This is a very inexhaustive list, in no particular order, of some things I love and would recommend to
most people.
Books
- Grief Is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter
- New People by Danzy Senna
- Attrib. & Other Stories by Eley Williams
- The Tidal Zone by Sarah Moss
- Fünftausend Kilometer in der Sekunde by Manuele Fior (translated by Maya della Pietra, originally Cinquemilla chilometri al secondo)
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
- A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam
- Milkman by Anna Burns
- The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Normal People by Sally Rooney
- Sabrina by Nick Drnaso
- Electric Arches by Eve Ewing
- Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
- Essayism by Brian Dillon
Poems
-
“Confession”
by Leila Chatti
-
“In Defense of ‘Moist’”
by Hanif Abdurraqib
-
“Windchime”
by Tony Hoagland
-
“Snow”
by Louis MacNiece
-
“Object Permanence”
by Nicole Sealey
-
“We Lived Happily During the War”
by Ilya Kaminsky
-
“Those Winter Sundays”
by Robert Hayden
-
“The New York Times reports that 200 Iraqi
civilians have been killed by U.S. military airstrikes”
by Clint Smith III
-
[Again and again, even though we know love’s landscape]
by Rainer Maria Rilke
-
“Eurydice”
by Ocean Vuong
-
“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”
by William Carlos Williams
-
“Daedalus, After Icarus”
by Saeed Jones
- “Alicante” by Jacques Prévert
-
[If thou must love me]
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (and Jack Underwood’s response from
Solo for Mascha Voice/Tenuous Rooms, “If you agree to love
me it has to be solely”)
-
“Dinosaurs in the Hood”
by Danez Smith
-
“The Gaffe”
by C. K. Williams
-
"Sound & Fury" by Claudia Rankine
-
“The Opposites Game”
by Brendan Constantine
-
“Today I Bought a Book for You” by Clint Smith III (from
Counting Descent)
- “Australia” by Ania Walwicz
-
“(Hospital Vespers)”
by The Weakerthans reads as an incredible sonnet
-
“The Summer Day the Spike Went into My” by Kathryn Maris
(from The House with Only an Attic and a Basement)
- any Frank O'Hara poem in which the "I" is in love, probably
-
Every section of Grief Is the Thing With Feathers by Max
Porter, if you’d like to think about it that way, but especially [My
brother and I discovered a guppy fish…/We found a fish in a
pool…], [We will never fight again…], [Yes? she
said…], [By the side of the road…],
[Once upon a time there were two big men…], [Try to
consider all three…], [This one is true:…], [We
collected the postman’s dropped elastic bands…], [‘I’ll tell
you this for free,’ said Crow…],
[Once upon a time our Dad took the bus to Oxford…](!!!),
[We seem to take it in ten-year turns…], and
[Permission to leave, I’m done…]
Short Fiction
Essays