Here are 100 books that Everyday Utopias fans have personally recommended if you like
Everyday Utopias.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I’ve always been fascinated with the first-person voice, the way it magically pulls us into a story through the character’s/narrator’s perspective, and how when done well, can feel so natural and personal. I’ve tried to write in this perspective over the years, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. I hope I have done it adequately with this current novel. I wouldn’t say I’m an expert when it comes to the first-person, but I am an interested participant. I am a creative writing professor, but I am also a student of writing and always will be. The more I investigate, the more I read, the more I learn. Focusing on this topic has been no exception.
Some first person voices are just so naturally nostalgic, like you’re sitting around a campfire listening to someone telling you a story.
“The year my mother started hearing voices from her dead brother Clyde,” or “But Gigi was the first to fly.” So many moments to hold onto in this novel, each an introduction to another tale, or a memory you can’t wait to listen to and run off down the street to share it for yourself.
The voice of August is so real and clear and poetic that one forgets there’s even a writer behind it. This close first-person voice lets us in, welcomes us into the secrets of the street. “Everywhere we looked we saw the people trying to dream themselves out.” And dream I did, along every glorious page, only I never wanted out.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER FROM A NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNING AUTHOR
A TIME MAGAZINE TOP 10 NOVEL OF 2016 | SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION 2016
FROM THE WINNER OF THE ASTRID LINDGREN MEMORIAL AWARD 2018
They used to be inseparable. They used to be young, brave and brilliant - amazingly beautiful and terrifyingly alone. August, Sylvia, Angela and Gigi shared everything: songs, secrets, fears and dreams. But 1970s Brooklyn was also a dangerous place, where grown men reached for innocent girls, where mothers disappeared and futures vanished at the turn of a street corner.
The Beatles are widely regarded as the foremost and most influential music band in history and their career has been the subject of many biographies. Yet the band's historical significance has not received sustained academic treatment to date. In The Beatles and the 1960s, Kenneth L. Campbell uses The…
When I was growing up, I had no idea that New York State had 200 years of slavery. And when I realized that my Dutch American ancestors had been some of the most fervent enslavers, I knew I had to know more. It wasn’t until I met Eleanor Mire, a woman who is descended from the very people that my family enslaved, that my story became fuller. We realized that, through rape, we shared ancestors, which makes us “linked descendants.” Rather than turning away from the upsetting history, we became friends who knew we needed to keep learning and tell the stories of those who had been lost.
What does it mean to enslave another human being? Sometimes a novel is the only way for me to get at the emotional heart of a horrible truth. That’s why I loved this book–an imaginary region of Virginia before the Civil War introduced me to Henry Townsend, a freed Black man who owned an entire plantation of other Black men, women, and children.
I couldn’t stop thinking of Moses, Augustus, Celeste, and all of the people who fought their way through to, finally, emancipation. Some people compare Edward P. Jones’ work to Faulkner's in the way he creates a complete and completely convincing world.
Masterful, Pulitzer-prize winning literary epic about the painful and complex realities of slave life on a Southern plantation. An utterly original exploration of race, trust and the cruel truths of human nature, this is a landmark in modern American literature.
Henry Townsend, a black farmer, boot maker, and former slave, becomes proprietor of his own plantation - as well as his own slaves. When he dies, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love beneath the weight of slavery…
As a professor of African American literature and culture, I’ve spent my career writing, reading, teaching, talking and thinking about black interiority: feelings, emotions, memory, affect. My publications and lectures focus mostly on the creative and diverse ways that black people have created spaces of pleasure and possibility, even in the most dire times and under extremely difficult conditions. I’ve been told that I’m a natural optimist, so it is fitting that my most recent book and this recommendation list is all about the intentional and creative ways that people cultivate joy and a sense of possibility for themselves and others.
Every now and then I come across a book that I wish I had written, and Quashie’s Black Aliveness is among them. One of the motivating premises of Afro-Nostalgia is the sense that so much of black life is narrated through a trauma, oppression, and death. Black Aliveness operates from a similar premise and is centrally concerned with the “quality of aliveness” in African American poetry and literature. Here is one of my favorite passages in the book: “As necessary as ‘Black Lives Matter’ has proven to be, so efficient and beautiful a truth-claim, its necessity disorients me…I want a black world where matter of mattering matters indisputably, where black mattering is beyond expression.”
In Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, Kevin Quashie imagines a Black world in which one encounters Black being as it is rather than only as it exists in the shadow of anti-Black violence. As such, he makes a case for Black aliveness even in the face of the persistence of death in Black life and Black study. Centrally, Quashie theorizes aliveness through the aesthetics of poetry, reading poetic inhabitance in Black feminist literary texts by Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, and Evie Shockley, among others, showing how their philosophical and creative thinking constitutes worldmaking. This…
Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS
by
Amy Carney,
When I was writing this book, several of my friends jokingly called it the Nazi baby book, with one insisting it would make a great title. Nazi Babies – admittedly, that is a catchy title, but that’s not exactly what my book is about. SS babies would be slightly more…
Like many who carry over childish curiosity into adulthood, I'm attracted to forbidden places. I trespass. When I heard that a portion of South Africa’s coast was owned by the De Beers conglomerate and closed to the public for nearly 80 years, plunging the local communities into mysterious isolation, I became obsessed with visiting the place. Afterward, I began studying carrier pigeons—the amazing flying things that folks use to smuggle diamonds out of the mines. I wrote a book about this, Flight of the Diamond Smugglers. I'm also the author of nonfiction books about the first-ever photograph of the giant squid, working on a medical marijuana farm, and American food culture.
