Here are 100 books that All the Birds, Singing fans have personally recommended if you like
All the Birds, Singing.
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I am a lifelong lover of books. As a child, one of my most prized possessions was my library card. It gave me entrance to a world of untold wonders from the past, present, and future. My love of reading sparked my imagination and led me to my own fledgling writing efforts. I come from a family of storytellers, my mother being the chief example. She delighted us with stories from her childhood and her maturation in the rural South. She was an excellent mimic, which added realism and humor to every tale.
This book is part odyssey, part ghost story, and part passion play. Toni Morrison is one of the patron saints of American literature whom I was fortunate to discover at an early age. This is her masterpiece, an example of what is possible when a writer’s heart, mind, and spirit are aligned.
The fact that the unfathomable sacrifice around which Beloved is imagined is based upon an actual event speaks volumes about the innate horrors of slavery. In matters of race, America’s skeletons are buried in shallow graves.
'Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours... Beloved is a heart-breaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all' Margaret Atwood, New York Times
Discover this beautiful gift edition of Toni Morrison's prize-winning contemporary classic Beloved
It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her…
An avid reader, I began a project in 2012 to read one short story a week in supernatural mysteries, ghost stories, and quiet horror genres. I began with the classic authors: Poe, MR James, Lovecraft, Shelley, Stoker, du Maurier, etc. I began a blog, Reading Fiction Blog, and posted these free stories with my reviews (I’m still posting today). Over the years, it turned into a compendium of fiction. Today, I have nearly 400 short stories by over 150 classic and now contemporary authors in the blog Index. I did this because I wanted to learn more about writing dark fiction and who better to learn from than the masters?
Jackson’s Gothic horror flows like black chiffon over a yawing window. That’s how I felt reading about Hill House. I loved the way the house sneaks up with its psychological weights swinging and jarring. Eleanor possesses a dark ambiance. She desperately needed to belong to something or someone, and I couldn’t let go of that.
Her emotions and fears were right there with me. But it was the romantic underbelly that got me: Eleanor’s romance with Hill House. The statuesque gardens, the light, and shadows, all tempted her into its sinister realm. As it tempted me. I felt deeply for Eleanor, wanting to belong to something extraordinary to replace her dull life. Shirley Jackson is quoted as saying, “I delight in what I fear.” This book proves it.
Part of a new six-volume series of the best in classic horror, selected by Academy Award-winning director of The Shape of Water Guillermo del Toro
Filmmaker and longtime horror literature fan Guillermo del Toro serves as the curator for the Penguin Horror series, a new collection of classic tales and poems by masters of the genre. Included here are some of del Toro's favorites, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Ray Russell's short story "Sardonicus," considered by Stephen King to be "perhaps the finest example of the modern Gothic ever written," to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and stories…
I grew up on a tiny peninsula in Downeast Maine, an evocative and rugged place, both lovely and haunting. As a girl, walking home late down gravel roads through an encompassing darkness I’ve found nowhere else, I sensed the world’s dangers long before I knew how to articulate them. Surrounded by woods, water, and unnerving quiet broken by the fox’s scream and rustling branches, I began to write. I sought out strange and unsettling books by Shirley Jackson and Stephen King (his home just a few towns away from mine) that left their mark. Storytelling became a way to process and explore what keeps me up at night.
As the title suggests, this book lingers like a disquieting dream. A mother to a toddler myself, I think of what the protagonist Amanda calls the “rescue distance” often – the ground between herself and her child, should something perilous occur.
This book distills maternal protectiveness and anxiety into something as potent as poison or as powerful as a curse. It makes me want to look over my shoulder, lock the doors, draw the blinds. It carries an air of contagion. I can think of few other reads that evoke such a visceral reaction with such subtle strokes.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2017
'The book I wish I had written' Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women and Animal
A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a remote Argentinian hospital. A boy named David sits beside her.
She's not his mother. He's not her child.
At David's ever more insistent prompting, Amanda recounts a series of events from the apparently recent past, a conversation that opens a chest of horrors. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family.
A chilling tale of maternal anxiety and ecological…
I grew up on a tiny peninsula in Downeast Maine, an evocative and rugged place, both lovely and haunting. As a girl, walking home late down gravel roads through an encompassing darkness I’ve found nowhere else, I sensed the world’s dangers long before I knew how to articulate them. Surrounded by woods, water, and unnerving quiet broken by the fox’s scream and rustling branches, I began to write. I sought out strange and unsettling books by Shirley Jackson and Stephen King (his home just a few towns away from mine) that left their mark. Storytelling became a way to process and explore what keeps me up at night.
