Here are 100 books that The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield fans have personally recommended if you like
The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield.
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I am a lifelong lover of books. As a child, one of my most prized possessions was my library card. It gave me entrance to a world of untold wonders from the past, present, and future. My love of reading sparked my imagination and led me to my own fledgling writing efforts. I come from a family of storytellers, my mother being the chief example. She delighted us with stories from her childhood and her maturation in the rural South. She was an excellent mimic, which added realism and humor to every tale.
This book is part odyssey, part ghost story, and part passion play. Toni Morrison is one of the patron saints of American literature whom I was fortunate to discover at an early age. This is her masterpiece, an example of what is possible when a writer’s heart, mind, and spirit are aligned.
The fact that the unfathomable sacrifice around which Beloved is imagined is based upon an actual event speaks volumes about the innate horrors of slavery. In matters of race, America’s skeletons are buried in shallow graves.
'Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours... Beloved is a heart-breaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all' Margaret Atwood, New York Times
Discover this beautiful gift edition of Toni Morrison's prize-winning contemporary classic Beloved
It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her…
After graduating with a BA in English, I moved to England to pursue a master’s in Literature and Visual Culture. My focus was on women artists working in London during the Blitz and I wrote my dissertation on Lee Miller, who went on to photograph (and doggedly publish) the liberation of German concentration camps. Later I worked in arts administration and marketing, and didn’t start writing my debut noveluntil I was thirty-five. My work is inspired by my favorite authors from the 1940s:Elizabeth Bowen, Patrick Hamilton, and Penelope Fitzgerald.I’m also drawn to historical fiction about ordinary people in difficult social conditions, especially when there’s a love story involved.
I used to moderate a book club for museum members at what is now the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Love Medicine was chosen by one of our exhibition artists. This astonishing debut is a masterwork about family, poverty, and passion.
The book is set where my grandparents came from, Minnesota and the Dakotas, and illustrates how settlers from Europe (my ancestors) continued to disrupt and destroy Native lives well into the 20th century. Ojibwe spiritual beliefs and Catholicism tangle as tightly as the characters that embody them. Spanning from 1934 to 1985, this novel should not be missed by anyone interested in Native American history.
“The beauty of Love Medicine saves us from being completely devastated by its power.” — Toni Morrison
Set on a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation, Love Medicine—the first novel from master storyteller and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich—is an epic story about the intertwined fates of two families: the Kashpaws and the Lamartines.
With astonishing virtuosity, each chapter of this stunning novel draws on a range of voices to limn its tales. Black humor mingles with magic, injustice bleeds into betrayal, and through it all, bonds of love and family marry the elements into a tightly woven whole that pulses…
Nothing about the art of writing is more interesting to me—as both reader and writer—than the power of language to open, or to enhance, or to teach, our perceptions about life and about living in the richest emotional and thoughtful ways possible. My own Sweetbitter is my major effort at imagining in language or with language as a kind of perception. Our intuitions are immensely valuable, when we can catch hold of them; for the writer, the process of imagining and articulating is a kind of method of deepening our perceptiveness and our intuitions. My books of poems, also, are a necessary—for me—practice of the art of writing.
William Goyen’s The House of Breath—a relatively short, lyric, novel—is a unique creation.
Set in the early 20th century in small-town Texas, it portrays a family of misfits and an almost supernatural world in which a deep well and a river narrate two of the chapters, while other chapters are told in a different voice.
In the family, each of its four wayward grown children is a remarkably distinct character. They differ in their sexuality, and one of the main dramas they have in common is their feeling of wanting to leave the small town in which they were born and go out into the larger, while at the same time longing, in the larger world, for the small town again, and the original house of the family.
The narrative is told in different voices. The house, too, seems a character. I learned from this book (and from Goyen’s…
Readers can now rediscover one of William Goyen's most important works in this restoration of the original text. The House of Breath eschews traditional conventions of plot and character presentation. The book is written as an ethereal address to the people and places the narrator remembers from his childhood in a small Texas town. More than a story, it is a meditation on the nature of identity, origins, and memory.
Nothing about the art of writing is more interesting to me—as both reader and writer—than the power of language to open, or to enhance, or to teach, our perceptions about life and about living in the richest emotional and thoughtful ways possible. My own Sweetbitter is my major effort at imagining in language or with language as a kind of perception. Our intuitions are immensely valuable, when we can catch hold of them; for the writer, the process of imagining and articulating is a kind of method of deepening our perceptiveness and our intuitions. My books of poems, also, are a necessary—for me—practice of the art of writing.
