LATEST BOOKSHELVES
The Style of Movement
Ken and Deborah have taken the dance world by storm with their ability to capture spectacular moves that are also filled with personality. In this book, a pantheon of today’s greatest dance stars show how fashion and fabric can be so much more. Costumes designed by Martha Graham side by side with Dior, Valentino, Oscar de la Renta and many mo ...
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Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs
Eighty years from its first publication, this is still hands down the most compelling book of dance photos ever. They capture the genius in Graham’s early works of modernism that revolutionized dance. And in the photos of Graham, you can feel the depth of her animal charisma.
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Martha Graham: When Dance Became Modern
Cultural historian Neil Baldwin has done a deep dive into Graham’s early years to unpack her genius revolution as she infused American dance with modernism.
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Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring
Inside the creation of one of the 20th Century’s most iconic works of art with the genius collaborators – Copland, Graham and Noguchi. The American conversation in the early 1940s, from regionalism and nationalism to immigration and racism, was poured into this modernist masterwork and vibrates within it still.
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Wreck this Journal
I love this book because it advocates for (and gives guidance in) subversive behavior. It’s an interactive manual that invites a practice of destruction as a path to freedom of choice and creativity. Favorite page: “Collect your pocket lint. Glue it here.”
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Slow Horses
My work deals so much with the abstract and ephemeral that I lean toward plot-driven stuff where the good guys win. I recently discovered Mick Herron’s Slough House series – dealing with the rejects of MI5 in London. Laugh-out-loud humor woven into the mayhem.
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Oedipus Rex
The wait for Oedipus to grasp the truth is the essence of theatrical suspense -- especially in the context of our current relationship with the truth. Recommended with a screening of the 1961 film of Night Journey, Martha Graham’s genius masterwork, which reimagines the Oedipus story through the eyes of Jocasta.
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Nutshell
Another classic brilliantly transformed — a prequel to the tragedy of Hamlet – told by the eavesdropping fetus (Hamlet-to-be) in Gertrude’s womb. The cross-referencing to the original is brilliant.
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Drawing on the Surface of Dance
An illustrated walk through the brain of one of today’s greatest choreographers. Annie-B has created for everyone from the Graham Company to David Byrne. Her multifaceted theater works are absorbed through the skin rather than the intellect. Don’t miss the deck of cards in the back – a tool for composition of any sort.
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The Lincoln Highway
This irresistible American road trip in the mid-1950s surprises and engages with every turn of the road while somehow evoking other classic quests and archetypes -- from Huck Finn to Odysseus.
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Trick Mirror
This was required reading in the You writers’ room. Tolentino has a gift for taking apart cultural phenomena to show you the problematic bits. Reading it gave me a sense of relief, because she can so precisely explain why something like Sweetgreen salad makes me angry.
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Misery
In 2020, I listened to 16 of his books in a row on long walks. Having the shit scared out of me really calms my anxiety. I especially love when King traps his protagonist – keeping the story in a tight box forces it deeper into the character’s psyche.
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Proof
Not a wasted word. Sometimes I’ll be stopped at a red light and suddenly start thinking about “connecting the dots.”
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Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
The first time a dentist gave me nitrous oxide, I saw the skeleton of the universe. So now when I get dental work, I take advantage of the altered state to investigate the question I like to dwell on at 3 a.m.: where do we go after we die? This book posits 40 possibilities. The vignettes are thoughtful, sometimes freaky, and a delight even if you ...
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Crush
His poetry feels like driving fast on a bad road in the rain, and that is a way I want poetry to feel. (This would also be at the top of my list of favorite cover art. I mean, look at it. Jesus Christ.)
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An Anthropologist on Mars
Sacks’s writing is compassionate and elegant, and makes me like people more as a species.
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Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence
An epistolary novel so creative it practically vibrates in your hands. Turning the page to see the next postcard or letter is thrillingly immediate— a couple of times, I gasped. And pulling a handwritten note out of an envelope addressed to someone else feels slightly illegal.
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Never Let Me Go
I’m so lucky that I came to this book without knowing anything about it. If you’re as lucky, go read it. If you’ve heard about the plot or seen the film, I’ll just say: when I think of the writing, I picture the pages gently glowing, like an object that has been touched by the Divine.
