Suggested Reading

Another Country, James Baldwin. I was an alienated kid in high school when I discovered Baldwin’s novel. Here were people who grappled with each other and asked the same questions I was asking and cared about much that mattered to me. I suddenly felt I’d found my community.

Stories of Grace Paley. Here, too, the shock of recognition. Growing up in NYC, I was surrounded by ordinary people – not the glamour and not the grit. The images of Manhattan in books and on the screen didn’t have much to do with the world I knew. But then along came Grace Paley—intimate, ironic, conversational. Though politics rarely takes centerstage in her stories, political commitments and beliefs are always part of the cultural medium through which her characters move, as taken for granted as the air.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez. Actually, let me back up and cite El Señor Presidente by Miguel Angel Asturias, the first Latin American novel I ever read and one that in its gorgeous language and searing social commentary first got me interested in exploring the politics and culture of that part of the world. I was hooked. From García Márquez I learned (or tried to) how to present any content in a matter-of-fact way. Juan Rulfo’s short stories in El llano en llamas (The Burning Plain) blew me away–and I cite the title in Spanish because I was so taken with the dialogue in Mexican Spanish rather than more regularized language. It reinforced my love of the conversational and vernacular. More recently, I’ve been intrigued by the chillingly cheerful nihilism of Colombian author, Fernando Vallejo, whose novel La virgen de los sicarios (Our Lady of the Assassins) was made into a darker, moodier, devastating film by Barbet Schroeder.

Though I’m drawn to conversational speech, I plunge into and learn from the highly charged and poetic language of Sharon Sheehe Stark (especially the novel A Wrestling Season, which I fear is very unjustly out-of-print), the hallucinatory excesses of Kate Braverman in Squandering the Blue, and the sinous romantic time-traveling sentences of Sunetra Gupta in Memories of Rain.

For their uncensored and uninhibited voices, I salute Frederick Exley (especially Pages from a Cold Island) and Alicia Erian (especially The Brutal Language of Love).

As for recent works that have moved me and that work with some of the same themes that obsess me, Robert Newman’s The Fountain at the Center of the World manages to pack a detailed critique of globalization into a consistently entertaining thriller of a novel. Luis Alberto Urrea draws on his talents as a poet and novelist to powerful effect in The Devil’s Highway: A True Story, about Mexican border-crossing migrants and the Arizona desert in which 14 of them died. Tram Nguyen’s We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities after 9/11 tore me up with true accounts of of immigrants in detention or threatened with deportation.

Finally, three of my favorite books about other-than-human animals that help dispel their Otherness and blur the imposed boundaries between Us and Them:
Next of Kin: My Conversations with Chimpanzees by Roger Fouts
Visions of Caliban: Of Chimpanzees and People by Dale Peterson and Jane Goodall
Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson.