Here are 17 books that A Harp in the Stars fans have personally recommended if you like
A Harp in the Stars.
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The first memoir I ever read—Road Songby Natalie Kusz—pierced me in ways I did not know were possible. Kusz had written, in this elegantly crafted book, of an Alaskan childhood, a life-changing accident, early motherhood, and family love. She had written, I mean to say, of transcending truths. I have spent much of my life ever since deconstructing the ways in which true stories get told, and writing them myself. I’ve taught memoir to five-year-olds, Ivy League students, master’s level writers, and retirees. I co-founded Juncture Workshops, write a monthly newsletter on the form, and today create blank books into which other writers might begin to tell their stories.
No frills, this book. Just good stuff. Chapters on the state of nonfiction today and on the ways to end an essay. Essential talk about “the ethics of writing about others” and “the necessity of turning oneself into a character.” Thoughts on the lyric essay and on research as it applies to nonfiction. Lopate blazed many a trail for teachers and writers of nonfiction. He is perennially relevant.
A long-awaited new book on personal writing from Phillip Lopate—celebrated essayist, the director of Columbia University’s nonfiction program, and editor of The Art of the Personal Essay.
Distinguished author Phillip Lopate, editor of the celebrated anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, is universally acclaimed as “one of our best personal essayists” (Dallas Morning News).
Here, combining more than forty years of lessons from his storied career as a writer and professor, he brings us this highly anticipated nuts-and-bolts guide to writing literary nonfiction.
A phenomenal master class shaped by Lopate’s informative, accessible tone and immense gift for storytelling, To…
The first memoir I ever read—Road Songby Natalie Kusz—pierced me in ways I did not know were possible. Kusz had written, in this elegantly crafted book, of an Alaskan childhood, a life-changing accident, early motherhood, and family love. She had written, I mean to say, of transcending truths. I have spent much of my life ever since deconstructing the ways in which true stories get told, and writing them myself. I’ve taught memoir to five-year-olds, Ivy League students, master’s level writers, and retirees. I co-founded Juncture Workshops, write a monthly newsletter on the form, and today create blank books into which other writers might begin to tell their stories.
This (almost) palm-sized book became an instant classic when it was published in 2008. Here, the reader watches the great memoirist, Abigail Thomas, at work, translating daily scenes into passages that resonate with universal appeal. It’s as if you are watching over her shoulder as she works. Writing a little of her own life, she’ll stop and look up and say, in so many words, join me. “Write two pages of what you have too much of,” she advises, after writing about a woman who ate only clams for months. “Write two pages about the softest thing,” she suggests, pages later, after she was “trying to recall the softest thing and remembered a white ermine muff.” Look to Thomas for the ways in which the every day becomes a story.
If living is an art, it must be practiced with diligence before being done with ease. Yet almost nothing in our culture prepares us for reflection on the great themes of existence: courage, friendship, listening, dignity—those everyday virtues that can transform our world. Because AARP believes it’s never too late (or too early) to learn, they, together with Sterling Publishing, have created the About Living series to address these crucial issues. Each entry will be written by only the best authors and thinkers. Thinking About Memoir, the first of these volumes, helps adults look back at their past and use…
The first memoir I ever read—Road Songby Natalie Kusz—pierced me in ways I did not know were possible. Kusz had written, in this elegantly crafted book, of an Alaskan childhood, a life-changing accident, early motherhood, and family love. She had written, I mean to say, of transcending truths. I have spent much of my life ever since deconstructing the ways in which true stories get told, and writing them myself. I’ve taught memoir to five-year-olds, Ivy League students, master’s level writers, and retirees. I co-founded Juncture Workshops, write a monthly newsletter on the form, and today create blank books into which other writers might begin to tell their stories.
“One of the first discoveries I made when I began to return in a reflective way to earlier parts of my life was that there was often very little connection between events that by rights ought to be capitalized—important trips, moves, friendships, deaths—and the experiences that had in fact left the most vivid deposit in memory,” Birkerts writes in this little book that packs a punch. Focusing on Coming-of-Age Stories, Fathers and Sons, Mothers and Daughters, Trauma and Memory, Birkerts deconstructs well-loved texts to teach us how their writers chose to manage time.
Memoir is, for better and often for worse, the genre of our times,' Birkerts writes. This piece of elegant literary criticism seeks to understand what makes some memoirs memorable and others self-serving. Birkerts argues that the memoirists strategies for presenting the subjective experience of time reveal the power and resonance of the writer's life. By examining Virginia Woolf's A Sketch of the Past, and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, Birkerts describes the memoirists essential art of assembling patterns of meaning.'
