Here are 100 books that Any God Will Do fans have personally recommended if you like
Any God Will Do.
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I learned how to write poetry by reading. Books have always been my main teachers. I try to read all kinds of work because there are so many different kinds of minds to learn from. When I discovered poetry as a teenager, it fascinated me on the level of the line. I spent a lot of time just looking at poems, without necessarily even reading them—let alone understanding them—because the form on the page was a revelation. It amazed me that people were allowed to do that! That I could choose to do that with words—to explode a sentence across the white space or smash all the words together.
I love prose poems, and they are a great introduction to poetry for those unfamiliar with the genre. I admire Sean Singer's singular sensibility, as he weaves the dailiness of driving a taxi with intimations of jazz, the divine, and insights into the human condition. I find this collection mesmerizing, and return to it over and again.
Sean Singer's radiant and challenging body of work involves, much like Whitman's, nothing less than the ongoing interrogation of what a poem is. In this way his books are startlingly alive... I love in this work the sense that I am the grateful recipient of Singer's jazzy curation as I move from page to page. Today in the Taxi is threaded through with quotes from Kafka, facts about jazz musicians, musings from various thinkers, from a Cathar fragment to Martin Buber to Arthur Eddington to an anonymous comedian. The taxi is at once a real taxi and the microcosm of…
I learned how to write poetry by reading. Books have always been my main teachers. I try to read all kinds of work because there are so many different kinds of minds to learn from. When I discovered poetry as a teenager, it fascinated me on the level of the line. I spent a lot of time just looking at poems, without necessarily even reading them—let alone understanding them—because the form on the page was a revelation. It amazed me that people were allowed to do that! That I could choose to do that with words—to explode a sentence across the white space or smash all the words together.
I believe Danez Smith is an important voice. I find Smith's poems powerful, poignant, and relevant. This collection has irreverence and reverence, humanity, fury, love, and a deep sense of urgency. It speaks to our country's history and present and demands we consider where we are headed.
Smith also has another stellar collection called Bluff, which was just released and promises to be a crucial contribution to contemporary poetry.
Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection
“[Smith's] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy.”―The New Yorker
Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality―the dangers…
I learned how to write poetry by reading. Books have always been my main teachers. I try to read all kinds of work because there are so many different kinds of minds to learn from. When I discovered poetry as a teenager, it fascinated me on the level of the line. I spent a lot of time just looking at poems, without necessarily even reading them—let alone understanding them—because the form on the page was a revelation. It amazed me that people were allowed to do that! That I could choose to do that with words—to explode a sentence across the white space or smash all the words together.
I love this book, because it fuses personal history with American history in the most searing, heartbreaking, and incisive ways.
I taught this book to high school students, alongside the work of James Baldwin, since they both call to account America's founding, its brutality, the moral injury and legacy of slavery, and also the corrosive nature of popular culture. My students were stunned. It woke them up and demanded that they pay attention.
Winner of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry (2017)
Acclaimed poet Shane McCrae's latest collection is a book about freedom told through stories of captivity. Historical persona poems and a prose memoir at the center of the book address the illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. In the book's three sequences, McCrae explores the role mass entertainment plays in oppression, he confronts the myth that freedom can be based upon the power to dominate others, and, in poems about the mixed-race child adopted by Jefferson Davis in the last year of the Civil War, he interrogates the infrequently…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I learned how to write poetry by reading. Books have always been my main teachers. I try to read all kinds of work because there are so many different kinds of minds to learn from. When I discovered poetry as a teenager, it fascinated me on the level of the line. I spent a lot of time just looking at poems, without necessarily even reading them—let alone understanding them—because the form on the page was a revelation. It amazed me that people were allowed to do that! That I could choose to do that with words—to explode a sentence across the white space or smash all the words together.
Several times now, I have given this slim book of poems to students and encouraged them to carry it in their bags, to read it at random moments throughout the day—instead of, say, looking at their phones. O'Hara's ebullient celebrations of daily life, musings on love, culture, and poetry itself never fail to inspire.
Whether it's a poem about sharing a coke with a beloved or the death of Billie Holiday, O'Hara's work makes me want to stay alert to the possibility of the wonderous, ordinary facts of life on Earth. If I were a doctor, I would prescribe everyone to start their morning with a poem by Frank O'Hara.
Important poems by the late New York poet published in The New American Poetry, Evergreen Review, Floating Bear and stranger places. Often this poet, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more deeply has withdrawn to a darkened ware- or firehouse to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, coexistence, and depth, while never forgetting to eat lunch, his favorite meal. "O'Hara speaks directly across the decades to our hopes and fears and especially our delights; his…
I was drawn to the subject of Yoga already as a teenager. Much later, I did my Ph.D. Thesis on the subject of the Nāths. I find fascinating the wealth of esoteric ideas and assumptions at the root of their project: the search for the elixir of immortality through internalization of the principles of alchemy. I admire their ethos, their stories, and the whole fabric of legends that surrounds them. I have done some work on translating the poetry attributed to their founder, guru Gorakhnāth, and that made me appreciative of their wisdom and their views, even when I disagreed with some of those.
