The most recommended modernism books

This is the best account I know of the double bind that artists subjected to settler forms of colonialism have had to endure. Taking Nigerian modern art as his case study, this eminent Africanist art historian shows how, on the one hand, colonial officials attempted to abolish the indigenous artistic heritage as "savage," or "primitive," while simultaneously blocking African artists from a European art education. To become modern required a negotiation between these dual limitations and ended up producing something very different from Western modernism.

This beautiful tome, with endless photos, takes a tour of Paris through the années folles, from the end of the Great War in 1919 to the start of World War Two in 1939. Many histories of Paris in this period focus solely on the culture – understandable, as this outpouring of modernism was world-shaking. This book includes history, politics, law, Parisian café life, sex workers, immigration, and more. My copy is full of so many notes that I had to buy a second copy. Here I found the underground gay scene and the effect of the war on the working class. Schiaparelli’s surreal hats sat along an overview of soup kitchens during the Depression. The book shows Paris as it was lived in those years, and mostly through visual material, giving the impression that you could book a ticket and visit.

The first collection by former Poet Laureate Ted Hughes includes one of the most stunning poems about the connection between poet, pen, and nature in the form of "The Thought-Fox." Hughes has a pared back, often disturbing vision of the world that seizes your attention. If you like this don’t stop, there are plenty of other wonderful books by Hughes, especially his retelling of the "Tales from Ovid" and "The Birthday Letters," his poems about his relationship with his first wife, the equally brilliant Sylvia Plath.

When researching historical fiction, one often falls down many rabbit holes. One such gap led me to China, where printing technology was in use 150 years before Gutenberg was born.

These short stories, woven from the tapestry of ancient Eastern folklore, offer both entertainment and profound insights. They not only provide a rich education in Eastern literature, but they also highlight the timeless truth that humanity's essence remains constant, whether in the East or West, regardless of era.

People's daily lives are fraught with mysteries and uncertainties that transcend geographical boundaries. While the distinct Eastern cultural prism through which these shared human experiences are filtered, provides a beguiling and enthralling perspective.

This anthology is a must-read for anyone interested in Asian short stories.

I keep returning to this collection of essays because of the elegantly stark prose style and Berger’s willingness to go against popular opinion. Who else would choose to place modernist titans like Jackson Pollock, Naum Gabo, and Paul Klee in a chapter entitled “Artists defeated by the difficulties”?

My reason for including Permanent Red here is the first chapter, “To Be an Artist,” in which Berger asks the reader to imagine lying beneath a tree on a summer day. Describing the geometry of the leaves and branches and the play of form and space, he reflects on what it means to see the world as an artist. For me, it’s the most lyrical evocation of looking as a creative act. 

In Portrait of a Marriage, Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw beautifully brings John Steinbeck’s first wife Carol into the spotlight. The impeccably researched narrative lays out the path of a ten-year marriage doomed to fail, even as Carol shapes John into one of America’s great writers. I couldn’t put it down. 

I love the humor, self-confidence, and acerbic wit of Margaret Anderson–a woman known by few, but those who know her love her.

Writing in her thirties she looks back with a keen eye for the geniuses of modernism–Joyce, Eliot, Pound, etc. She also, with her lover Jane Heap, published early feminist and LGBTQ content. And she is funny. An iconoclast from Day 1.

Impulse and happenstance set the syllabus of my reading, and so it was that, shortly after reading Lydia Davis’s Madame Bovary, I chanced to see a notice for her rendering into English, from the Dutch, a selection of the very short stories written by the late A. L. Snijders. He wrote plainly, eschewing elegance and complications of form and syntax in favor of simple sentences that laid out, in workmanlike prose, his casual, wry observations of, and on, his fellow Dutchmen, Dutch women, and also Dutch animals, of whom he was fond. Here is no Modernist heroic ambition, no Postmodernist archness, no posturing, or overbearing intellectual or moral superiority. He wrote thousands of his peculiar miniatures, we are told by Davis in her foreword on the writer and on the problems of translation in general.

Those she chose for Night Train rise above anecdote or sketch, despite their Dutch… show more.

I love Akhmatova for her talent and her immense courage. Considered to be the ‘Soul of the Silver Age,’ the greatest modernist Russian woman poet, Akhmatova was a brilliant master of conveying raw emotion in her portrayals of everyday situations. She began to write poetry at age eleven and was first published in her late teens. Her father considered this to be an unsuitable and even shameful occupation and forbade her to write using the family name so she chose the surname of her great-grandmother, Akhmatova. Her works range from short lyric love poetry to longer, more complex poems, such as Requiem, a tragic depiction of the Stalinist terror, and written as a testament to the hardship and suffering of the people during this time, particularly women whose husbands and sons were imprisoned and executed. 

This book is beautiful even as its subject is ugly: how the shock of the Great War led inexorably in Germany to the rise of Hitler.

I loved the aesthetics of this book. Eksteins begins by transporting us back to Paris, sitting us in the audience on opening night in May 1913 for Stravinsky's ballet The Rites of Spring, which caused mayhem because of the wild dance techniques and jarring music. Eksteins then takes us on a journey through the culture of Weimar Germany as Berlin seized the title of Europe's cultural capital from Paris.

I was enraptured by the dizzying esthetics of modernism, dada, surrealism, and other, punctuated bursts of artistic trends, both celebrated and opposed, in a right-wing backlash that had real-world consequences. Ekstein's thesis convinced me counter-intuitively that Hitler and Nazism were connected in the irrational conglomeration of birth and destruction, first introduced by Stravinsky.

This book… show more.