Horrifying, brutal, sinuous, and uncanny, this one floored me. It evokes the peril of girlhood and womanhood with unwavering intensity.
Each story is fresh and unexpected, yet also timeless, rich with wisdom and mythology centuries old. Steeped in painful history, past atrocities twine with the present to nightmarish effect.
Mariana Enríquez is part of a new vanguard of Argentine and Latin American Gothic writers alongside Samanta Schweblin. Their writing, born from real-world horrors, is among the most thrilling discoveries I’ve made in years.
'A portrait of a world in fragments, a mirrorball made of razor blades' Guardian
Sleep-deprived fathers conjuring phantoms; sharp-toothed children and stolen skulls; persecuted young women drawn to self-immolation. Organized crime sits side-by-side with the occult in Buenos Aires - a place where reality and the preternatural fuse into strange, new shapes. These stories follow the wayward and downtrodden, revealing the scars of Argentina's dictatorship and the ghosts and traumas that have settled in the minds of its people. Provocative, brutal and uncanny, Things We Lost in the Fire is a paragon of contemporary Gothic from a writer of singular…
I am passionate about the importance of telling stories in the classroom. My career has been as a children’s librarian in public libraries, but with much time spent telling stories in schools. My daughter and her husband followed in my footsteps as storytellers and found that using storytelling in the classroom has so many benefits. We all offer workshops for teachers, write articles encouraging storytelling, and try in any way possible to grow the corps of teachers who discover this joyful addition to the classroom.
This book contains twelve easily told tales that can be used to discuss character development. The Norfolks include suggestions for classroom use of the tales. I like to recommend this to the teachers in my storytelling classes as the advice comes from a teacher who has written several other books on using stories in the classroom.
To kids everywhere, in the hope that their elders will never stop telling stories.
Throughout history, traditional cultures have recognized the role of storytelling in teaching values to children. This user-friendly, hands-on guide to using storytelling and folktales in character education provides not only rationale for this approach, it includes stories. These twelve stories are fun, time- and audience-tested, and accessible to a wide range of listeners, from preschool to high school.
The tales are enhanced by suggested activities or informal lesson plans, source notes, and extensive bibliographies that point the reader to additional sources of folktales suitable for character…
I am passionate about the importance of telling stories in the classroom. My career has been as a children’s librarian in public libraries, but with much time spent telling stories in schools. My daughter and her husband followed in my footsteps as storytellers and found that using storytelling in the classroom has so many benefits. We all offer workshops for teachers, write articles encouraging storytelling, and try in any way possible to grow the corps of teachers who discover this joyful addition to the classroom.
I found that owning a collection of tales organized by these themes was very useful. Over 100 short folktales on themes of cooperation, courage, diversity, empathy, friendship, generosity, honesty and fairness, perseverance, respect, responsibility, self-control, and bullying prevention. Pearmain also gives suggestions for telling these and for extending them in the classroom. Wrapping an idea in a story really helps the concept sink in for the listener. Having a collection like this helped me build programs for use in the library.
This book features 99 multi-national and multi-cultural folk tales with familiar character and bullying prevention themes but encapsuled in wonderfully diverse stories. The author, a professional storyteller, provides actual stories plus chapters on how to tell a story, not just read it; activities for students; and bulliten board ideas. She also provides hints and tips for teaching kids the art of storytelling which encourages communication skills and classroom unity.
My name is Susan Perrow. I am an Australian whose ‘work’ passion is stories and storytelling. I am an author, storyteller, teacher trainer, and parent educator. For the last 30 years, I have been documenting stories from other cultures, writing stories, and telling stories to groups of children and adults – all this woven in with a career in teaching, lecturing, and consulting in Australia, Africa, Asia, China, Europe, and North America. I currently have four published story collections, in a total of 14 languages. Three of my collections are Healing Stories for Challenging Behaviour, An A-Z Collection of Behaviour Tales, and Stories to Light the Night: A Grief and Loss Collection for Children, Families and Communities.
I have chosen my fourth collection to introduce to you below.
Birds of Heaven is a tiny book full of noble thoughts on why stories and storytelling are integral to our humanity. Okri, the Man Booker Prize author of ‘The Famished Road’, eloquently states ‘The universe began as a story… we are part human, part stories.’
The text contains two inspirational essays on the meaning of language and its power to shape our lives. The work presents an alternative spiritual response to the problems of the present day. It is bursting with beautiful and insightful gems.
