Here are 100 books that Lion of the Sky fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am the author and illustrator of the baby book listed below. As a mom of a 1-year-old, I am no stranger to kids’ books. After 1 year of going through my baby’s bookshelf and finding my own personal favorites, I realized that the common theme amongst all of my favorites is that all my selects happen to rhyme. Therefore, when I set out to write my own book, it was a given that this would be a rhyming story. Since then, I have been reading and researching all of the rhyming books to create my own. After all this research, these top five books are my top picks.
The only book you need! Compiled over several short stories, you can pack just this one book with you on a trip and be set for your entire trip. It is so fun to have short stories as an option—you can read one if the baby is tired or five if the baby needs time to wind down before bedtime.
Shel Silverstein, the New York Times bestselling author of The Giving Tree, A Light in the Attic, Falling Up, and Every Thing On It, has created a poetry collection that is outrageously funny and deeply profound. Come in...for where the sidewalk ends, Shel Silverstein's world begins. This special edition contains 12 extra poems. You'll meet a boy who turns into a TV set, and a girl who eats a whale. The Unicorn and the Bloath live there, and so does Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout who will not take the garbage out. It is a place where you wash your shadow…
I’ve loved words from the moment I met them. I wrote my first poem when I was eight years old and haven’t stopped yet! As a children’s book author, I love incorporating rhyme, poetry, or lyrical prose in the stories I write. I was a shy kid and often felt like my poetry wasn’t “good enough.” It is my goal to get kids excited about all forms of poetry and I want them to know that they can be poets if they want to and that writing, reading, and sharing poetry is fun and rewarding.
A pet adoption story told completely in haiku? Yes, please!
This delightful story begins at a pet shelter when a little boy chooses a cat to take home. It is told from the point of view of the cat with “catitude” and is so clever and funny! I am more of a dog person, but this story won me over and warmed my heart! Younger kids will enjoy the story and darling illustrations while older kids will recognize the three short lines of the clever “one breath” poetry.
I’ve loved words from the moment I met them. I wrote my first poem when I was eight years old and haven’t stopped yet! As a children’s book author, I love incorporating rhyme, poetry, or lyrical prose in the stories I write. I was a shy kid and often felt like my poetry wasn’t “good enough.” It is my goal to get kids excited about all forms of poetry and I want them to know that they can be poets if they want to and that writing, reading, and sharing poetry is fun and rewarding.
Like Daniel, young kids may have heard the word “poetry,” but what exactly is a poem?
The collage illustrations will draw you in as Daniel takes a walk through the park asking creatures, “what is poetry,” the spider answers, saying, "to me poetry is when morning dew glistens.” Or maybe it’s “moonlight on the grass.” Daniel finds that poetry is different things to different animals, and he learns that to find his poem all he has to do is look around and listen. A perfect introduction to poetry!
Stunning collage art full of rich color, glorious details, and a sense of wonder—reminiscent of the work of Ezra Jack Keats—illustrate this delightful story celebrating the poetry found in the world around us.
What is poetry? Is it glistening morning dew? Spider thinks so. Is it crisp leaves crunching? That’s what Squirrel says. Could it be a cool pond, sun-warmed sand, or moonlight on the grass? Maybe poetry is all of these things, as it is something special for everyone—you just have to take the time to really look and listen. The magical thing is that poetry is in everyone,…
I’ve loved words from the moment I met them. I wrote my first poem when I was eight years old and haven’t stopped yet! As a children’s book author, I love incorporating rhyme, poetry, or lyrical prose in the stories I write. I was a shy kid and often felt like my poetry wasn’t “good enough.” It is my goal to get kids excited about all forms of poetry and I want them to know that they can be poets if they want to and that writing, reading, and sharing poetry is fun and rewarding.
Leaves drifting on a winding stream, toes sinking into the soft sand, exploring the branches of gigantic trees… Kate Coombs’ simple poetry shows kids how to practice mindfulness to help them relax.
I love how this book gives us time to stop, look around, and enjoy the world we live in while enjoying poetry —“My breath is a river of peace.” The illustrations are so dreamy! Every child needs to experience this book!
I breathe slowly in, I breathe slowly out. My breath is a river of peace. I am here in the world. Each moment I can breathe and be.
Hear thunder crash, feel your toes touch sand, and watch leaves drift softly away on a quiet stream. The simple poems in Breathe and Be help children learn mindfulness as they connect to the beauty of the natural world.
