100 books like Uncivil Rites

Mahmoud Darwish is without a doubt the national Palestinian poet, who expresses the experience of millions of Palestinians across generations.

Whether he is writing about exile, love, or death, his poetic voice reverberates simultaneously in the soul, the intellect, and the body. Darwish speaks with the intimacy of someone who is not afraid to be vulnerable and the authority of a poet who believes that poetry can change the world.

This collection gathers together the best translations of his poems by American poet Carolyn Forché working in collaboration with Munir Akash, and includes commentary by the important Arabic writers Sinan Antoon, Fady Joudah, and Amira El-Zein.

There is no better place to start learning about Palestine than with the stories of Ghassan Kanafani, a writer and militant activist who was assassinated by Mossad, the Israeli Secret Service, in 1972.

Kanafani combined activism with a powerful ability to recreate the Palestinian experience of displacement and forced migration. In one of his most moving and disturbing stories, Men in the Sun, Kanafani tells of three Palestinian migrant workers who travel from the refugee camps of Iraq to Kuwait in the hopes of finding work.

The story was made into a film called The Dupes by Egyptian director Tawfiq Saleh in 1973.

Raja Shehadeh is the author of many important books on Palestine.

He has a unique ability to interweave the personal into the political in his writing. That talent shines through in this recent book, a memoir about his relationship to his father, an influential attorney and defender of Palestinian rights who was murdered outside his home in Ramallah in 1985. In telling the story of this relationship, which was marked by mutual misunderstanding and unarticulated love, Shehadeh also tells a story about the history of the Palestine people.

He shows how the conflicts and displacements inflicted on Palestinians have torn apart millions of lives and destroyed the human connections that many of us take for granted.

Mohammed El-Kurd is arguably the most militant voice in Palestinian literature since Ghassan Kanafani. Born in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, even as a young boy, he began speaking out against the settlers who were occupying his home.

Rifqa is his debut poetry collection. Named for his grandmother, the poems in this work combine oral history with powerful political verse. Despite his youth, Kurd speaks as a poet who has already developed a strong literary voice. Having witnessed the brutality of occupation and lived to tell the story.

Since 2021, El-Kurd has been the Palestine correspondent for The Nation, and in this role has brought a Palestinian perspective to the media coverage that tends to silence Palestinian voices.

I found this book to be one of the best introductions to the endless dilemmas surrounding free speech. In the first half of the twentieth century, anxieties about free speech in the United States were triggered mostly on the left, with government attempts to stifle socialists and communists culminating in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts, damaging and even destroying thousands of lives and careers.

Philippa Strum shows how, after the 1950s, this completely changed. The government’s increasing focus on far-right speech became an issue of burning importance when residents of a small Illinois town, home to Holocaust survivors, tried to block a Nazi march–and the courts said “No” in the name of free speech.

LaPier and Beck’s book is the perfect backstory to Van Alst’s.

Chicago, built on the lands of the Three Fires Council, has a long history as an Indigenous metropolis, from activism around the famous 1893 World’s Fair to the building of urban Indian organizations. The authors show how Indigenous people are everywhere in the archives. 

Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb set out to commit the perfect crime and ended up in newspapers as the perpetrators of “the crime of the century.” They kidnapped and murdered a teenage boy in Chicago in 1924, but both Leopold and Loeb were still considered boys themselves at the time. Clarence Darrow defended them at trial, arguing that they were guilty but that the situation had extenuating circumstances. Baatz’s book explores how two college students from good families ended up in prison for murder. Leopold’s family even came from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, near where I currently live, so even though the case is almost 100 years old, it’s not as distant as it might seem.

I have a thing for Pinkertons. They’re so often portrayed as villains, but this one is a hero: Kate Warne, the (real-life) first female Pinkerton detective. Kate’s story is fascinating and tense, full of surprising twists—some real and some fictional. At times Girl in Disguise reads more like a spy novel than a detective story, especially when it comes to a certain real-life assassination attempt I’d never heard about, and which literally dropped my jaw. Readers interested in fascinating women largely forgotten by history will devour this one.

Oh my goodness, first of all: this book will make you so hungry. So, be prepared for that.

Taking place in a warm, intimate Filipino restaurant outside Chicago, Arsenic and Adobo forces recently dumped Lila Macapagal into action after a brutal restaurant critic (who just so happens to be her ex-boyfriend) drops dead while eating her aunt’s food.

She and Tita Rosie are the main suspects, so Lila has to put on her amateur sleuth hat and figure out what really happened to stay out of jail and save her aunt’s business. Arsenic and Adobo is funny, charming, and layered with enough sweetness and spice to keep you devouring it until the last crumb. 

This gorgeous coffee table book jam-packed with full-size photographs from every angle of the Fair. There is enough text to explain what the reader is looking at, but the glory of this volume is the photography. The map at the front is one of the best I’ve found, as well.