The most recommended avant garde books

Who picked these books? Meet our 24 experts.

24 authors created a book list connected to avant garde, and here are their favorite avant garde books.
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Book cover of Derek Jarman's Garden

Marta McDowell Author Of Unearthing the Secret Garden: The Plants and Places That Inspired Frances Hodgson Burnett

From my list on the English love of gardening.

Why am I passionate about this?

My husband sums up my biography as ā€œI am, therefore I dig.ā€ I live, garden, read and write in Chatham, New Jersey, and have had a long, open love affair with the gardening style ā€œacross the pond.ā€ At the New York Botanical Garden I teach English garden history, and Iā€™m a regular contributor to the British gardening journal, Hortus. In my writing, I follow the relationship between the pen and the trowel, that is authors and their gardens. Iā€™ve written books about childrenā€™s authors Beatrix Potter and Frances Hodgson Burnett, and, as you might imagine, the research trips to the UK were a special bonus.

Marta's book list on the English love of gardening

Marta McDowell Why did Marta love this book?

Derek Jarmon was a British avant-garde filmmaker, theater designer, and life-long gardener. In the last decade of his life, he built a new garden at a tiny house by the sea in Kent. Prospect Cottage sits on the shingle expanse overlooking the Dungeness Nuclear Power Station and the English Channel. It was an accidental garden, this arrangement of rocks and driftwood, flowers, and found objects. The book sings. Jarmonā€™s musings and poems wind through a small volume of 140 pages; there are 150 photographs. It is a book about why we garden, how to live, and how to die.

By Derek Jarman, Howard Sooley (photographer),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Derek Jarman's Garden as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'Paradise haunts gardens', writes Derek Jarman, 'and it haunts mine.' Jarman's public image is that of a film-maker of genius, whose work, dwelling on themes of sexuality and violence, became a byword for controversy. But the private man was the creator of his own garden-paradise in an environment that many might think was more of a hell than a heaven - in the flat, bleak, often desolate expanse of shingle that faces the Dungeness nuclear power station. Jarman, a passionate gardener from childhood, combined his painter's eye, his horticultural expertise and his ecological convictions to produce a landscape which combinedā€¦


Book cover of Derek Jarman's Garden

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