Here are 100 books that No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies fans have personally recommended if you like
No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies.
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My first memory is of my father telling me about the cosmos, the Big Bang, and how the sun would burn out one day, expanding so big it would swallow the Earth. This memory haunted my dreams and waking hours, instilling a fascination with the life and death cycles of everything. Now I’m an artist, writer, educator and somatic coach devoted to helping people talk about and honor the things western culture doesn’t create space for–big emotions, messy love and the gifts of dying.
The poetics of this book, mixed with its vital and necessary information about being with death, broke my heart at least once a page, often more. I believe that every time your heart breaks, you build a necessary resilience for staying alive.
By the end of the book, all the pieces of my heart had somehow been mended, leaving me with a new understanding of what being alive is about. In the months leading up to my grandmother’s death, I returned to this book many times, and it helped me give her a beautiful death in her home, just as she longed for. Every person who is going to die and loves someone who will die needs this book.
Award-winning writer and nurse Sallie Tisdale offers a lyrical, thought-provoking yet practical perspective on death and dying in this frank, direct and compassionate meditation on the inevitable. _______________________________________
From the sublime to the ridiculous, Tisdale leads the reader through the peaks and troughs of death with a calm, wise and humorous hand. More than a how-to manual or a spiritual bible, this is a graceful compilation of honest and intimate anecdotes based on the deaths Tisdale has witnessed in her work and life, as well as stories from cultures, traditions and literature around the world.
My first memory is of my father telling me about the cosmos, the Big Bang, and how the sun would burn out one day, expanding so big it would swallow the Earth. This memory haunted my dreams and waking hours, instilling a fascination with the life and death cycles of everything. Now I’m an artist, writer, educator and somatic coach devoted to helping people talk about and honor the things western culture doesn’t create space for–big emotions, messy love and the gifts of dying.
I was raised by a family and culture that taught me nothing about grief, mourning, or honoring the great heartbreaks of aliveness. This book raised me and taught me about the importance of ritual and community tending to our grief.
It taught me that naming the pain of the world is an act of love and that helping others do the same is a responsibility we all carry. I trained with Francis Weller years after reading this book and was so affirmed by sharing space with a person who embodies what he teaches in a deep and embodied way.
"It blew me away. I underlined things on nearly every page." —Anderson Cooper, All There Is
The Wild Edge of Sorrow offers hope and healing for a profoundly fractured world—and a pathway home to the brightness, pains, and gifts of being alive.
Introducing the 5 gates of grief, psychotherapist Francis Weller explores how we move through the waters of grief and loss in a culture so fundamentally detached from the needs of the soul.
• The first gate recognizes—and invites us to accept—the painful truth that everything we love, we will lose. With this acceptance comes beauty and responsibility—and an…
My first memory is of my father telling me about the cosmos, the Big Bang, and how the sun would burn out one day, expanding so big it would swallow the Earth. This memory haunted my dreams and waking hours, instilling a fascination with the life and death cycles of everything. Now I’m an artist, writer, educator and somatic coach devoted to helping people talk about and honor the things western culture doesn’t create space for–big emotions, messy love and the gifts of dying.
This book taught me that I don’t always have to show up “right” or “well.” I can just show up, and that is often enough–to death or any other difficult situation. I walked away from this book with the assurance that there is no way to fully prepare for death because every person is different, every death is different and grief is a bit of a trickster (you never know how it's going to show up).
The mix of personal stories and practical direction has lasted with me over the years and is now a part of how I hold space as a friend, family member, coach, spiritual guide, lover, and partner in life and death.
A hospital chaplain reflects on grief and loss, mindfulness and healing, in this “beautifully written” meditation on the spiritual, emotional, and philosophical implications of end-of-life care (Jan Chozen Bays, author of Mindfulness on the Go)
As a hospital chaplain, Amy Wright Glenn has been present with those suffering from suicide, trauma, disease, and unforeseen accidents and has been witness to the intense grief and powerful insights that so often accompany loss. She weaves together memoir, philosophical inquiry, and cutting-edge research on death/dying to chronicle how we, as individuals and as a culture, handle everything from grief to mortality.
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.
My first memory is of my father telling me about the cosmos, the Big Bang, and how the sun would burn out one day, expanding so big it would swallow the Earth. This memory haunted my dreams and waking hours, instilling a fascination with the life and death cycles of everything. Now I’m an artist, writer, educator and somatic coach devoted to helping people talk about and honor the things western culture doesn’t create space for–big emotions, messy love and the gifts of dying.
I knew I would love this book and I waited years to read it. I was waiting to savor it at the right time. I finally read it while moving through the painful realization of my mother’s schizoaffective disorder. She is still alive, though our relationship has had many deaths. When I need to remember that the little moments of beautiful mundanity can be as poignant as the big joys and pains of life, I go back to this book.
When I need to remember that queerness is a gift only a few of us are lucky enough to have, I go back to this book. When I need to remember that our greatest griefs come from our greatest loves, I go back to this book—over and over again.
