LATEST BOOKSHELVES
Lucy Gayheart
Willa Cather is my all time favorite writer. My only child, a daughter, is named Willa. Her writing is spare and beautiful. I love so many of her books, One of Ours, Alexander’s Bridge, but Lucy Gayheart is my favorite. It is a heartbreaking romance. The story is delicate and the characters are so well defined.
ADD TO CART
The Blessing
All of Nancy Mitford’s books, about the exploits of a fictionalized family that closely resembles her own, are fabulous. They are hilarious and revealing. The Blessing is another example of parenting gone sour. Anyone that has a child should read it!!
ADD TO CART
Redhead by the Side of the Road
Anne Tyler’s most recent book is beautiful. Her writing reminds me of a modern Willa Cather. Spare and perfect. You care so much about her characters and invest yourself in the story. It’s always a gentle read.
ADD TO CART
Theater
There are so many great Maugham books, Cakes and Ale!!, but Theatre is wickedly smart and tells the story of being badly parented by a mother who is an actress! It hits home.
ADD TO CART
Leave it to PSmith
P. G. Wodehouse helped my husband and me through the Pandemic. I’m not sure we would have survived sheltering without his books. They are so brilliantly crafted and laugh out loud funny. We would read passages to each other and howl! This one is particularly brilliant.
ADD TO CART
The Daughter of Time
It was hard to pick my favorite Tey mystery. They are all terrific. Daughter of Time is especially fun for theatre lovers because it deals with the mystery of Richard III. Was he evil or misrepresented through history? This book is a lot of fun.
ADD TO CART
Me Talk Pretty One Day
I have laughed out loud on a NYC bus reading a Sedaris short story. He is a writer that tells all of his secrets, warts and all. You recoil, you cringe and then you fall completely in love with him. And, now, I pick trash up on the side of the road because of him.
ADD TO CART
Neither Here nor There
Not only does Bryson travel through Europe, he time travels back and forth to a prior, youthful European trip he took. This is a very funny read and also wonderfully insightful. His other books are terrific too and he covers an amazing range of topics.
ADD TO CART
Franny and Zooey
Salinger is another author that made a huge impression on me when I was young. Every time you turn the page you find out that each family member is more screwed up than the last. I keep hoping that there are some more Salinger books coming when his estate is settled???
ADD TO CART
Slaughterhouse-Five
When I reread Vonnegut recently I realized how much he had influenced my youth. His imaginative way of writing forces you to think outside the box. Time travel is just the beginning. Slaughterhouse Five is thrilling.
ADD TO CARTLATEST BOOKSHELVES
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.
ADD TO CART
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 ...
ADD TO CART
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 ...
ADD TO CART
The Dark Forest
The second in Liu’s trilogy (see above), that takes off in new and wonderful ways.
ADD TO CART
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 ...
ADD TO CART
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, ...
ADD TO CART
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.
ADD TO CART
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.
ADD TO CART
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.
ADD TO CARTLATEST BOOKSHELVES
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 ...
ADD TO CART
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.
ADD TO CART
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.
ADD TO CART
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 ...
ADD TO CART
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 ...
ADD TO CART
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 ...
ADD TO CART
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 ...
ADD TO CART
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 ...
ADD TO CART
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.
ADD TO CART
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 ...
ADD TO CARTLATEST BOOKSHELVES
The Control of Nature
In three exquisite stories, McPhee asks the defining question of our age—how to perfect our control of nature without losing our own?
ADD TO CART
The Invention of Nature
A thrilling, bighearted introduction to the life and work of Alexander von Humboldt, the man most responsible for our modern understanding of the natural world and our place in it. He was so ahead of his era that he seems to have been beamed back from the future, warning centuries ago of the perils of climate change, colonialism, industrial agricul ...
ADD TO CART
The Great Derangement
The most insightful critical study of the literature of climate change, written with a depth and warmth that only a novelist of his imaginative powers could achieve. Why aren’t there more works of fiction about climate change, and why so few good ones? Ghosh’s answers are both convincing and surprising.
ADD TO CART
Storm
The first ecological novel: The life story of Maria, a Pacific storm that besieges the American West, told from the storm’s perspective. Formally deranged, stylistically radical, Storm fuses the spirit of a 1930s social drama with the sensibility of an Aldo Leopold. Published in 1941, it sold more than a million copies.
ADD TO CART
Erosion: Essays of Undoing
Moving, elegant, unflinchingly personal, genre-defying, mournful, reverent, enraged, bighearted—a terrific collection from one of our most imaginative writers. “Wilderness in the twenty-first century is not a site of nostalgia for what once was,” she writes, “but rather the seedbed of creativity for what we have yet to imagine.”
ADD TO CART
The MaddAddam Trilogy
“Is prescience a literary virtue?” asked Martin Amis, in his introduction to J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (a runner-up for this list, along with Amis’s Einstein’s Monsters). The answer, Amis correctly concludes, is “a cheerful no.” Still much of the thrill of Atwood’s trilogy lies in her unique ability to dramatize, and satirize ...
ADD TO CART
A Friend of the Earth
Boyle fictionalized the story of the tree-sitting activist Julia Butterfly Hill long before Richard Powers tried it in The Overstory. A Friend of the Earth is one of the first novels about climate change and remains one of the best.
ADD TO CART
Gold Fame Citrus
A cracked vision from our sunbaked future and an intimate exploration of the ways environmental crises enter, and derange, our inner lives.
ADD TO CART
Mother Country
Robinson’s most overlooked work, Mother Country is an investigation of the Sellafield nuclear plant and its moral and political failings. An analysis of bureaucratic inanities, greed, and economic history that becomes no less than a meditation on the mundanity of evil.
ADD TO CART
Epochs of Nature
A rollicking tour of the natural world as seen by the Europeans who strived to dominate it. The wonders of nature attract such descriptions as “grotesque,” “nauseous,” “terrible,” and “pestilential.” Published in thirty-six volumes, this triumph of anti-enlightenment it was the most widely collected work of the Enlightenment.
ADD TO CARTLATEST BOOKSHELVES
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 ...
ADD TO CART
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.
ADD TO CART
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 ...
ADD TO CART
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 ...
ADD TO CART
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 ...
ADD TO CART
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.
ADD TO CART
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 ...
ADD TO CART
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.
ADD TO CART
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.
ADD TO CART
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 ...
ADD TO CART
