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Fiction (of all kinds) about poets and poetry |
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by Annabel Abbs
When Eliza Acton is told by her publisher to write a cookery book instead of the poetry she loves, she refuses--until her bankrupt father is forced to flee the country. As a woman, Eliza has few options. Although she's never set foot in a kitchen, she begins collecting recipes and teaching herself to cook. Much to her surprise she discovers a talent - and a passion - for the culinary arts.
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by Kaveh Akbar
A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.
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by Jill Bialosky
Something terrible has happened and I don't know what to do. An unnamed narrator's life is unraveling. Her only child has left home, and her twenty-year marriage is strained. Anticipation about her soon-to-be-released book of poetry looms. She seeks answers to the paradoxes of love, desire, and parenthood among the Greek and Roman gods at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As secret betrayals and deceptions come to light and rage threatens to overwhelm her, the pantheon of gods assume remarkably vivid lives of their own.
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by Belle Boggs
Marianne is in a slump: barely able to support herself by teaching, not making progress on her poetry, about to lose her Brooklyn apartment. When her novelist ex-fiancé, Eric, and his venture capitalist brother, Mark, offer her a job directing a low-residency school for Christian writers at a motel they've inherited on Florida's Gulf Coast, she can't come up with a reason to say no.
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by Roberto Bolaäno
Bolaño's boundless imagination and seemingly inexhaustible gift for shaping the chaos of his reality into enduring fiction is unmistakable in these three exhilarating novellas.
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by Miguel Bonnefoy
The house on Calle Santo Domingo in Santiago de Chile, with its lush lemon trees, has sheltered three generations of the Lonsonier family. Having arrived from the harsh hills of France’s Jura region with a single grape vine in one pocket and a handful of change in the other, the patriarch put down roots there in the late nineteenth century.
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by Amy Belding Brown
When Maggie accepts a temporary position at the illustrious Dickinson family home in Amherst, it's only to save money for her upcoming trip West to join her brothers in California. Maggie never imagines she will form a life-altering friendship with the eccentric, brilliant Miss Emily or that she'll stay at the Homestead for the next thirty years.
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by Tara Conklin
It begins in a big yellow house with a funeral, an iron poker, and the Pause: a free and feral summer in a middle-class Connecticut town. Caught between the predictable life they once led and an uncertain future that stretches before them, the Skinner siblings emerge from the Pause deeply connected.
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by Amanda Flower
Willa Noble knew it was bad luck when it was pouring rain on the day of her ever-important job interview at the Dickinson home in Amherst, Massachusetts. When she arrived late, disheveled with her skirts sodden and filthy, she'd lost all hope of being hired for the position. As the housekeeper politely told her they'd be in touch, Willa started toward the door of the stately home only to be called back by the soft but strong voice of Emily Dickinson.
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by Amity Gaige
Juliet is failing to juggle motherhood and her stalled-out dissertation on confessional poetry when her husband, Michael, informs her that he wants to leave his job and buy a sailboat. With their two kids - Sybil, age seven, and George, age two - Juliet and Michael set off for Panama, where their forty-four foot sailboat awaits them.
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by Robert Justice
Inspired by the atmospheric poetry of Langston Hughes and set in the heart of Denver's black community, this gripping crime novel pits three characters in a race against time to thwart a gross miscarriage of justice -- and a crooked detective who wreaks havoc...with deadly consequences.
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by Lee Daniel Kravetz
Told through three unique interwoven narratives, this novel reimagines a chapter in the life of Sylvia Plath, telling the story behind the creation of her classic, semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar.
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by Liv Little
Elsie is a sexy, funny, and fiercely independent woman in south London. But several things in her life have gone terribly wrong. She's estranged from her family; is failing to make it as a poet; and has just been evicted from her social housing. As fierce and independent as she is, even Elsie must admit that being a carefree 28-year-old is proving difficult--and that she's running out of options.
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by Laura McNeal
A tender and engrossing historical novel about the unlikely love affair between two great nineteenth-century poets, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett
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by Kathryn Scanlan
Based on an anonymous diary written by an eighty-six year old woman residing in Illinois. It was acquired fifteen years ago at a public estate auction and covers the years, 1968 through 1972. Scanlon edited, arranged, and rearranged the text.