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Society Within
The first book I read that was adjacent to the world in which I lived. It’s about a girl on a west London housing estate, who is a conduit to the lives of all the other people in her orbit. Until reading this, I didn’t realize that books in which I could recognize people from my own life, could be written.
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Homo Deus
I was drawn to the book because of the subtitle: A History of Tomorrow. It had been a year since I left church and I was having what I now understand was an existential crisis and spinning out of my mind: what the fuck is going on, where am I, what is happening? I didn’t understand anything because I’d so whole-heartedly adopted the Bible’s a ...
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The Three-Body Problem
Originally published in China in 2006, but now translated into English, this took me about eight months to read because I had to keep going back. It’s a book that I struggle to explain—it flashes back and forth in time over a million years and across solar systems—but it totally helped me escape this planet. It’s not offering a utopian visi ...
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The Dark Forest
The second in Liu’s trilogy (see above), that takes off in new and wonderful ways.
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Flowers for Algernon
The story of a mouse in a lab undergoing an experiment to make it more intelligent is juxtaposed with a parallel story in which Charlie Gordon, a cleaner in a bakery with learning difficulties, undergoes the same experiment. It may mean different things to different people; for me it was about what you lose when you trade naivete for intelligence ...
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Breakfast of Champions
Reading this reminded me of people who approach life like a video game, without consequence. I love it so much that I included a homage to Kurt Vonnegut in I May Destroy You, in episode two when Arabella is at the clinic and meets a woman who is covered in blood, having been assaulted. The woman says, ‘Everything is beautiful and nothing hurts, ...
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Exhalation
I’m usually drawn to novels, but this beautifully-written collection of short stories was recommended by the same person who recommended Three-Body Problem, and they weren’t wrong.
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Poor
I’ve never read about life on a housing estate written with such beauty. Femi is a poet, and this is a combination of short stories and poems and photography, and—a little like Society Within--it’s about life for people in working class London who are Black, so again it’s a book in which I saw myself.
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The Book of Eels
I never thought I would see myself in an eel, until I read Svensson’s beautiful book, in which he anthropomorphizes eels and shows how mysterious they are, and how little we know about them. It’s a beautiful book that makes you realize that the eel is our cousin—we are the eel, and the eel is us.
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Independent People
What a masterpiece of a novel. I’ve recommended this book with enthusiasm to so many people and almost none of them have managed to get through it. I have no idea why. It’s funny and brutal and transportive. It’s about a crofter in Iceland putting his poor family through the wringer so he can prove he is an independent, self-sufficient man. A ...
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Gilead
Oh God, this book. It almost made me a believer in middle American Christian goodness. Talk about a feat of imagination and compassion. There’s something about the voice of John Ames that makes me cry just thinking about it. He is a fiction but I don’t care, I love him. Glory be to God.
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The Poetics of Space
This is theory - and French, no less - at its best. It is not “deconstructing” poetry - it IS poetry. Its radical but obvious thesis is that poetry is generative, enhancing our lives with feelings and thoughts that otherwise would not exist. It is alive to the haunting magic of childhood and the imaginative spaces of our youth.
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Love and Death in the American Novel
If Bachelard is theory at its best, this is criticism at its best. So funny and inspired and bursting with ideas. I am jealous of anyone who has not read this book - because reading this for the first time is like going on a literary thrill ride through the tropes of our culture. Is it all true? Who cares? It will jiggle your mind and broom out the ...
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In the Freud Archives
I think I have read every published sentence of Janet Malcolm. She is non-fiction prose at its sadistic finest. Talk about assuming the intelligence of the reader. She suffers no fools. I chose this book because I share her love for the writings of Freud - for Freud, like her, wanted to crack open the reader’s skull and leave a permanent mark on ...
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The Book of Disquiet
Like the voice of John Ames, the melancholy Bernardo Soares stays with you forever. I love the values of this book - inertia, passivity, confusion. What an antidote to most things we read. Following around this civil servant as he journals about his mundane, depressing life, I feel weirdly giddy with life’s possibilities. We should all have heter ...