The first memoir I ever read—Road Songby Natalie Kusz—pierced me in ways I did not know were possible. Kusz had written, in this elegantly crafted book, of an Alaskan childhood, a life-changing accident, early motherhood, and family love. She had written, I mean to say, of transcending truths. I have spent much of my life ever since deconstructing the ways in which true stories get told, and writing them myself. I’ve taught memoir to five-year-olds, Ivy League students, master’s level writers, and retirees. I co-founded Juncture Workshops, write a monthly newsletter on the form, and today create blank books into which other writers might begin to tell their stories.
Sometimes we just want to know how it feels to be someone else living the writer’s life. In this collection, forty-six writers ranging from Roxane Gay and Billy Collins to Edwidge Danticat and Amy Tan answer one single question: What inspires you? My favorite response comes from Marilynne Robinson, who writes “I’m drawn to that movement toward essentials, away from all secondary definitions, all extraneous props, and ornaments.” What about you? What inspires you? Why are you writing in the first place? You’ll ponder that question while you read these short pieces by writers who shine a light in dark places.
A stunning masterclass on the creative process, the craft of writing, and the art of finding inspiration from Stephen King, Elizabeth Gilbert, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, Roxane Gay, Neil Gaiman, and more of the most acclaimed writers at work today
"For artists in need of a creative fix, Light the Dark is as good as a visit from the divine muse." -Bookpage
What inspires you? That's the simple, but profound question posed to forty-six renowned authors in LIGHT THE DARK. Each writer begins with a favorite passage from a novel, a song, a poem—something that gets them started and keeps…
After my dad died, I didn’t know where to turn. People felt uncomfortable talking to a seventeen-year-old girl about her dead dad. They felt even more uncomfortable talking to me about it one, two, ten years later. Still, I couldn’t, can’t, stop thinking about it. I turned, then, to books. These books made and make me feel seen. They aren’t about “moving on” or “letting go” but the ways in which leaning into grief’s deep well connects us to love’s true depths. These books are honest and pure, and if you don’t know what to say to a friend who’s mourning, let these authors speak for you.
“I am writing into the rupture, the absence left there,” writes Mary-Kim Arnold in her book.
Framed through a Korean television questionnaire, the book investigates how loss (of parents, of a homeland, of language) dislocates us. This lyric essay collages personal and public documents, rifling through history in search of tethers, poetics rubbing against the barest of facts.
I’m still, over ten years later, combing through my father’s things, knowing, as this book does, that the only answer is the search. It’s the desire to know, not the knowing itself, that matters.
Literary Nonfiction. Asian & Asian American Studies. The orphan at the center of LITANY FOR THE LONG MOMENT is without homeland and without language. In three linked lyric essays, Arnold attempts to claim her own linguistic, cultural, and aesthetic lineage. Born in Korea and adopted to the US as a child, she explores the interconnectedness of language and identity through the lens of migration and cultural rupture. Invoking artists, writers, and thinkers—Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Francesca Woodman, Susan Sontag, among others—LITANY FOR THE LONG MOMENT interweaves personal documents, images, and critical texts as a means to examine loss and longing.
My first memories are of sitting in the garden munching strawberries off the vine as my grandfather picked vegetables. Dad’s days off meant a trip to the nature reserve or sledding the town slopes. Vacations were for jumping in waves and exploring tidepools. Mom collected antique children’s books and instilled a passion for reading. When not exploring the woods across the railroad tracks with friends, I was reading. Childhood and my passion for nature intersect in my writing in two of my other books, A Beach Tail and Circles of Hope. Nowadays, my routine includes writing in my woodland cabin and daily hikes with my flat-coated retriever, Lowani.
This simple story offers an intimate view into the life of a hermit crab who has outgrown his shell. He travels along the shore, by the sea in the sand…scritch-scratch, scritch-scratch looking, looking. The lyric repetition I strive for in my own writing helps build tension. The hermit crab needs a place to hide from the prickle pine fish.
I can feel that sandy beach in the illustrations and I have walked there where Hermit Crab encounters a rock, a rusty tin can, driftwood, and an old bucket. None of these make a house for Hermit Crab. I can relate to the satisfaction of a journey’s end. In a new home that is not too heavy or too noisy, not too dark, not too crowded. A safe new home that fits just right. Something we all look for.
Follow a hermit crab on the perilous journey to replace his outgrown shell in this classic picture book by the author of the popular Judy Moody and Stink series.
Hermit Crab has outgrown his shell, and it’s time for a new home to keep him safe from predators. The beach is strewn with possible choices, but none are quite right. A rock is too heavy; a tin can is too noisy; a fishing net has too many holes.
He stepped along the shore, by the sea, in the sand . . . scritch-scratch, scritch-scratch
My childhood diary entries often turned into poems. Writing and art have been in my life a long while. After earning a BA in Advertising and Design, I became an art director for Prentice Hall, a large educational publisher. My reading tastes are eclectic. Reading the work of poets came to me later in life when poetry began oozing out my pores. I’ve maintained an art & writing blog since 2014. I self-published an illustrated collection of poetry in 2016. My work has been published in a variety of journals. Do check out the books on my list, they are unique, just like you.