I find extremely interesting the mix of historical scholarship and anthropological fieldwork so vividly presented in this study, as in the other work, by Véronique Bouillier.
She has a particular penchant to focus on and engage with the tension in the ideology and lived experience of her chosen subjects, be it between ancient stories about the Yogis and the lifestyle of the contemporary ascetics or between the ethos of the warriors and the ethos of the renouncers (as the former, in particular kings, become the latter, in popular legends), which gives particular attraction to her elegant and learned exposition.
How have the premodern Shaiva ascetic sect of the Nath Yogis (known also as the Yogis with splitted ears) succeeded in maintaining its presence and importance until today? This book intends to give a general survey of this sampradaya which is said to have been founded by the Siddha Gorakhnath, known for his strong link to Hatha Yoga. However, rather than to Yoga, the history and expansion of the Nath sect are linked to its rich legendary corpus. Dealing first with the marks of belonging (such as the huge earring worn by the fully initiated Yogis) which give the sect…
I am a writer and historian, specialising in the early-Medieval period and the fractious but fruitful encounter between the Christian and Islamic worlds. My fiction is informed by my non-fiction work: it’s a great help to have written actual histories of Northumbria in collaboration with some of the foremost archaeologists working on the period. I regard my work as the imaginative application of what we can learn through history to stories and the books I have selected all do this through the extraordinarily varied talents of their authors. I hope you will enjoy them!
There’s a sort of electric thrill on opening a book, reading the first sentence, and realising that you are about to plunge into something strange, wonderful, and expansive. It’s like labouring up a hill towards a distant ridge and then, on cresting the ridge, finding a whole new unsuspected world opening up before you. It was like that for me when first reading Godric. “Five friends I had, and two of them snakes.” That’s the first line in the book. If, like me, you read that and are immediately interested, then read on, for you won’t be disappointed. Godric takes an almost forgotten figure from history, a 12th-century hermit, and, by the magic of an almost alchemical use of language, brings him and his times to life, neither diminishing their strangeness nor distancing him from the reader.
Frederick Buechner's Godric "retells the life of Godric of Finchale, a twelfth-century English holy man whose projects late in life included that of purifying his moral ambition of pride...Sin, spiritual yearning, rebirth, fierce asceticism--these hagiographic staples aren't easy to revitalize but Frederick Buechner goes at the task with intelligent intensity and a fine readiness to invent what history doesn't supply. He contrives a style of speech for his narrator--Godric himself--that's brisk and tough-sinewed...He avoids metaphysical fiddle, embedding his narrative in domestic reality--familiar affection, responsibilities, disasters...All on his own, Mr. Buechner has managed to reinvent projects of self-purification and of faith…
I’m a historian of the early Middle Ages. There are all sorts of unexpected differences and similarities between modern and medieval life, and things get especially interesting when it comes to thinkingabout thinking. Our understanding of how our minds work has obviously changed—and so have the ways that we actually use them. Medieval thinkers in Europe and the Mediterranean world struggled with concentration and memory and information overload, just like we do. But they were savvier in dealing with those problems, and these books invite you into the wonderful world of their cognitive practices. You’ll probably find yourself experimenting with many of these techniques along the way!
Early Christian monks in the eastern Mediterranean chalked up many of their mental struggles to demonic interference—and yet their approaches to the problem of attention share some striking similarities to modern psychology.
Graiver makes the case that monks’ talk of demons was not a superstitious diagnosis but a pragmatic one: it helped monks try to strike a balance between monitoring their thoughts and thinking too hard about them, deal with unwanted thoughts before they became all-consuming, and figure how to keep it together when their thoughts were all over the place.
I love that this book takes early monks and modern psychologists equally seriously. And even if you don’t start blaming your problems on demons after reading it, you will still have learned a lot about the promises and perils of attention management.
Asceticism is founded on the possibility that human beings can profoundly transform themselves through training and discipline. In particular, asceticism in the Eastern monastic tradition is based on the assumption that individuals are not slaves to the habitual and automatic but can be improved by ascetic practice and, with the cooperation of divine grace, transform their entire character and cultivate special powers and skills. Asceticism of the Mind explores the strategies that enabled Christian ascetics in the Egyptian, Gazan, and Sinaitic monastic traditions of late antiquity to cultivate a new form of existence. At the book's center is a particular…
I’ve been fascinated by celebrities and heroes ever since I was a child. That compulsion became something I wanted to understand. I got my chance as the head editor of People magazine. Over the years, I met more than my share of celebrities – Ronald Reagan, Tom Hanks, Malcolm X, and Princess Diana, to name only a few. I began to take notes about my brushes with fame and think about celebrities in history and why they have recently become so dominant in our culture. Celebrity Nation is the result. Enjoy it!
