100 books like Heaven's Coast

Terry Tempest Williams is a Utah-based poet and naturalist who writes in this book about her mother's devastating cancer diagnosis and the rising of the Great South Lake in 1983, which was endangering the bird population by which Terry measured her life.

The way she interweaves the human world with the natural world and how interconnected everything is, in some ways, in my memory, reminds me of the same power Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast had for me, in that I was mesmerized out of my misery by the incredibly specific descriptions of sights and sounds and even smells.

Her mother’s illness and the tragedy that was occurring in the lake were somehow embroidered together to feel like the same story. When my opera The Grapes of Wrath premiered in Utah in 2008, it was as if Terry’s exquisite book had iconized the state for me. Coincidentally, it was Mark Doty… show more.

I didn’t know if I could recommend a play here, but reading this one is how I first experienced it because it premiered in London. I hadn’t seen it yet, so I read its two monumental parts, “Millennium Approaches” and “Perestroika,” on a typewritten marked-up rehearsal script someone had lent me.

Quite simply, Tony Kushner wrote THE play for my generation, a generation that lost probably half of itself to an awful plague most people, especially the government, ignored until it was too late. When my lover Jeffrey died, I went to the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park and wept because Tony had given it to me in his play, a monument for the AIDS generation.

Finally seeing it on Broadway, with Jeffrey, as he was dying, was like having my DNA scratched and resurfaced into something other than who I was before it. It was shape-shifting, soul-stirring, and salve… show more.

Marie’s poems are separated into three sections: childhood (which included an alcoholic and abusive father), the illness and death of her brother Johnny from AIDS, and life beyond his death, including her relationship with James Shannon, a tree surgeon and a fisherman. They were like lifelines to me after Jeffrey died.

I memorized the title poem and said it repeatedly in my head like a litany. These poems are clearly spoken; life boiled down to a stock with the healing power of fresh air and cool water. No other book of poems has ever helped me so much through a catastrophic time, and I ended up setting many of these poems to music.

One morning, Christopher’s fiancé, Brigid, kissed him goodbye and went into the snowy morning of Montpellier, Vermont, to drive to work. She was sidewinded by a speeding car and killed.

Christopher wrote a devastating memoir of shock and coming to terms with such a sudden loss. Brigid was also a beautiful writer, and part of his healing and writing this book involved folding her highly evocative journals into his book. It felt like a resurrection.

Ironically, Christopher and Brigid lived in a house that Mark Doty either rented or sold. As I read this astonishing book, I felt like I was living there with them, roiling in shock and pain.

A few years ago we at Gertrude lit journal decided to answer the question that kept coming our way: What are some great books written by queer people with narratives that center on queer people? Before the pandemic made a mess of things, we ran GERTIE, a book club that chose two fabulous queer books every quarter. This was our very first book selection, and—like with many firsts, perhaps—it holds a special place.

The Angel of History takes place during one night in the waiting room of a San Francisco psyche ward when visits by the Devil and 14 Saints reveal the life of Jacob, a Yemen-born poet who was born in an Egyptian whorehouse. Yes, you read that right. 

I’m going to say right off the top that this book is not well written: it’s turgid and florid and hard to follow. But it’s also recent, unlike most of the books on my list, and it’s the first comprehensive accounting of PEPFAR, the extraordinary US intervention into the African pandemic.

It’s impossible to understand the huge shift in the dynamic of the pandemic without understanding how massively George Bush’s decision to support HIV treatment in Africa changed – well, everything – and Bass is the first writer to try to really dig into that story.

Steinberg is one of South Africa’s great writers of narrative non-fiction; his work is oddly little known outside his home country and it was of huge value to me when I discovered it, not long after I moved to Johannesburg.

This book tracks the progress of a testing and treatment program in Lusikisiki, which had one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world. Part of the story is told through the eyes of a white doctor who expects that, once treatment is there, everyone will seek it out – and a young Black man named Sizwe, clever and successful, who shows all the reasons why HIV response is not as simple as opening up a clinic.

Steinberg’s book probes into some of the messier, less-well-understood dynamics that have driven the pandemic, and features voices rarely heard outside a community like Lusikisiki.

Sometimes I regret not having experienced the sex and drugs enjoyed by my contemporaries who came out much younger in life. The Christodora brought me back to reality. The reality of those years was much darker than my fantasies.

Murphy sketches out the diverse group of intertwined characters that inhabit the Christodora, a gentrified building in Manhattan’s East Village. I wanted to be the artistic Mateo who pushes through life’s difficulties to live an actualized life. But I can’t escape that I could have been one of the AIDS victims for whom the activism Murphy describes was so critical. Or I might have been Hector, an AIDS activist who descends into substance abuse after losing his lover.

Christodora recounts the heartbreak of AIDS but ultimately is a story of the healing of broken lives.

Craig Timberg was a reporting colleague when I was a correspondent in South Africa, and became a friend, one with whom I often passionately disagreed.

That’s why I suggest this book: it offers a very different perspective than mine. Craig and his co-author Halperin, an epidemiologist whose work had a big influence on Craig’s thinking, draw a clear through-line for how Western powers created the sparks of the African epidemic then vigorously fanned them.

A significant chunk of the book focuses on solutions (Halperin is a vociferous champion of male circumcision as an intervention to drive down the spread of the virus). It’s a brisk read that makes complex epidemiological dynamics accessible.

In Reports from the Holocaust, Larry Kramer charts his own journey into AIDS activism, through a collection of his articles, speeches, jeremiads, and public pronouncements dating from the earliest days of the AIDS crisis. A combination gadfly, angry prophet, activist conscience, and provocateur, Larry was also a huge pain-in-the-ass and an unyielding and loving advocate for the gay community—all of which is on full display here. The book includes his incendiary “1,112 and counting,” written in 1983, which first awakened me (and the rest of the gay community) to the political dimensions of the AIDS crisis, as well as his speech four years later, that led to the formation of ACT UP. I defy you to read this book and not want to take to the streets in protest.