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by Cathleen Schine
Laurel and Daphne Wolfe are identical, inseparable redheaded twins who share an obsession with words. They speak a secret "twin" tongue of their own as toddlers; as adults making their way in 1980s Manhattan, their verbal infatuation continues, but this love, which has always bound them together, begins instead to push them apart. Their fraying twinship finally shreds completely when the sisters go to war, absurdly but passionately, over custody of their most prized family heirloom: Merriam Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition .
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by Jean Thompson
A contemporary story about the insular world of writers, centering on a notable female poet and the young woman to whom she reveals her long-guarded secret about a famous manuscript.
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by Kris Waldherr
When famed Byronesque poet Hugh de Bonne is discovered dead of a heart attack in his bath one morning, his cousin Robert Highstead, a historian turned post-mortem photographer, is charged with a simple task: transport Hugh's remains for burial in a chapel.
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by Liza Wieland
June 1937. Elizabeth Bishop arrives in France with her college roommates. They are in search of an escape, and inspiration, far from the protective world of Vassar College where they were expected to find an impressive husband, a quiet life, and act accordingly. There, they meet a community of upper-crust expatriates who not only bring them along on a life-changing adventure, but also into an underground world of rebellion that will quietly alter the course of Elizabeth's life forever.
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by Alejandro Zambra
Zambra chronicles with enormous tenderness and insight the small moments -- sexy, absurd, painful, sweet, profound -- that make up our personal histories. Exploring how we choose our families and how we betray them, and what it means to be a man in relationships -- a partner, father, stepfather, teacher, lover, writer, and friend.
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BONUS TRACKS: NOVELS IN VERSE
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by Sarah Crossan
After discovering that her married lover has been killed in an accident, estate lawyer Ana Kelly, alone and undone, seeks friendship with the person who she once thought of as her adversary and opposite, but who is now the only one who shares her pain -- Rebecca, her lover's widow.
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by Bernardine Evaristo
Sparklingly witty and filled with emotion, centering voices we often see othered, and written in an innovative fast-moving form that borrows technique from poetry, Girl, Woman, Other is a polyphonic and richly textured social novel that shows a side of Britain we rarely see, one that reminds us of all that connects us to our neighbors, even in times when we are encouraged to be split apart.
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by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Ferlinghetti lets loose an exhilarating rush of language to craft what might be termed a closing statement about his highly significant and productive 99 years on this planet.
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by Jennifer Givhan
When Bianca appears late one night at her brother's house in Santa Ana, she is barely conscious, though not alone. Jubilee, wrapped in a fuzzy pink romper, is buckled into a car seat. Jubilee, who Bianca feeds and clothes and bathes and loves. Jubilee, who Bianca could not leave behind. Jubilee, a doll in her arms.
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by Irene Latham
In 1860, long after the United States outlawed the importation of enslaved laborers, 110 men, women and children from Benin and Nigeria were captured and brought to Mobile, Alabama aboard a ship called Clotilda. Their journey includes the savage Middle Passage and being hidden in the swamplands along the Alabama River before being secretly parceled out to various plantations, where they made desperate attempts to maintain both their culture and also fit into the place of captivity to which they'd been delivered.
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by Pat McCabe
A swirling, psychedelic, bleakly funny fugue, (this) epic reinvention of the verse novel combines Modernist fragmentation and Beat spontaneity with Irish folklore, then douses it in whiskey and sets it on fire.
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by Ishle Yi Park
Told across the changing seasons, Angel & Hannah holds all of the tension and cadence of blank verse while adding dynamic and expressive language rooted in a long tradition of hip-hop and spoken word, creating new and magnetic forms. The poetry of Angel and Hannah's relationship is dynamic, arresting, observant, and magical, conveying the intimacies and sacrifices of love and family and the devastating realities of struggle and loss.
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by Bud Smith
Leaving their abusive pasts behind them in Jersey, Kody and Teal set off on a cross-country road trip equal parts self-destruction and self-discovery, making their way, one stolen car at a time, toward bigger, wider, bluer skies.
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Maybe this list isn't your jam. Check out the RPL Readers page for more lists. Or, if you'd prefer a hand-crafted, bespoke book suggestion list, try The Bookologist service. You need an RPL Library card to access. Don't have one? Find out how to get one here.
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