Here are 100 books that The World Unseen fans have personally recommended if you like
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I believe deeply that, as messy and painful as life is, there is always joy, and usually humor, to be found. The book I wrote, Leaving’s Not the Only Way to Go, pulls from some of the painful experiences I’ve had, and I often find myself following my description of the book, about two women who meet in a grief group, with “but it’s not a downer!” It’s true, because Leaving is also inspired by all the joy and connections I’ve made for myself, even in the midst of loss. I learned how to balance the two sides of life through books like the ones on this list.
I’ve singled out the story “Up and Comers,” the tale of an indie band whose members have superpowers (but only when they’re drunk) because of its bisexual narrator, but every story in this collection has similar merits: a delightfully odd premise, a grim honesty about how bad life can get, and an unrelenting humor about how ridiculous life always is in spite of the grimness.
Maybe everything is meaningless and absurd, but I’m still here, and so are you, so let’s have a good laugh at ourselves while we can!
Written with all the scathing dark humor that is a hallmark of BoJack Horseman, Raphael Bob-Waksberg delivers a fabulously off-beat collection of short stories about love—the best and worst thing in the universe.
Featuring:
• A young engaged couple forced to deal with interfering relatives dictating the appropriate number of ritual goat sacrifices for their wedding.
• A pair of lonely commuters who ride the subway in silence, forever, eternally failing to make that longed-for contact.
• A struggling employee at a theme park of U.S. presidents who discovers that love can’t be genetically modified.
I grew up in a woman-centered household, the youngest with two older sisters. I was the only child of my mother’s second marriage, and a space of ten and twelve years separated me from my sisters. My sisters and mother always felt like an intense unit that didn’t include me, and that yearning and outsider status defined my life and made me a lover of books about mothers and daughters and the female world.
This is a quirky, hilarious, autobiographical coming-of-age story about a lesbian who grows up in a repressive English Pentecostal community.
Winterson’s creation of the mother is the most unique mother I’ve ever encountered—damaged, oppressive, deeply misunderstanding of her genius daughter. I found lots of commonalities between the conflicts Jeanette had with her difficult mother and my own experience, even though we live countries apart.
Study methods Introduction to the text Summaries with critical notes Themes and techniques Textual analysis of key passages Author biography Historical and literary background Modern and historical critical approaches Chronology Glossary of literary terms
I believe deeply that, as messy and painful as life is, there is always joy, and usually humor, to be found. The book I wrote, Leaving’s Not the Only Way to Go, pulls from some of the painful experiences I’ve had, and I often find myself following my description of the book, about two women who meet in a grief group, with “but it’s not a downer!” It’s true, because Leaving is also inspired by all the joy and connections I’ve made for myself, even in the midst of loss. I learned how to balance the two sides of life through books like the ones on this list.
Fat Tuesday is the book that taught me what a lesbian was and what a joyful possibility that could be for me.
It’s about a high school senior named Rusty who decides, despite all the desperate circumstances of her life, to travel to New Orleans for Mardi Gras with her sick mother and dysfunctional friends.
Rusty and company are obsessed with soap operas as an escape from their current reality, and as their road trip proceeds, their reality becomes more and more like a soap opera plot, with all the drama, dramatic twists, and exaggerated exuberance that soap operas are known for!
What does Rusty Quinn do when her mom loses touch with reality, her best friend's dad explodes over a kiss, her other best friend gets committed to a psych ward, and the sanest person she knows is an egotistical Finnish exchange student who swears in a language nobody understands? She could write a soap opera, of course - or go to Mardi Gras. In fact, she could do both!
Funny how destiny comes down to single choices, focused moments, and split-second decisions. Can running away to Mardi Gras really change four lives forever?
I believe deeply that, as messy and painful as life is, there is always joy, and usually humor, to be found. The book I wrote, Leaving’s Not the Only Way to Go, pulls from some of the painful experiences I’ve had, and I often find myself following my description of the book, about two women who meet in a grief group, with “but it’s not a downer!” It’s true, because Leaving is also inspired by all the joy and connections I’ve made for myself, even in the midst of loss. I learned how to balance the two sides of life through books like the ones on this list.
Simply the Best is a romance set after the COVID-19 pandemic began, and it doesn’t flinch from the pain that era has inflicted on us all. Kallmaker set out to grapple with the question of how we find joy and love after experiencing such devestation, and why trying to find joy and love at all still matters.
This romance is, despite its serious circumstances, as funny and pleasurable as all Kallmaker novels are.