This massive novel consists of several novellas in which some of the same characters appear.
Each major character is given a novella, and the characters interact among each other in different ways. But the great thing about this novel—which was the first of White’s books that I read (and then I read all the others!)—is that White has an unusual, a surprising, a somehow oblique angle, on human beings and their actions and feelings and fates, that is brought so vividly to life by his stylistic genius.
Some of his long sentences are almost like compositions that could stand alone. He sees so much in people, he delves so deeply into what they themselves don’t even realize they are thinking or feeling or deciding to do. I feel, when reading White, that I am standing behind him and he’s showing me how to understand other human beings. How to perceive…
Through the crumbling ruins of the once splendid Xanadu, Miss Hare wanders, half-mad. In the wilderness she stumbles upon an Aborigine artist and a Jewish refugee. They place themselves in the care of a local washerwoman. In a world of pervasive evil, all four have been independently damaged and discarded. Now in one shared vision they find themselves bound together, understanding the possibility of redemption.
As a mystery writer, I’ve always got my eye out for a great place to hide a body. I can’t help it, it’s a hazard of the job. I also love to travel, and a mix of the two has always been irresistible to me, whether I’m reading or writing. I’d say I’m not the only one who enjoys a little sightseeing with my whodunits, because my first book, Death in the Aegean, was nominated for an Agatha Best First Novel Award by the Malice Domestic community. I hope you enjoy these picks that combine some of my ideal vacation spots with entertaining whodunits.
I’ve never been to New Zealand, and this book makes me feel like I’m there with forensic odontologist Alexa Glock, who identifies bodies via dental records.
She navigates men, murder, and the ocean in this tightly woven murder mystery that’s as much about her personal life as her professional one. I learned quite a bit about sharks and whales, and bonus, this mystery includes quicksand!
A new title in the Alexa Glock Forensics Mysteries. When bodies wash up on the beach, is man or animal the culprit? It'll take everything forensic specialist Alexa Glock has to seek out the truth. Because lips may lie, but teeth never do... These thrilling New Zealand mysteries are:Perfect for Fans of Kathy Reichs and Candice FoxFor readers of forensic mysteries and international mysteriesFor lovers of police procedurals and marine scienceAt first, Alexa Glock's initial case as a traveling forensic investigator seems straightforward-her expertise in teeth helps her identify the skeletal remains of a hunter found on the remote Stewart…
Kristyn Harman is an award-winning researcher who successfully completed doctoral research investigating the circumstances in which at least ninety Australian Aboriginal men were transported as convicts within the Australian colonies following their involvement in Australia’s frontier wars. She has published extensively on historical topics, and currently lectures in History at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia. Having lived in both countries, Kristyn is fascinated by the different understandings that New Zealanders and Australians have of their nation’s respective pasts. She is particularly intrigued, if not perturbed, by the way in which most New Zealanders acknowledge their nation’s frontier wars, while many Australians choose to deny the wars fought on their country’s soil.
Just a few years after New Zealand became a British crown colony, armed conflict broke out in 1845 between representatives of the crown and local Māori. These frontier wars continued to be fought, particularly across New Zealand’s North Island, up until 1872. Understanding New Zealand in the present requires gaining an understanding of the New Zealand Wars. Vincent O’Malley’s book provides an insightful introduction to these complex conflicts. He explores in some detail what caused these conflicts, where and how the various battles that make up the wars were fought, and who might rightfully claim the various victories involved. O’Malley also usefully examines the consequences flowing from the New Zealand Wars. His book is richly illustrated with many evocative full color and black and white images depicting key participants, places, and moments in the New Zealand Wars.
The New Zealand Wars were a series of conflicts that profoundly shaped the course and direction of New Zealand history.Fought between the Crown and various groups of Māori between 1845 and 1872, the wars touched many aspects of life in nineteenth-century New Zealand, even in those regions spared actual fighting. Physical remnants or reminders from these conflicts and their aftermath can be found all over the country, whether in central Auckland, Wellington, Dunedin, or in more rural locations such as Te Pōrere or Te Awamutu.Following on from the best-selling The Great War for New Zealand, Vincent O'Malley's new book provides…
I am the author of three novels that all explore contemporary notions of fidentity. In 2016 I received a scholarship to travel from New Zealand to Berlin for three months and fell in love with the city. I ended up staying there for nearly four years, until the pandemic started. As a writer I liked the way that being detached from your regular life, and living in a country where you are unfamiliar with the language and the rules, makes you alert to the quirks. It helps you to gain a fresh perspective about the place that you came from, and also the place that you are in.
