the book allows one to ask questions about the sense knowledge makes of the world, given that much of the sense we make actually comes through active participation in the world, for example in listening to or playing music, or, indeed, in doing philosophy in relation to a real world problem.