Simply the Worst…Alice Cabot’s only great love is science, but a lapse in judgment has exiled the New York journalist to the glitzy Gallerias and vapid bubble-babble of Beverly Hills. The assignment to do a flattering feature series on Simply the Best and the superficial nonsense it sells threatens to crush what little is left of her spirit.
Simply the Best...Pepper Addington can’t believe she’s moved up from grunt intern to personal assistant for Helene Jolie, the celebrity socialite founder of SimplytheBest.com. Succeeding at the job she worked so hard to get is her only priority. Keep a cynical know-it-all…
I come from worlds that look much like the worlds in these books: raised in poverty, absent father, generational trauma, and mental illness running strong in my genes. I’ve always been interested in the ways our opportunities shape us, and the coping mechanisms we wield—secrecy, denial, anger, violence, even love—as we try to survive.
Marais does an excellent job of moving among these three point-of-view characters: a Black woman and two white sisters, all brought together by a child and the question of parentage. At the heart of the story is life in apartheid-era South Africa. A must-read for anyone who loves messy families and complex characters.
From the author of the beloved Hum If You Don't Know the Words comes a rich, unforgettable story of three unique women in post-Apartheid South Africa who are brought together in their darkest time and discover the ways that love can transcend the strictest of boundaries.
In a squatter camp on the outskirts of Johannesburg, seventeen-year-old Zodwa lives in desperate poverty, under the shadowy threat of a civil war and a growing AIDS epidemic. Eight months pregnant, Zodwa carefully guards secrets that jeopardize her life.
Across the country, wealthy socialite Ruth appears to have everything her heart desires, but it's…
If I knew why I'm attracted to ghost stories, spooky stories; “mysteries from beyond the veil”, it wouldn't be a mystery, would it? My brother was the same. We can (or could) suddenly find the streets where we lived as mysterious as a lost world. We used to call it “The Land of Ghosts and Witches”. Did we imagine this feeling? Did we make it up? I don't know. But there is a long name for a condition, a little kink that matches my experiences. I found an article in New Scientist about it once, but I've forgotten what it was.
I find H.Rider Haggard's famous tales of adventure (e.g. King Solomon's Mines) pretty disgusting: bunch of white guys in southern Africa, where they can slaughter and loot at will, far from the constraints of “civilised” society.
But “She” is one of a kind. A perilous wilderness, where the people who put pots on the heads of strangers have a very sinister outlook on life (these are cooking pots, and this is a stranded population, desperate for protein). Their immortal goddess (originally Ancient Greek?) lives in a tomb, doesn't seem to eat or drink; talks like a spoilt, entitled Victorian debutante, and fascinates our hero.
I imagine the author, a humble civil servant when not dreaming of glorious gory derring-do, met young ladies of her kind socially, and was snubbed a few times. She pays... and I won't spoil the horror of it for you, but it's pretty bad! A guilty…
She — subtitled A History of Adventure — is a novel by H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925), first serialised in The Graphic magazine from October 1886 to January 1887. She is one of the classics of imaginative literature, and one of the best-selling books of all time, with over 100 million copies sold in 44 different languages as of 2013. She was extraordinarily popular upon its release and has never been out of print. According to literary historian Andrew M. Stauffer, "She has always been Rider Haggard's most popular and influential novel, challenged only by King Solomon's Mines in this regard".The…
Growing up in rural Wisconsin, I was crazy about both horses and books, so it’s not surprising that in grad school I became a horse historian. I found that writing about work horses linked my love of horses with my interests in technology and nature. The books I’ve chosen show how humans and horses shaped each other, society, the environment, and built the modern world. I hope readers browse (graze?) these books at their leisure and pleasure.
Swart makes a big argument: studying horses changes how we understand all history. This sweeping overview shows that “The history of horses is the history of the desire for power” whether economic, political, military, social, or cultural. The history of horses in South Africa offers an interesting comparison with both the American West and the American South in terms of frontiers, the military, race, class, and gender. Swart is a lively, funny, and entertaining writer. The fieldwork she did for this book gives the reader a visceral sense of what South Africa is like as a place. What is there not to love about a book with chapter titles like “The Reins of Power” and “The Empire Rides Back?”
