Here are 100 books that The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth fans have personally recommended if you like
The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth.
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I’m a writer and professor of literary studies whose work has been deeply involved in topics of truth, realism, and public policy. My recent book considers works of fiction that openly and honestly experiment with questions of uncertainty, identity, and risk in the supermodern present. This book draws from disciplinary discourses in law, finance, and economics, which similarly contend with competing claims to truth and value and dive deep into the circumstantial and speculative games that authors play when they write fiction about reality. I have my PhD in Spanish Literature (UVA), M.A. in International Affairs and Economics (Johns Hopkins Univ.), and a B.A. from Harvard University.
This book makes American history relevant, alive, and urgent.
This is not a book to read in one sitting–but to enjoy in segments. I felt so much smarter and prepared to understand our current challenges to truth and trust after reading this book.
At this critical juncture in our democracy, this book will illuminate, enlighten, and inform!
The American experiment rests on three ideas-"these truths", Jefferson called them-political equality, natural rights and the sovereignty of the people. And it rests, too, "on a dedication to inquiry, fearless and unflinching", writes Jill Lepore in a ground-breaking investigation into the American past that places truth at the centre of the nation's history.
Telling the story of America, beginning in 1492, These Truths asks whether the course of events has proven the nation's founding truths or belied them. Finding meaning in contradiction, Lepore weaves American history into a tapestry of faith and hope, of peril and prosperity, of technological progress…
I’m an OB/GYN, passionate about adventuring beyond what’s expected. This has led me to pivot multiple times in my career, now focusing on writing. I’ve written a play, The Post-Roe Monologues, to elevate women’s stories. I cherish the curiosity that drives outer and inner exploration, and I love memoirs that skillfully weave the two. The books on this list feature extraordinary women who took risks, left comfort and safety, and battled vulnerability to step into the unknown. These authors moved beyond the stories they’d believed about themselves–or that others told about them. They invite you to think about living fuller and bigger lives.
This ode to losing yourself grabbed me by the hand and never let me go. I loved being invited into Solnit’s universe, which is so original and contemplative.
Her meandering associations about wandering and the importance of embracing the unknown are themes at the heart of what drives my passion for adventure and for pivoting to try new things. In this philosophical book of essays, Solnit explores why ramblings of the body incite musings of thought as she traverses landscape and life.
In this investigation into loss, losing and being lost, Rebecca Solnit explores the challenges of living with uncertainty. A Field Guide to Getting Lost takes in subjects as eclectic as memory and mapmaking, Hitchcock movies and Renaissance painting.
Beautifully written, this book combines memoir, history and philosophy, shedding glittering new light on the way we live now.
I’m a writer and professor of literary studies whose work has been deeply involved in topics of truth, realism, and public policy. My recent book considers works of fiction that openly and honestly experiment with questions of uncertainty, identity, and risk in the supermodern present. This book draws from disciplinary discourses in law, finance, and economics, which similarly contend with competing claims to truth and value and dive deep into the circumstantial and speculative games that authors play when they write fiction about reality. I have my PhD in Spanish Literature (UVA), M.A. in International Affairs and Economics (Johns Hopkins Univ.), and a B.A. from Harvard University.
I found this book so smart in the way that it examines and questions how we have made many parts of our worlds into winner-take-all competitions or “games.” I thought Jagoda did a great job making me think about “gamified” realities that simulate real-world situations and how we virtually experiment through gameplay.
I was also drawn to the idea that games could “safely” let us play out real-world scenarios, imagining and testing out new ways of trying out alternative futures without the risks of playing those for real.
At the same time, I am reminded that however simulatively real the game feels, the consequences are not similarly real. Win or lose, we can always “end” the game, reboot, and start again–not necessarily so in real life.
I’m a writer and professor of literary studies whose work has been deeply involved in topics of truth, realism, and public policy. My recent book considers works of fiction that openly and honestly experiment with questions of uncertainty, identity, and risk in the supermodern present. This book draws from disciplinary discourses in law, finance, and economics, which similarly contend with competing claims to truth and value and dive deep into the circumstantial and speculative games that authors play when they write fiction about reality. I have my PhD in Spanish Literature (UVA), M.A. in International Affairs and Economics (Johns Hopkins Univ.), and a B.A. from Harvard University.
I found incredibly compelling the argument of how important humility and the willingness to admit what we don’t know are to democratic, liberal thought.