"Take your time with these poems, and return to them often.” —The Washington Post
The New York Times-bestselling collection of poems from the award-winning writer Ocean Vuong
How else do we return to ourselves but to fold The page so it points to the good part
In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of personal and social loss, embodying the paradox of sitting in grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with…
We are three anthropologists who have focused decades of research on the cultures and histories of the beautiful part of the world known as Micronesia. We wrote this book when we realized that the many volumes of history on War in the Pacific focused on the combatants, and told us little of the experiences of the Islanders across whose lands, seas, and airspace the war was fought. Kwajalein, Enewetak, Pohnpei, Chuuk, Peleliu, Saipan, Guam, Tinian—these were not just battlegrounds, but also precious homelands. Our goal was to combine documentary history with interviews of more than 300 elders to tell the story of the war in Micronesia as it was experienced by Islanders who lived through it.
Anna Annie Kwai is a Solomon Islander historian who brings together documentary historical sources with oral history and personal recollections to tell the story of the war in the Southwest Pacific from the point of view of Solomon Islanders themselves—including the work of the famous “coastwatchers,” the Battle of Guadalcanal, and the rescue of the crew of Lt. John F. Kennedy’s PT-109. An essential addition to the study of the Southwest Pacific war.
The Solomon Islands Campaign of World War II has been the subject of many published historical accounts. Most of these accounts present an ‘outsider’ perspective with limited reference to the contribution of indigenous Solomon Islanders as coastwatchers, scouts, carriers and labourers under the Royal Australian Navy and other Allied military units. Where islanders are mentioned, they are represented as ‘loyal’ helpers. The nature of local contributions in the war and their impact on islander perceptions are more complex than has been represented in these outsiders’ perspectives. Islander encounters with white American troops enabled self-awareness of racial relationships and inequality under…
I have been a writer for more than twenty years and have favored pursuing “truth in fiction” rather than “money in formula.” I also spent over thirty years in the corporate world and was exposed to many situations reminiscent of those described in my fiction and in these recommended books. While I support enterprise, “enlightened capitalism” is preferable to the bare-knuckle type we have today, and which seems to resurface whenever regulation weakens. I also find writing novels closer to my lived experience connects me intimately with readers who are looking for socio-political, realist literature.
A scientist discovers that his invention, a defoliant, has contributed to exterminating an entire native reserve in British Columbia, causing the birds and turtles to leave. The battle is on between nature and science to restore the balance. But all is not well in the corporation, for the scientist’s boss has become a shopaholic to compensate for his lonely life and wonders why his wife wants to divorce him. The characters are enjoyable, the action circular, and our current political considerations are tackled in a non-didactic fashion. And the human spirit triumphs despite the chemical overload! Throughout the novel, King makes searing one-liners about unbridled capitalism: “capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.”
Winner of the 2014 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction!
This is Thomas King's first literary novel in 15 years and follows on the success of the award-winning and best-selling The Inconvenient Indian and his beloved Green Grass, Running Water and Truth and Bright Water, both of which continue to be taught in Canadian schools and universities. Green Grass, Running Water is widely considered a contemporary Canadian classic.
In The Back of the Turtle, Gabriel returns to Smoke River, the reserve where his mother grew up and to which she returned with Gabriel's sister. The reserve is deserted after an…
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places…
All of us bear the scars of emotional wounds, as complex psychology beats at the heart of all relationships. I’ve personally survived the betrayal of a parent, the loss of a child, emotional abuse, and life with an addict who could look me in the eye and lie. These themes resound in my stories. Literature is a safe place to explore and heal our own traumas through the dramatic interactions of our characters. My witch killer is not just “crazy” he’s unraveling a complex psychological past. In standing with our heroes as they meet and conquer evil, in its many guises, we find our way to healing our own trauma.
I read this book twice, cover-to-cover and back-to-back. First, to find out what happens to our feisty Métis hero, Joan of Arcand, and then again to savor Dimaline’s lyrical writing. When Mere (her grandmother) is murdered by a wolfish shape-shifting creature—a rogarou—we find ourselves trapped in a mythic Métis world. “A dog, a man, a wolf. He was clothed, he was naked in his fur, he wore moccasins to jig.” Carrying a ground-up salt bone for protection, Joan ventures into the Empire of Wildto slay the rogarou who killed Mere and reclaim her husband. Like her hero, Dimaline is brave and fearless, pouring history, politics, and religion into her cauldron, then stirring with a branch of magic realism and psychological terror. Dimaline is my hero.
A NO. 1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER One of the most anticipated books of the summer for Time, Harper's Bazaar, Bustle and Publishers Weekly
'Deftly written, gripping and informative. Empire of Wild is a rip-roaring read!' Margaret Atwood
'Empire of Wild is doing everything I love in a contemporary novel and more. It is tough, funny, beautiful, honest and propulsive' Tommy Orange, author of There There
'Dimaline turns an old story into something newly haunting and resonant' New York Times
'An utterly compelling blend of propulsive narrative, starkly beautiful writing and passionate, near dysfunctional love' Daily Mail
In grade school, I was taught that my ancestors in Borikén (Puerto Rico) were eradicated by the Spanish, just a few decades after Christopher Columbus “discovered” the Americas. I have since become an Anthropologist of technology, where I study how the infrastructure failures and disasters like hurricanes are reactivating a dormant Taíno identity on my ancestral archipelago. My speculative fiction is inspired by this research and my fractured family history as a descendant of the Taíno, enslaved Africans, and their colonizers from Spain. In my stories, I challenge the narrative of my own extinction, imagining alternative pasts and futures where the Taíno are flourishing and Boricuas are free from American colonial rule (Taínofuturism).
