Books (2015-2025)

I hate quantitative appraisal of things that are meaningful to me, especially if they’re art. Still, here are a few published books that I like a lot.

Multiple works per author

Albert Camus

• The Myth of Sisyphus
• The Possessed (theater)
• Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (all the essays here are amazing, but if you must read one, read Reflections on the Guillotine)
• Neither Victims nor Executioners

Roland Barthes

• The Pleasure of the Text
• Camera Lucida
• Mourning Diary (one of my favorites, perhaps because it’s so different from everything else on this list.)
• Empire of Signs
• The Responsibility of Forms
• What is Sport? (And although I’m cheating my self-imposed rule of only published ISBN’d books on this, I recommend the fiction series 17776 as a companion.)
• Mythologies

Emil Cioran

• The Temptation to Exist
• The Fall into Time
• The Trouble with Being Born
• The Twilight of Thought

Lesley A. Sharp

• The Sacrificed Generation: Youth, History, and the Colonized Mind in Madagascar
• Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self
• Animal Ethos: the morality of human-animal encounters in experimental lab science

James Baldwin

• Giovanni’s room
• This morning, this evening, so soon (short story)
• Notes of a Native Son (which adds like 20 essays with every new edition), and honestly, all of James Baldwin’s essay corpus is amazing. Not a single work in there that I would not recommend, and it’s a long list.

Franz Kafka

• Josephine the Singer (short story)
• The Trial
• In the Penal Colony

Fiction (prose)

• Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
• East of Eden by John Steinbeck
• Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges (and the prologues specifically for the Library of Babel, which is one of the short stories featured in Fictions, although I don’t know if that’s been translated or how widely available it is)
• How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
• The Monster Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson
• Dialogues with Leucò by Cesare Pavese
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• This is how you lose the time war by Amad El-Mothar and Max Gladstone
• When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (yes, I know. Not a word.)
• Discworld series by Terry Pratchett, but it’s massive, so here are my favorite story threads and novels within them:
  • Watch cycle (favorite installments: Men at Arms + Feet of Clay)
  • Industrial Revolution cycle (favorite installments: Monstrous Regiment + Going Postal)
  • Death cycle (favorite installments: Reaper Man + Thief of Time)

Fiction (theater)

• Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard
• Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
• Los árboles mueren de pie by Alejandro Casona
• Luces de Bohemia by Ramón María del Valle-Inclán
• Fuenteovejuna by Lope de Vega
• La casa de Bernarda Alba by Federico García Lorca
• Escuadra hacia la muerte by Alfonso Sastre
• The Flies by Jean-Paul Sartre
• No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
• Angels in America by Tony Kushner
• Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus
• Hecuba by Euripides
• Antigone by Sophocles
• Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus (kind of, you know how it is.)

These last three have translations by Anne Carson that I’m 100% supportive of. Actually, most Anne Carson translations of Greek tragedy are awesome; go check them out.

Non-fiction (prose)

• Capitalist Realism, Hauntology, and (the salvaged fragments of) Acid Communism by Mark Fisher. These go in a three-pack to me, so I’m listing them together.
• Ahí es nada by Jorge Riechmann
• ¿Vivir como buenos huérfanos? By Jorge Riechmann
• Identity and Friendship by Emilio Lledó
• Diario del cuidado de los enjambres by Antonio Orihuela
• El tamaño de mi esperanza by Jorge Luis Borges
• Hope Without Optimism by Terry Eagleton
• Minima Moralia by Theodor Adorno
• Philosophy as a Way of Life by Pierre Hadot (as a general overview to the historical overlap of ethics-as-doing with the rest of philosophical thought, but if you can use it as a foothold to his hermeneutics work, please do)
• The Idea of the Holy by Rudolf Otto
• The Bonobo and the Atheist by Frans de Waal
• Can the subaltern speak? by Gayatri Spivak
• Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings by James Elkins
• La resistencia by Ernesto Sabato
• The Dialogic Imagination by Mikhail Bakhtin
• The Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway
• Epistemic Injustice by Miranda Fricker
• Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

Non-fiction (poetry)

• Grafitis para neandertales by Jorge Riechmann
• Crush by Richard Siken
• La luz impronunciable by Ernesto Kavi
• How We Became Human by Joy Harjo
• The Good Thief by Mary Howe
• Eyes to See Otherwise by Homero Aridjis
• Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong
• I wrote this for you (series) by Iain Thomas (it’s a combination of poetry and photography and greatly benefits from a physical format).