Mindfulness teaches us how to stay calm, soothe our emotions, and appreciate the world around us. Whether we're watching tiny colored fish darting in the water or exploring the leaves, branches, and roots…
Hello, I write poems, lots of them, and also lots of books about Christianity. I grew up in London and lived for my first thirteen years deep within myself, in a kind of fog that prevented anyone from knowing me, including myself. Then, one day, when I was thirteen, in the middle of a math class, everything changed for me. I entered a wholly new world. I went from being at the bottom of the class to the top of the class; I started publishing poems. I started a quest to find myself anew, cutting through the fog, and that quest ended with me teaching Divinity at Duke University.
The “I” is elusive: no one knows this better than Basho. He shows us that if we are finely attentive to anything at all, we can learn an enormous amount about ourselves. Basho thought he was dying when he started his great haiku narrative, but he also sought to find the road that leads deeply into himself.
His lyrical journey was his true way home. When we think about interiority, we must always think of Augustine’s Confessions (for the West) and Basho’s book, listed here (for the East). We learn most about ourselves by reading them.
A masterful translation of one of the most-loved classics of Japanese literature—part travelogue, part haiku collection, part account of spiritual awakening
Bashō (1644–1694)—a great luminary of Asian literature who elevated the haiku to an art form of utter simplicity and intense spiritual beauty—is renowned in the West as the author of Narrow Road to the Interior,a travel diary of linked prose and haiku recounting his journey through the far northern provinces of Japan.
This edition, part of the Shambhala Pocket Library series, features a masterful translation of this celebrated work. It also includes an insightful introduction by translator Sam Hamill…
Having completed military survival courses as well as stints in an improv comedy troupe, James Schannep knows the best zombie stories are those presented with a wry grin while staring down the end of the world. The product of an overactive imagination, the genre-hopping Click Your Poison series puts you in the driver’s seat against zombies, pirates, international spies, a detective whodunit, superheroes (and villains), exploration through a haunted house, and more!
You’d probably be forgiven if when you think of poetry you think of love, natural beauty, or at worst, melancholic sadness. But with just 17 syllables, the author manages to bring all the grit, gore, and mayhem of the zombie apocalypse into pleasant verse. Haiku is a popular, easily approachable form of poetry (i.e. not pretentious), which makes this book a fun, light read despite its blood-spattered pages.
Blood is really warm, like drinking hot chocolate but with more screaming.
Poetry is dead. "Zombie Haiku" is the touching story of a zombie's gradual decay told through the intimate poetry of haiku. From infection to demise, readers will accompany the narrator through deserted streets and barracaded doors for every eye-popping, gut-wrenching, flesh-eating moment. The book is illustrated with over 50 photos from the zombie's point of view and designed with extra blood, pus, gore, and guts!
Biting into heads is much harder than it looks. The skull is feisty.
I have written stage and radio plays, poetry, short story collections, and, beginning in 2013, novels that comprise The American Novels series, published by Bellevue Literary Press. Unlike historical fiction, these works reimagine the American past to account for faults that persist to the present day: the wish to dominate and annex, the will to succeed in every department of life regardless of cost, and the stain of injustice and intolerance. In order to escape the gravity of an authorial self, I address present dangers and follies through the lens of our nineteenth-century literature and in a narrative voice quite different from my own.
I suspect that I was led to takeThe Malady of Death from my shelf by a subconscious directive. I admit that I am afraid of this book, its relentless probing, afraid I will never understand it however much I struggle. Confounded by it twenty-five years ago, I put it aside until my consciousness could mature. (Ha!) The fault must be mine, since her style, language, and structure are as limpid as Ernaux’s or Davis’s, although Duras’s prose carries a poetical charge deliberately absent in the other two writers. I begin to think that the trouble lies in my sex, that as a man, an Other to women, I can’t possibly know what Duras’s narrator is being made to gradually reveal not with the leer of a striptease artist but with the solemnity of a priestess presiding over ancient feminine mysteries.
A man hires a woman to spend several weeks with him by the sea. The woman is no one in particular, a "she," a warm, moist body with a beating heart-the enigma of Other. Skilled in the mechanics of sex, he desires through her to penetrate a different mystery: he wants to learn love. It isn't a matter of will, she tells him. Still, he wants to learn to try . . .This beautifully wrought erotic novel is an extended haiku on the meaning of love, "perhaps a sudden lapse in the logic of the universe," and of its absence,…
Many people are intimidated by poetry. For a big part of my life, I was too. So much of the poetry I had been exposed to was either indecipherable or irrelevant to me. Then I discovered some poems that I loved—accessible poems about subjects I related to. I started collecting poetry books, by both adult and children’s poets. Eventually, I was inspired to write poetry of my own. Today, I’m a poetry advocate, recommending my favorites to anyone who shows interest. The satisfaction I get from poetry boils down to this: When I read a good poem, I think to myself, “Wow, I didn’t know words could do that.”