That we have become a society that rarely listens to ideas that challenge our own or that disrupt what we think we know to be true–is hugely dangerous.
As Lynch explores, more information has not led to greater certainty or confidence in the answers we find. What we are experiencing is not only a crisis of truth, but one of trust.
Taking stock of our fragmented political landscape, Michael Patrick Lynch delivers a trenchant philosophical take on digital culture and its tendency to make us into dogmatic know-it-alls. The internet-where most shared news stories are not even read by the person posting them-has contributed to the rampant spread of "intellectual arrogance." In this culture, we have come to think that we have nothing to learn from one another; we are rewarded for emotional outrage over reflective thought; and we glorify a defensive rejection of those different from us.
Interweaving the works of classic philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Bertrand Russell…
I’m a historian of Southern Africa who is fascinated by questions of visibility and invisibility. I love probing beneath the surface of the past. For example, why is thisperson famous and renowned, butthatperson isn’t? To me, recognition and reputation are interesting to scrutinize as social categories in their own right, rather than as factual statements. I’ve written two books focusing on the history of religious expression in Southern Africa, and my most recent book is a biography of the forgotten South African writer and politician Regina Gelana Twala.
This anthology of African women writers has been my personal lodestar in writing about Regina Twala, a forgotten African writer.
Busby (a pioneering editor and publisher of Ghanaian heritage) was one of the first to recognize that the canon of African writers was much bigger than famous men like Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.
Her work taught me about a longstanding rich female literary tradition on the African continent – some of her earliest examples of women writers date to Ancient Egypt!
Busby recognizes that we can’t always look to the written page for evidence of this, given that many women writers were denied opportunities to publish their work.
So she broadens the focus of her anthology by paying attention to both “wordsandwriting,” thinking about female writers of novels, poetry, plays, non-fiction, and journalism.
Three decades after her pioneering anthology, Daughters of Africa, Margaret Busby curates an extraordinary collection of contemporary writing by 200 women writers of African descent, including Zadie Smith, Bernardine Evaristo and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
A glorious portrayal of the richness and range of African women's voices, this major international book brings together their achievements across a wealth of genres. From Antigua to Zimbabwe and Angola to the USA, overlooked artists of the past join key figures, popular contemporaries and emerging writers in paying tribute to the heritage that unites them, the strong links that endure from generation to generation, and…
As Iago says in Shakespeare’s Othello, “I am nothing if not critical,” and regardless of what he meant, it applies to me - my intelligence works best at scrutinizing things for their significance. I studied science, worked in the financial sector, read fiction, watched cinema, and developed a sense of the interconnectedness of things. If the connections existed, I thought, there could be no one way of approaching anything; all intellectual paths were valid and the only criterion of value was that it must be intelligent. My book tries to stick to this since a writer may hold any opinions, but he or she must show intelligence.
This is the work of a cultural sage with deep wisdom to offer on how political issues affect culture, especially literature.
It illuminated to me how significant cultural artifacts of high modernity like the short story as a phenomenon, the work of Charles Baudelaire in relation to the city, the plays of Bertolt Brecht, and the stories of Franz Kafka - that I had once been uncomfortable with because of their density - mattered and needed to be engaged with to make sense of the intellectual currents of the age.
To take my place among a culturally aware Benjamin is a writer I could not sidestep.
Essays and reflections from one of the twentieth century’s most original cultural critics, with an introduction by Hannah Arendt.
Walter Benjamin was an icon of criticism, renowned for his insight on art, literature, and philosophy. This volume includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and Brecht’s epic theater. Illuminations also includes his penetrating study “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” an enlightening discussion of translation as a literary mode; and his theses on the philosophy of history.
Women’s fiction is about relationships and issues that women deal with daily. I wish I could write thrillers or fantasy—those are so much fun to read, but I’m most fascinated by people and the life-changing choices they make. Being the daughter of immigrants has made me obsessed with two things, one is identity and the second is success. My books touch on the discovery of self and how that leads to success. And if we're honest, our relationships with our parents have a massive effect on who we become and our beliefs. I’ve explored parent/child relationships in all my novels, but most intimately in Let Us Begin which is based on my father’s life.
This is a fascinating historical novel about Thomas Jefferson’s oldest daughter, Patsy Jefferson. Aside from learning much more about history than I ever did in high school or college, I enjoyed reading about the relationship that she had with her father.