0||The aim of this volume is to examine nascent movements, genre shifts, developing authors/playwrights and controversial themes as they emerged in both drama and theatre. The editors have focused on the essence of creative nexus of London from the end of the nineteenth century up to the beginning of the Great War (1914). The resultant study discusses Gordon Craig and production design, Wilde, Shaw, Synge, Pinero, Strindberg,Harley Granville Barker,Jones, Archer, Ford Madox Ford, D.H.Lawrence,Galsworthy, Sims, women playwrights, popular theatre among other topics. The work complements J.L.Styan s 3 volume Modern Drama in Theory and Practice and is more focused on…
I’m an engineer, writer, and editor. And I love short stories. I love writing them and reading them too. I’ve written for major science fiction and fantasy magazines, and my stories have even been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. But when short stories are put together in a single author collection, they can truly come alive, revealing running themes and ideas explored through the imagination of the author. My own collections Incomplete Solutions and Convergence Problems do just this – exploring potential futures for Africa. I previously shared five of the best single-author collections of African speculative fiction and now, here are five more.
The late Nick Wood, a science fiction writer, clinical psychologist, former journalist, humanitarian, and anti-apartheid activist born in Zambia and raised in South Africa, was always learning.
This is reflected in all his writing, including most of the stories in his collection. Largely science fiction stories in a variety of settings: from post-apocalyptic worlds, settled moons, and climate-changed earths, these stories are highly focused on the social and environmental aspects of humanity even in the most science fictional scenarios.
These stories, intersectional, emotionally resonant, exciting, thoughtful, and varied. Learning Monkey and Crocodile is a wonderful way to sample some of South Africa’s interesting science fiction corpus from a voice that has now left us, but which will not be forgotten.
“Nick Wood’s short stories are powerful, impassioned visions of worlds and worldviews remade by way of redemptive engagement with the spirits of the earth and the earth of the spirit. Joining ancestral wisdom and transformative technologies, combining searing self-scrutiny with joyous awareness of the Other, Learning Monkey and Crocodile is a book for Africa and for all of us.”
Nick Gevers
Nick’s stories have delighted readers across the world and have appeared in publications such as Interzone, Albedo One, Omenana, among others. His debut novel Azanian Bridges was shortlisted for the BSFA award. Embark on a journey where science meets…
For fifty years I have studied and taught the history of Africa, which makes me about the luckiest guy around. My focus has been on Southern Africa, and especially Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. Aside from the fantastic physical beauty, the region attracts because of the comparability of its history and experience with that of the United States at many points: for instance, a colonial past, systems of slavery, and fraught [to say the least] racial dynamics. I have enjoyed 23 journeys or lengthier sojourns in Southern Africa, and have taught at five universities, including North Carolina State, Duke, and the University of Zimbabwe as a Fulbright Lecturer.
Okay, he was my dissertation advisor. Sorry! But Thompson’s is a concise, perceptive, and readable one-volume history of the great country, a splendid introduction. Born and raised in South Africa, the late Thompson was a Rhodes Scholar before seeing extensive service in World War II. Like so many talented South Africans from many fields, he went into exile around 1960 when the apartheid regime moved toward a no-holds-barred stranglehold on all opposition. This was his last book, and in it he distills a lifetime of research, teaching and experience. The fourth edition has an update and new preface by Lynn Berat.
A fresh and penetrating exploration of South Africa's history, from the earliest known human inhabitation of the region to the present
"I did not think it was possible for a white person to write a history of South Africa which a black South African would find to be a fair and accurate account of a beautiful land and its people. Leonard Thompson has disabused me of that notion. His is a history that is both accurate and authentic, written in a delightful literary style."-Archbishop Desmond Tutu
The Fourth Edition of this classic text brings South Africa's history up to date…
While my childhood in a coastal community in South Africa contributed to my deep appreciation and love for nature, I was born and grew up as a person of colour in the apartheid era when barricades divided humans, the land, and the sea. I developed a profound understanding, rooted in my lived experience, of the interlinkages between justice, equity, and sustainability. I've remained actively involved and interested in developing and profiling transformative and inclusive approaches to sustainability from community to the international level. I've maintained this focus on the nexus between climate, nature, and inequality throughout my career, where I've led transformative and inclusive approaches to nature and climate policy and practice for 20+ years.
This is a foundational book if you’re interested in understanding the green economy discourse in South Africa.
It tackles the challenges facing the country in addressing poverty, inequality, and unemployment and how a green transition must deliver both social and environmental outcomes.
Contributors are drawn from leading thinkers on sustainability issues in South Africa.
The depletion of South Africa's (and in some cases the world's) natural resources and the degradation of environmental sinks (including the atmosphere, lakes and rivers, and land) are continuing at such a rate that natural resource prices are climbing and many critical ecosystem services that underpin human welfare are increasingly threatened.
The concept of the `green economy' has gained increasing traction in South African policy discourses over the past few years. However, in much of this discourse it is viewed in a piecemeal way as one part or sector of the economy (e.g. an industrial sector dealing with manufacture and…