For me, Catherine Lacey’s debut novel Nobody Is Ever Missing is a kind of reverse exploration of foreignness.
Elyria escapes from a comfortable New York life to New Zealand, where she backpacks down to the South Island towards a half-hearted invitation to stay from a poet she once met. Interesting to see your own country through the eyes of another writer as she observes “a boring little mountain, a plain blue lake, a gas station, the same as ours only slightly not” while she searches for a “small and manageable life”.
As she outwardly drifts through the landscape she also takes us on a very inward journey, interrogating her own thoughts about her adopted sister’s suicide, the mutual grief that drew her to her husband, and her mother’s drinking.
In the spirit of Haruki Murakami and Amelia Gray, Catherine Lacey's Nobody Is Ever Missing is full of mordant humor and uncanny insights, as Elyria waffles between obsession and numbness in the face of love, loss, danger, and self-knowledge.
Without telling her family, Elyria takes a one-way flight to New Zealand, abruptly leaving her stable but unfulfilling life in Manhattan. As her husband scrambles to figure out what happened to her, Elyria hurtles into the unknown, testing fate by hitchhiking, tacitly being swept into the lives of strangers, and sleeping in fields, forests, and public parks.
I love Aotearoa New Zealand books! Our writers are brave, feisty, original - and living in ‘the land of the long white cloud’ at the bottom of the globe gives us a unique take on the world that permeates through everything we write. But we struggle to get our voices heard internationally, so far from the rest of you! This is your chance to push out your boundaries and explore stories that derive from a culture very different from your own, while sharing the same human emotions that bring us all together. As one of these writers, I challenge you to check us out – you won’t be disappointed!
This gripping psychological thriller centers around a girl who is caught up in a religious cult, her name changed and all her supports ripped away. How will she survive this? Will she be able to escape? Still in print after 20 years, this book won the Storylines Gaelyn Gordon Award for a Much-loved Book 2009.
A classic bestseller that's been in print for over 20 years, this gripping YA thriller follows a teenage girl caught in a religious cult.
Imagine that your mother tells you she's going away. She is going to leave you with relatives you've never heard of - and they are members of a strict religious cult. Your name is changed, and you are forced to follow the severe set of social standards set by the cult. There is no television, no radio, no newspaper. No mirrors. You must wear long, modest clothes. You don't know where your mother is, and you…
As a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand, I’ve always been interested in social justice and human rights, and my own writing explores such issues, including who holds the power and who exerts the control. By writing about real-world issues in a speculative future, it allows us to peel back the layers of conditioning and look at ourselves and our actions through the eyes of an outsider – which forces us to examine our best and worst human traits. I love the way speculative fiction can do this, and I love that it challenges us to do better.
Described as an ‘alternate history coming-of-age YA’, Ursa packs a real punch. Set in a world deeply divided into those who can live freely and those denied all human rights, it shows what happens when the desire for freedom in those oppressed ignites into a revolution. Brutal and unflinching, with important things to say about fascism and xenophobia, you won’t be able to stop reading!
I love Aotearoa New Zealand books! Our writers are brave, feisty, original - and living in ‘the land of the long white cloud’ at the bottom of the globe gives us a unique take on the world that permeates through everything we write. But we struggle to get our voices heard internationally, so far from the rest of you! This is your chance to push out your boundaries and explore stories that derive from a culture very different from your own, while sharing the same human emotions that bring us all together. As one of these writers, I challenge you to check us out – you won’t be disappointed!
A writer of predominantly fantasy and historical fiction, Sheryl Jordan’s books have heart and soul. The Raging Quiet, a fantasy novel, introduces us to outsider Marnie, a young widow living in an isolated medieval community. Her only friends are a priest and a weird, "mad" youth called Raven, who she realizes is not mad at all, but deaf. When she teaches him "hand words" they are both suspected of witchcraft and find themselves under attack. It’s a book that pierces your heart and stays with you for a long time afterward.
OUTSIDERS Widowed just two days after her unwilling marriage to a man twice her age, Marnie finds herself an outsider in the remote seaside village of Torcurra. Spurned by the townsfolk who suspect her involvement in her husband's death, she has only two friends: the local priest and the madman known as Raver, even more of an outcast than Marnie herself. Marnie makes a remarkable discovers about Raver, whom she renames Raven, and the two forge a deep bond that begins to heal her own bruised heart. But the suspicious villagers see Raven's transformation as evidence of witchcraft, and suddenly…