This text contains two inspirational essays from the author of "The Famished Road", on the meaning of language and its power to shape our lives. The work presents an alternative spiritual response to the problems of the present day.
Ever since my primary school teacher read out my essay about a friendly octopus to the whole class, I’ve known I was a storyteller. I went on to enjoy a long career as a journalist–first, writing stories about rock and pop groups for the music paper Sounds (where I coined the term ‘The New Romantics’), then as editor of the pop magazine Record Mirror, and subsequently as a writer/editor for national newspapers including The Observer and The Sunday Telegraph. After that, I became a coach, a public speaking trainer, and a book editor. However, my most enduring passion is helping people find and tell their most meaningful stories.
I feel deeply connected to this book because it helped me navigate the break-up of my marriage.
It puts into beautifully poetic words what I was feeling on an intuitive level about the transformative power of telling our own stories and the importance of ‘storying out’ unarticulated experiences.
Becoming a "storycatcher" and taking ownership of my story pulled me through a dark time and set me on the path toward a more empowering narrative.
Story is the heart of language. Story moves us to love and hate and can motivate us to change the whole course of our lives. Story can lift us beyond our individual borders to imagine the realities of other people, times, and places. Storytelling — both oral tradition and written word — is the foundation of being human. In this powerful book, Christina Baldwin, one of the visionaries who started the personal writing movement, explores the vital necessity of re-creating a sacred common ground for each other's stories. Each chapter in Storycatcher is carried by a fascinating narrative — about…
In sixth grade, I got into an argument with my neighbor, Billy. We were in his backyard, looking at the stars through his new telescope. “I see Orion,” said Billy. “What do you see?” “A bunch of stars.” “I aimed it at Orion. See him?” ”I see a bunch of stars.” “Don’t you see his belt? His sword?” Billy got more agitated. “Everybody knows that’s Orion. I can’t believe you can’t see him.” “It’s not actually Orion – it was just a bunch of stars until someone told a story about it and gave it meaning.” That compelled me to write, to construct a meaning for what I experienced, and try to make sense of it.
I love great storytelling and what makes stories compelling. Suber goes into great detail about story, plot, and characters in a way that I found totally fascinating. It inspired me to think about storytelling differently. I got deeper and deeper into the process of what makes characters and their journey interesting.
There are many films that are successful at the box office, but not memorable. They fade as time passes. Great stories resonate for generations. Ultimately, the book is about what makes a film memorable.
Breaking News! The Power of Film Series (based upon this book) is now available on MAX. (Formerly HBO)
Make sure you tune in to see this amazing six part series.
One of America's most distinguished film professors provides the definitive A to Z course on the intricacies of film. Each entry in this remarkable book, which represents a lifetime of teaching film, has already inspired and educated several generations of Hollywood's greatest filmmakers and writers. This book examines the patterns and principles that make films popular and memorable, and will be useful both for those who want to create films…
Nearly forty years ago, as a young poet, I started going to a storytelling circle in Toronto, thinking it would be a good venue to recite my poems. What I heard there awakened something in me. When I was a child, my parents read me wonder tales, and I soon began to read them on my own. Now I was hearing these stories, the way they were heard for millennia before anyone wrote them down. Today, I am a storyteller, I am married, and I am a professor who teaches a course on storytelling and writes about stories – all because of those weekly gatherings years ago and the storytellers there.
Stories come alive when people tell them to each other.
In my mid-20s, I happened upon a weekly gathering in Toronto, “1001 Friday Nights of Storytelling.” In a former synagogue turned art school – with candlelight shining on works in progress – people told old tales, by heart and with heart. This was the beginning of many things in my life, and this is the community that folklorist Kay Stone has written about.
She shows that the Toronto storytelling circle is part of a worldwide movement. She talks with great storytellers and explores favourite stories with them. And she shares her own struggle with a witch story from Grimms’ Fairy Tales, and how, as she told it again and again, she changed the story and the story changed her.
Burning Brightly is the first full-length book treatment of professional storytelling in North America today. For some years there has been a major storytelling revival throughout the continent, with hundreds of local groups and centres springing up, and with storytelling becoming an important part of the professional training for librarians.
In the book, Stone explores storytelling through storytellers themselves, while providing enlightening commentary from her own background as a storyteller. Included in her analysis are informative discussions of organized storytelling communities, individual tellers, and tales. Issues such as the modern recontextualization of old tales and the role of women in…