The sociologist Joshua Gamson was among the first to analyze the effects of television on our image of celebrityhood.
In Claims to Fame, he rebels against the democratization of fame and is nostalgic for the days before fame was divorced from merit.
He cites Clifford Geertz’s classic The Interpretation of Cultures to make the point that celebrities are “a powerless elite” with high status and visibility but literally no power of any kind over audiences.
And now, of course, in the age of social media, these discrepancies are magnified.
Moving from "People" magazine to publicists' offices to tours of stars' homes, Joshua Gamson investigates the larger-than-life terrain of American celebrity culture. In the first major academic work since the early 1940s to seriously analyze the meaning of fame in American life, Gamson begins with the often-heard criticisms that today's heroes have been replaced by pseudoheroes, that notoriety has become detached from merit. He draws on literary and sociological theory, as well as interviews with celebrity-industry workers, to untangle the paradoxical nature of an American popular culture that is both obsessively invested in glamour and fantasy yet also aware of…
My great uncle was an eccentric book collector who lived in an old, rambling house stuffed floor-to-ceiling with thousands and thousands of books. After he died, I inherited a tiny portion of his collection: a set of state guidebooks from the 1930s and 40s. These were the American Guides created by the Federal Writers’ Project, the New Deal program that put jobless writers to work during the Great Depression. I dipped into these weird, rich, fascinating books, and I was hooked immediately. Some years later, I quit my job in publishing to research and write my own account of the FWP’s unlikely rise and lamentable fall, Republic of Detours.
This is a scholarly work, but don’t let the unassuming title fool you: Stott’s writing is crisp, elegant, and highly readable, and his insights are crucial to any understanding of the New Deal’s place in American culture. He covers the Roosevelt administration’s cultural undertakings—from the WPA projects to Farm Security Administration photographers to FDR’s own political style and “documentary imagination”—but his real subject is the broader documentary impulse that was expressed so forcefully and variously during the 1930s. This impulse was hardly confined to the federal government’s interventions in the arts. The connections he draws between the New Deal and, say, Martha Graham’s dance productions, or James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, are illuminating and convincing.
"A comprehensive inquiry into the attitudes and ambitions that characterized the documentary impulse of the thirties. The subject is a large one, for it embraces (among much else) radical journalism, academic sociology, the esthetics of photography, Government relief programs, radio broadcasting, the literature of social work, the rhetoric of political persuasion, and the effect of all these on the traditional arts of literature, painting, theater and dance. The great merit of Mr. Stott's study lies precisely in its wide-ranging view of this complex terrain."-Hilton Kramer, New York Times Book Review
"[Scott] might be called the Aristotle of documentary. No one…
Poems to Lift You Up and Make You Smile
by
Jayne Jaudon Ferrer (compiler),
This entertaining and uplifting collection of 100 classic and contemporary poems offers upbeat perspectives, positive outlooks, feel-good scenarios, smiles galore, and even a few LOL moments! Featuring the work of poets from across the U.S., Canada, England, and Ireland, it’s the perfect way to brighten a day for family members,…
I was born in 1947, in the first wave of the baby boom, and was part of the first generation to grow up immersed in television, movies, and popular music. I have always felt the force of pop culture in my life. But it was only at a certain point that it became something that I felt I could write about and be taken seriously. Writers like Pauline Kael made it possible for me because they obviously adored popular culture but they neither puffed it up nor dumbed it down. They wrote about it with intelligence, honesty, and curiosity and also as a barometer of where people were at and where society was going. That’s what I’ve aimed at in my own writing, from my books on the male and female body to those on politics and the media to my most recent exploration of the impact of television on our lives.
Where the Girls Are is about a particular generation of women growing up in post War America, and the impact popular media had on their lives, both for good and for bad. It weaves wonderfully smart, often funny, always engagingly written discussions of pop music, movies, and television shows with Douglas’s own experiences at the time. It’s unabashedly feminist—but it isn’t a speech or a political manifesto. It’s an exploration of the push-pull of growing up female at a transitional time, a time in which attitudes toward women were changing, unevenly, and how pop culture reflected the tensions of the times. This book is history, memoir, sociology, media studies, all at once – immensely informative and very entertaining.
Media critic Douglas deconstructs the ambiguous messages sent to American women via TV programs, popular music, advertising, and nightly news reporting over the last 40 years, and fathoms their influence on her own life and the lives of her contemporaries. Photos.