There’s this rumor that poets look longer and harder at the ornaments of the world than do anyone else. They keep looking, and looking, and looking, after most everyone else has long ago looked away, moved on. Here, in the wonderful world of poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s first book of nonfiction, whimsy and reverence twine like the DNA helices of the flora and fauna she examines. In her essay on the firefly, I adore the part when the insects “…lose their light rhythm for a few minutes after a single car’s headlights pass. Sometimes it takes hours for them to recalibrate their blinking patterns.”
"Hands-down one of the most beautiful books of the year." -NPR
From beloved, award-winning poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil comes a debut work of nonfiction-a collection of essays about the natural world, and the way its inhabitants can teach, support, and inspire us.
As a child, Nezhukumatathil called many places home: the grounds of a Kansas mental institution, where her Filipina mother was a doctor; the open skies and tall mountains of Arizona, where she hiked with her Indian father; and the chillier climes of western New York and Ohio. But no matter where she was transplanted-no matter how awkward the fit…
Science fiction and Fantasy have always been about exploring new ideas in novel ways—right from the beginning, Mary Shelley saw the story of Frankenstein as a chance to explore ideas of liberation and equality that, at the time, were too uncomfortable for mainstream stories. Since then many writers have found success by mashing up sf with other literary genres to discover the boundaries—and the gray areas—between them. In my latest book I explore the deep connection between horror (the fear of the unknown) and sf (the drive toward wonder). Some of my most cherished books have similarly charted these murky borderlands.
This science fiction and mystery story is about an astronaut from a world without men crashes on Earth and blows all our minds… except we’re also reading a story about a woman living in our 1970s, and a parallel Earth where WWII never happened… it gets a little confusing, in a really fun way.
Russ uses this engaging, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic multiverse story to explore topics of sex essentialism and gender fluidity in a way that still feels bracing and mind-expanding today.
You could say this is as much a philosophical treatise as a novel but that makes it sound like it isn’t any fun, when in fact it’s a blast. If you’re open to a far-out read you will not be disappointed.
A landmark book in the fields of science fiction and feminism.
Four women living in parallel worlds, each with a different gender landscape. When they begin to travel to each other's worlds each woman's preconceptions on gender and what it means to be a woman are challenged.
Acclaimed as one of the essential works of science fiction and an influence on William Gibson, THE FEMALE MAN takes a look at gender roles in society and remains a work of great power.
I’m a creative director in Vermont with a few favorite things: laughter, standard poodles, and happy endings—in life and in fiction. Romance fiction abounds with young heroines and happy endings. But I prefer reading about mature women like myself, women who have experienced their share of disappointments yet face life’s challenges with courage and humor. I like the elements of both genres in one juicy book. After much-frustrated searching, I gave up and wrote the story I wanted to read. My wise, middle-aged heroine still has lots to learn about grief and joy, and learns many of those lessons with men—in bed.
Spending is about a divorced artist and mom. It starts with a middle-aged protagonist reluctantly giving a gallery talk. She complains that male artists often have muses to do their laundry and supply sex, thereby providing practical and “therapeutic” support. A man in the audience stands up and offers to be the artist’s muse. The story is about what happens when this stubbornly independent woman takes him up on it. I totally related to the crusty heroine who has fought for everything she has and distrusts fortune when it offers abundant gifts.
Monica Szabo, a middle-aged, moderately successful painter, encounters B, a wealthy commodities broker who collects her work. B volunteers to be her muse, offering her everything that male artists have always had to produce great art: time, space, money, and sex. Passionate, provocative, and highly engaging, Spending displays Gordon's maverick feminism, her extraordinary wit, and her unique perspectives on art, money, men, sex -- and the desires of women.
What happens when a feminist who studies romance turns the lens on her own romantic adventures?
Loveland is about how the author came to understand this journey to the far country of love—dating, marriage, a forbidden love affair, an unusual love affair as an older woman—as part of a larger…
I, Ira Nayman, have been writing stories set in the multiverse for almost twenty years, first with the Alternate Reality News Service set of books, then with my Transdimensional Authority/Multiverse novels and, most recently, with multiverse triptychs (the spark for The Dance). One of the things that I recently realized about my writing is that a lot of it focuses on the factors that shape our lives and make us the people we are. My ongoing fascination with the multiverse is because it is a great vehicle for exploring this idea by showing us how our lives could have turned out if circumstances or our choices had been different.