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Outline Trilogy
The most uncanny and sober of fever dreams. What the fuck are these books? Why did I chew through them - as if they were the most compelling of murder mysteries - yet nothing ever happens and I can’t remember a thing after putting them down? Dissociative perambulations but written with such urgency. These books cast a spell on me. Maybe Rachel ...
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The Scorpion Fish
There are so many travel writers I love - hard to choose one. But Nicolas Bouvier’s writing is unmatched and this book is a major freak-out. Stuck in Galle, Sri Lanka - he loses his mind as he watches strange tropical bugs invade his squalid hotel room. He is in a haunted colonial Hell and the whole time I’m reading, I just wish I could be ther ...
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A Bend in the River
Speaking of colonial Hells! This is such a strange, grim, beautifully rendered book. Its nihilism about the human condition is so convincing! (And if that’s not a glowing recommendation, I don’t know what is - lol!) It’s hard to call this a “favorite” book but it has stayed with me longer than most. Ugh.
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My Lives
So many gay writers have influenced me - Edward Albee, James Baldwin, Stephen Sondheim, Quentin Crisp, Oscar Wilde yadda yadda. I also wanted to include an autobiography. Edmund White is a great writer - so erudite, curious about all things, a great aesthete. And as honest as anyone can be about sex and the motivations of self. Honesty is everythin ...
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Wuthering Heights
I dove into Wuthering Heights when I was 15 or 16, and read it in a single sitting, starting in the afternoon and reading late into the night. I was thrilled by the idea of passionate love. It’s a very English novel, very gothic, whereas French romanticism is more rooted in disillusion. We had a big library in our home and my parents let me read ...
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The Lily of the Valley
I read this for school, and didn’t fully understand it at the time but I remember that I found it shocking. In contrast to Wuthering Heights, this is romanticism in the French style. It’s the story of an older woman, Henreitte de Mortsaud and a young suitor; they have big conversations, they talk about love, but they never have sex.
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After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie
A friend of mine recommended this to me in my twenties as a suggestion for a film because Rhys is so good at portraying women’s lives, all of which are in various ways portraits of herself. I love the book, I love the writing, and I love the story of Jean Rhys herself - she was obscure, and unlucky in love for most of her life, and only became fa ...
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The Waves
I love the structure of The Waves, which I read in my twenties: to make a portrait of someone who is dead, in which each character has their own point of view, felt truly radical. It’s reminiscent of the Mankiewicz movie, The Barefoot Contessa, but like Marcel Proust she is a writer who would be very difficult to adapt in movies. Neither of them ...
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Survival in Auschwitz
My mother suggested I read this as a teenager. I remember crying as I read the book. There is a kind of hope in his account of life in Auschwitz that makes his own life story--Levi committed apparent suicide in 1987--all the more devastating. I was destroyed by that. This book is a little forgotten today, but if I had a child I’d ask them to read ...
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Angel
Angel is the only book I ever adapted into a movie. It’s the ego of a writer who is utterly selfish, like a a portrait of what an artist doesn’t want to become. It’s very funny, very clever, but I now think I should have made it in French.
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Time Regained
The final volume of In Search of Lost Time functions as a key to the whole series, summarizing what’s come before. You can return to Proust at any point, just a few pages can prompt reflection. It’s such a pleasure to read his descriptions of feelings, of characters. It’s like a Bible for people who love literature, and probably impossible to ...
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Lolita
I read Lolita as a teenager, and would love to reread it from the perspective of these times. Is it a novel in favor of paedophilia or against paedophilia? I think it’s very ambiguous, not least because the reader is in Humbert Humbert’s head. That kind of ambiguity would make it impossible to publish today.
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A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
This is a book I turn to when I am stuck or lost. As with Proust, there is always something to learn. I found it in my mother’s library, and I know she was a big fan of the book, so reading it was a way to understand her.
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Forbidden Colors
All of Mishima’s books are exotic for us occidental people - they’re very Japanese, with themes of sacrifice, of guilt, of cruelty and humility, and a lot of trauma. Being gay was a big deal for Mishima, and here he describes the gay community of the 50s and 60s in Japan. It’s a book I’d love to adapt but I think that’s impossible because ...
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