After writing 14 children’s books about art appreciation, I decided to try my hand at children’s poetry. When I read this collection of haiku by Jack Prelutsky, it was a revelation. Each poem is a first-person description of an animal, full of rich, unexpected language. By writing in first-person, Prelutsky broke one of haiku’s cardinal rules. But it worked—and inspired me to write my own collection in the first person as well. Here’s one of my favorites poems in his book:
Raucously we caw.
Your straw men do not fool us.
We burgle your corn.
Seventeen haiku composed by master poet Jack Prelutsky and illustrated by renowned artist Ted Rand ask you to think about seventeen favorite residents of the animal kingdom in a new way.
On these glorious and colorful pages you will meet a mouse, a skunk, a beaver, a hummingbird, ants, bald eagles, jellyfish, and many others. Who is who? The answer is right in front of you. But how can you tell? Think and wonder and look and puzzle it out!
A creature whispers:
If not for the cat, And the scarcity of cheese, I could be content.
I lived most of my life in Hawai‘i’s multiethnic community—an amazing place, where, for the most part, people of diverse ancestries got along. The foundation of tolerance was the culture of Native Hawaiians, who lived isolated from outsiders for centuries before the nineteenth century and thus had few prejudicial ideas about others. The natives generally welcomed them and adopted their beliefs. While confrontations and violence occurred, they were limited, not long-term or widespread. Of course, outsiders brought their racial and cultural prejudices, but, today, with a high rate of intermarriages among all the ethnic groups, Hawai'i is one of the most integrated societies in the world.
Westlake, a poet of Native Hawaiian ancestry, incorporates influences from Chinese Taoist and Japanese haiku poetry, Dada concrete poetry, the writings of Kerouac and Bukowski, as well as local pidgin and Hawaiian literary traditions. Westlake’s editor and friend Richard Hamasaki writes that the early poems are “calm, contemplative, and serene, often playful, celebratory”—humans interacting with nature, from rain, moonlight, and mountains, to bugs, frogs, and dandelions: “Looks of disbelief: / I’m on my knees / Washing a rock.” The later poems are political: “Westlake blasts away at Waikiki’s rampant tourism and American materialism, which replaced the native culture in his native land. He wonders, “how we spose / feel Hawaiian anymoa / barefeet buying smokes / in da seven eleven stoa ...?”
In an all-too-brief life and literary career, Wayne Kaumualii Westlake produced a substantial body of poetry. He broke new ground as a poet, translated Taoist classical literature and Japanese haiku, interwove perspectives from his Hawaiian heritage into his writing and art, and published his work locally, regionally, and internationally. The present volume, long overdue, includes nearly two hundred of Westlake's poems - most unavailable to the public or never before published.
I am the author of ten collections of microfiction and poetry. I came to microfiction after having written several novels and short story collections. I just felt that I was saying more than I wanted to say. Microfiction has allowed me to completely distill my stories to the essence of what makes them tick. Of the 26 books I have written, the microfiction collections are my favorites because every word and idea is carefully measured. I am presently working on my next collection of microfiction and have no immediate plans to return to writing at longer lengths. Oddly, writing small has freed me up so I can experiment with various genres, structures, and ideas. I honestly feel microfiction has made me a much better writer.
John Edgar Wideman is the first African-American writer I can clearly point to who took microfiction seriously enough to write an entire collection. His stories are filtered through the lens of Blackness, but that is not the major reason why I like this book. Wideman does things with language that force me to completely step back and rethink things. I find myself reading his words aloud, simply because they feel as though they transcend the page. If it were not for Wideman, I would not feel as comfortable revealing the authenticity of my experience in my work.
BRIEFS is a groundbreaking new collection of "microstories" from celebrated author John Edgar Wideman, previous winner of both the Rea and O. Henry awards saluting mastery of the short story form. Here he has assembled a masterful collage that explodes our assumptions about the genre. Wideman unveils an utterly original voice and structure-hip-hop zen-where each story is a single breath, to be caught, held, shared and savored. A relief worker's Sudan bulletin, a jogger's bullet-dodging daydreams, your neighbor's fears and fantasies, an absent mother's regrets-Wideman's storytellers are eavesdroppers and peeping Toms, diarists and haiku historians. The characters and compass points…