Among the more insidious and tragic consequences of colonialism and its assimilationist policies is the eradication of indigenous conventions around gender and sexuality. In many indigenous communities, gender and sexuality do not operate in as binary as a fashion as they do in European societies.
Highlighting these historical and contemporary possibilities for what we might call queer identities (or “two-spirit” in some communities), is Joshua Whithead’s breathtaking “Indigiqueer” anthology, Love After the End. Contributors amend the provocation, the future is indigenous, to consider how the future is also queer or indigiqueer.
Weaving between the traditional and the contemporary, the past and the future, the ancestral and the posthuman, these tales of queer joy, love, and thriving remind us of what was lost and what is still possible as we strive toward mass decolonization.
This exciting and groundbreaking fiction anthology showcases a number of new and emerging 2SQ (Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous) writers from across Turtle Island. These visionary authors show how queer Indigenous communities can bloom and thrive through utopian narratives that detail the vivacity and strength of 2SQness throughout its plight in the maw of settler colonialism’s histories.
Here, readers will discover bio-engineered AI rats, transplanted trees in space, the rise of a 2SQ resistance camp, a primer on how to survive Indigiqueerly, virtual reality applications, motherships at sea, and the very bending of space-time continuums queered through…
I am an anthropological archaeologist specializing in the Indigenous cultures of the Northeastern United States. My research intersects archaeology, anthropology, history, and Native American and Indigenous Studies to explore settler colonialism, landscape and memory, and Indigenous survivance. I’ve always been interested in cities, maybe because I’m city-born and raised and have spent my academic career at an Ivy League university in Providence. I read these books because I’m fascinated by place-based stories of Indigenous survivance in cities and elsewhere that challenge omissions and misconceptions about their colonial experiences in the popular historical imagination. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I have!
This memoir by Thomas Muller, a product of intergeneration trauma from Canada’s Indian residential schools, a broken home, serial father figures, and alcohol and sexual abuse, is filled with pain, heartbreak, and self-effacing humor.
Growing up, he navigated between Winnipeg and towns in British Columbia and the Pukatawagan Cree Nation’s homeland of his great-grandparents in northern Manitoba. Written with unflinching honesty and a survivor’s instinct, the memoir traces the depths of his frustration and despair and his healing and spirituality, fatherhood, and newly found purpose as a leader at the forefront of the environmental justice movement.
As I turned every page, I found myself rooting for him and his right to the city.
*FINALIST FOR 2022 CANADA READS* *SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 J.W. DAFOE BOOK PRIZE* *SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 MANITOBA BOOK AWARDS’ MCNALLY ROBINSON BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD*
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A gritty and inspiring memoir from renowned Cree environmental activist Clayton Thomas-Muller, who escaped the world of drugs and gang life to take up the warrior’s fight against the assault on Indigenous peoples’ lands—and eventually the warrior’s spirituality.
There have been many Clayton Thomas-Mullers: The child who played with toy planes as an escape from domestic and sexual abuse, enduring the intergenerational trauma of Canada's residential school system; the angry youngster…
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
Why I chose to write about cold climates: I spent nearly seven years living in the North of Norway in the Sámi reindeer herding village called Guovdageaidnu, or Kautokeino in Norwegian. I cherish my time in that part of the world.
This is a little off-piste in that this isn’t exactly about cold climates; the main topic of Dodds Pennock’s book is about how Indigenous Americans discovered Europe. I first heard Dodds Pennock talk about her book at a lecture in London just a few months back and had to buy the book, which is a riveting account of the reverse migration of Indigenous Americans to Europe.
Why include this book on the Arctic, you ask? Dodds Pennock also writes about a few Indigenous Inuit that make it to England, and I haven’t stopped thinking about the story she tells about their fraught lives in the UK and (until now) unknown or forgotten history in England. For example, she tells a gripping story of two Inuits who were abducted and brought to London in the 1570s and are buried in the city in unmarked graves at St. Olave’s Church.
We have long been taught to presume that modern global history began when the 'Old World' encountered the 'New', when Christopher Columbus 'discovered' America in 1492. But, as Caroline Dodds Pennock conclusively shows in this groundbreaking book, for tens of thousands of Aztecs, Maya, Totonacs, Inuit and others - enslaved people, diplomats, explorers, servants, traders - the reverse was true: they discovered Europe. For them, Europe comprised savage shores, a land of riches and marvels, yet perplexing for its brutal disparities of wealth and quality of life, and its baffling beliefs. The story of these Indigenous Americans abroad is a…