Do you think this multiverse business is something new from MCU Labs? H.G. Wells wrote about parallel universes in this book back in 1923.
Humble Mr. Barnstaple and some 1920 one-percenters pass through a dimensional rift into an alternate world called “Utopia.” Appropriately, there’s no disease or poverty, no war, and everybody’s into exploration and scientific progress. But there are also some worrying things (e.g. “eugenics-light”). Aldous Huxley’s anti-utopia Brave New World (1932) is partly a rebuttal of this book.
This book is more of a slow burn than the high impacts of wonder/terror in The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. However, the resolution of the story is ingenious, and Well’s vision of humanity’s destiny is still relevant after 101 years.
HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.
Welcome to Utopia.
When Mr. Barnstaple, an Earthling, is accidentally transported to Utopia with a group of others, he begins an adventure that will change how he views the world forever.
Utopia has no government. Utopia has no religion. People are governed only by their own conscience and desires, and Barnstaple is drawn into what he sees as a perfect society. But when a disease brought by the Earthlings threatens the existence of the Utopians, Barnstaple must make a choice: take over Utopia, or betray his own people…
I've been writing dark thrillers since 2003 and am fascinated by the whole "what would I do" premise of the genre. There's nothing like taking an ordinary character and throwing them into the most harrowing situation my imagination can conjure. Then, I picture myself in that situation, and the goosebumps arrive immediately. The scariest books are those rooted in reality, the kind where these terrible things could happen to us with just one wrong turn in our car, just one decision to engage with a stranger's question. A truly scary book features you as the protagonist. What would you do?
Let's face it: kids are creepy. Even creepier still are kids who are stranded on an island, forced to find ways to survive, then fracture into tribes that not-so-slowly descend into complete anarchy.
Anyone who reads this will forever remember the wild chants of "Piggy" and picture themselves–or their children–in the same horrible situation. Nothing scarier than a story about normal people who devolve into monsters the moment societal guardrails are removed.
A plane crashes on a desert island and the only survivors, a group of schoolboys, assemble on the beach and wait to be rescued. By day they inhabit a land of bright fantastic birds and dark blue seas, but at night their dreams are haunted by the image of a terrifying beast. As the boys' delicate sense of order fades, so their childish dreams are transformed into something more primitive, and their behaviour starts to take on a murderous, savage significance.
First published in 1954, Lord of the Flies is one of the most celebrated and widely read of modern…
I have a weird imagination and care deeply about being kind in all areas of life. I think people, in general, need to be kinder to one another and to the earth. I find humanity to be too anthropocentric and dismissive of the intelligence of other creatures. The incredible complexity and interconnectedness of nature fascinate me, and I constantly look for connections between two seemingly disparate systems. Writing my book allowed me to put insects at the focal point of planetary control. It was an incredibly fun story to write.
I love how Huxley depicts a utopic community in a sea of unrestrained capitalism. This book got me thinking about solutions to problems I didn’t know existed. It got me to rethink how I view family structures, community, responsible drug use, and meditation. I appreciate how he centered the conflict around his ideal world versus the world imposed on his ideals by reality.
For over a hundred years the Pacific island of Pala has been the scene of a unique experiment in civilisation. Its inhabitants live in a society where western science has been brought together with Eastern philosophy to create a paradise on earth. When cynical journalist, Will Farnaby, arrives to research potential oil reserves on Pala, he quickly falls in love with the way of life on the island. Soon the need to complete his mission becomes an intolerable burden and he must make a difficult choice.
In counterpoint to Brave New World and Ape and Essence, in Island Huxley gives…
In This Together explores how we can harness our social networks to make a real impact fighting the climate crisis. Against notions of the lone environmental crusader, Marianne E. Krasny shows us the power of "network climate action"—the idea that our own ordinary acts can influence and inspire those close…
When I was a teenager, I thought we could create a perfect world—or if not quite perfect, at least much, much better than the one we are currently destroying. Actually, I still think it’s possible, just a lot harder and a lot more dangerous than I originally thought. I’ve been interested in all the efforts to imagine and create utopias, which sometimes produce hells instead of heavens, ever since. I have evolved (I think it’s progress) from being a high school Maoist to something more mature while watching China’s attempts to improve the lives of its citizens with respect and sympathy.
The Manuels give an exhaustive but very readable history of utopian thought from the Renaissance (Thomas More) to Marxism, with backward glances to ancient Judaic and Hellenic cultures. This book explains how and why utopias have been central to Western thought, showing how the utopias of one age seem dystopian in another age (or even their own), presented in wry prose that draws readers into the story.
This masterly study has a grand sweep. It ranges over centuries, with a long look backward over several millennia. Yet the history it unfolds is primarily the story of individuals: thinkers and dreamers who envisaged an ideal social order and described it persuasively, leaving a mark on their own and later times.
The roster of utopians includes men of all stripes in different countries and eras--figures as disparate as More and Fourier, the Marquis de Sade and Edward Bellamy, Rousseau and Marx. Fascinating character studies of the major figures are among the delights of the book.