Four-legged girlbegins with a powerful cover image and ends with the equally evocative “four-legged girl.” Captivating and curious.
I own several Diane Seuss collections, but this one (her third) is my favorite. Seuss bares the train wrecks in a way I admire and strive to emulate. Her lines crash, her images explode – I’m reading but can’t stop the comet crashing to earth, or sometimes earth is crashing into the comet – either way, Ms. Seuss, a former therapist, doesn’t do faux redemption like I so often do out of guilt for happy endings. Her frank language catapults. She confesses, critiques, includes me in her world and excludes pity of any kind.
Her poetry pushes me, in the best way possible, to smash every crayon in my secret box.
"Diane Seuss writes with the intensity of a soothsayer." ―Laura Kasischke
For, having imagined your body one way I found it to be another way, it was yielding, but only as the Destroying Angel mushroom yields, its softness allied with its poison, and your legs were not petals or tendrils as I'd believed, but brazen, the deviant tentacles beneath the underskirt of a secret queen ―from "Oh four-legged girl, it's either you or the ossuary"
In Diane Seuss's Four-Legged Girl, her audacious, hothouse language swerves into pain and rapture, as she recounts a…
I was born in the Bronx, New York City, and my earliest memories involve going to the beach in the Bronx, where crabs ran among my toes, and especially going to City Island to try to see the great yachts that were being built to win the America's Cup. But I think my love of marine biology was really cemented at the age of ten when my father took me to the Paris movie theater in New York City to see The Silent World made by Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle.
Great children's books about the ocean are very rare. Pagoo is a hermit crab, and Holling brings the shore and Pagoo to life. As a marine biologist and parent, I was overjoyed to see how an author and illustrator could produce such a wonderful and literate book that reached out to children so well.
Holling is at the very peak of children’s adventure writing, and he filled his books with magnificent illustrations.
The heroes and heroines in the Seven Kingdoms Fairy Tales face challenges inspired by my own fears, like giving a presentation in the front of the class, getting lost in an unfamiliar place, finding my place in a new school, or working out how to be fair to my friends when we disagree about the rules. Fears tell us a boring life is “safe.” They hide our extraordinary life behind their backs. I write books for and about kids attempting things that are absolutely positively “not for them”. Because kids are the bravest people around. That’s why they’re so magical.
Doesn’t every kid want a pet? Most kids think of a dog, a cat, a hamster, or a hermit crab, but this story is about trying a new kind of pet: A skunk.
Bixby Alexander Tam, a.k.a. Bat, has his work cut out for him. His mom is a veterinarian. That’s how the skunk got into the house. (At our house, it was Stretchy the Leech. We have a zoologist in the family.) Watching Bat convince his mom that a skunk could be his pet, instead of a ticking time-bomb, was lots of fun. (I love the author’s note about the skunk scientist. Science magic.)
The first book in a funny, heartfelt, and irresistible young middle grade series starring an unforgettable young boy on the autism spectrum.
For Bixby Alexander Tam (nicknamed Bat), life tends to be full of surprises-some of them good, some not so good. Today, though, is a good-surprise day. Bat's mom, a veterinarian, has brought home a baby skunk, which she needs to take care of until she can hand him over to a wild-animal shelter.
But the minute Bat meets the kit, he knows they belong together. And he's got one month to show his mom that a baby skunk…
It’s not an exaggeration to say that finding a path toward a spiritual belief that accepted me for who I am was a lifelong pursuit for me. As someone who felt pushed out by the Catholic Church for my transness, I wanted to find something that kept some of those traditions but built on them in a way that made sense to me and included me. Italian-American folk magic had room for people like me in a way that organized religion never did. The magical memoirs of contemporary writers inspired me to synthesize what I’d learned into my own grimoire/memoir.
I love this meditation on magic, parenting a child with a medical condition, and intimate partner violence for its honesty and bravery.
Hillary Leftwich doesn’t shy away from discussing traumatic events and her own decisions that left her life feeling unmoored and the magical pathways that helped her come back to herself. Fearless and insightful, this was one of my favorite memoirs in recent years.
AURA is more than a memoir-- it's a spell book for survival, a powerful promise from mother to son, and an intimate examination of power, spirituality, and the abuse of both.
"AURA is more than a memoir-- it's a spell book for survival, a powerful promise from mother to son, and an intimate examination of power, spirituality, and the abuse of both. Hillary Leftwich weaves together the stories of her life to create startlingly raw memories that are both personal and profoundly universal. She explores the devastating impact of patriarchy in her own life while searching for answers in witchcraft,…