It’s difficult, I think, to have a relationship with a man like Jefferson who was devoted to his ideals and dreams first and to his family second. He had goals that were so immense that there was no competing with them. And yet, Patsy is completely devoted to her father and his goals. It’s a story about loving an imperfect man and making sacrifices.
It gave me a different perspective on a historical figure, but it also made me think about my own relationship with my father because I could relate to coming second or third in the life of a father you love. I know what it’s like…
In a compelling, richly researched novel that draws from thousands of letters and original sources, bestselling authors Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie tell the fascinating, untold story of Thomas Jefferson's eldest daughter, Martha "Patsy" Jefferson Randolph--a woman who kept the secrets of our most enigmatic founding father and shaped an American legacy.
From her earliest days, Patsy Jefferson knows that though her father loves his family dearly, his devotion to his country runs deeper still. As Thomas Jefferson's oldest daughter, she becomes his helpmate, protector, and constant companion in the wake of…
I'm a medievalist with a focus on German and European literature. Already with my Ph.D. diss. in 1987, I endeavored to explore interdisciplinary, interlingual connections (German-Italian), and much of my subsequent work (119 scholarly books so far) has continued with this focus. I have developed a large profile of studies on cultural, literary, social, religious, and economic aspects of the pre-modern era. In the last two decades or so, I have researched many concepts pertaining to the history of mentality, emotions, everyday-life conditions, and now also on transcultural and global aspects before 1800. Numerous books and articles have dealt with gender issues, communication, and historical and social conditions as expressed in literature.
Auerbach wrote this book while he lived in exile in Istanbul, having fled from the Nazis. This forced him to turn his attention very closely to the original texts, classical in their reputation from the ancient through the medieval, and the early modern period. He demonstrated brilliantly the true value of thorough philological work and the great yield of close reading, profiling all of pre-modern European literature in a unique fashion. This book lives on until today.
More than half a century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis remains a masterpiece of literary criticism. A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. This new expanded edition includes a substantial essay in introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay, never before translated into English, in which Auerbach responds to his critics. A German Jew, Auerbach was forced out of his professorship at the University of Marburg in 1935. He left for Turkey,…
I’ve always seen myself as the kind of person that could tolerate any painful reality. My life has led me in directions that required me to delve deep into the difficult aspects to find some light at the end of the tunnel. Growing up in Texas, I’ve found that being tough is a prescription given to every child. The elements and culture were always difficult, and the realities of loss, drug addiction, and an exhaustive worker culture were a constant that required reinforcement or abandonment. The books I’ve read and written are a product of that environment and its necessities.
I wasn’t in a good mental state when I read this book, so the impact was deeply felt.
The book lines out in explicit detail how human consciousness was an accident of nature designed to make us miserable. I’ve grown to feel this worldview is deeply cynical, yet when I look back on it, I remember the moments where Thomas Ligotti punctuated himself with drab humor as the highlight.
A reader could come away feeling like this book provides small light in deep darkness. The blunt dissociative experience makes any writer shudder at doing this to an audience.
In Thomas Ligotti's first nonfiction outing, an examination of the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life through an insightful, unsparing argument that proves the greatest horrors are not the products of our imagination but instead are found in reality.
"There is a signature motif discernible in both works of philosophical pessimism and supernatural horror. It may be stated thus: Behind the scenes of life lurks something pernicious that makes a nightmare of our world."
His fiction is known to be some of the most terrifying in the genre of supernatural horror, but Thomas Ligotti's first nonfiction book may be even scarier.…
I am a chameleon scholar. Though my first love is poetry, I have written about all the arts, about 18th-century authors (especially Samuel Johnson), about theories of literature and literary vocations, about Sappho and other abandoned women, about ancients and moderns and chess and marginal glosses and the meaning of life and, most recently, the Scientific Revolution. But I am a teacher too, and The Ordering of the Arts grew out of my fascination with those writers who first taught readers what to look for in painting, music and poetry—what works were best, what works could change their lives. That project has inspired my own life and all my writing.
This classic study introduced me and the whole world of critics and scholars to theoretical perspectives that still resonate among historians of literature and culture.
It defines a momentous change: the shift from views of art as a mirror—a reflection of things as they are—to a lamp—a radiant projection from the hearts and minds of its creators. This revolution in aesthetic principles, formulated by German and British theorists, also resulted in new ways of looking at nature and in new kinds of poetry.
Abrams charts the depths of Romantic theory; and his work helped spur a revival of interest in the Romantics—now often cherished as the first modern poets.
