The Complete Poems
1966 · 908 pages
Waiting outside a Leningrad prison with a parcel for her son, Akhmatova was asked whether she could describe this. Requiem was the answer. Her love lyrics have the same merciless exactness.
★ 7.1
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
A Death in the Family
1957 · 310 pages
Knoxville, 1915: a man is called out at night to his sick father and killed on the road home. Agee follows the six-year-old son through the days after, in prose of unbearable precision.
★ 6.3
The Snow Leopard
1978 · 368 pages
Months after his wife's death, Matthiessen walks deep into the Nepalese Himalaya with a biologist counting blue sheep, studying Zen as he goes and watching for a snow leopard he never sees.
★ 5.6
Let the Great World Spin
2009 · 400 pages
In August 1974 a man steps onto a wire between the Twin Towers. Below him McCann gathers the whole city: an Irish monk living among Bronx prostitutes, Park Avenue mothers grieving Vietnam.
★ 5.4
The Year of Magical Thinking
2005 · 227 pages
Her husband died at the dinner table while their daughter lay in a coma. Didion turns a reporter's eye on her year of grief and keeps his shoes, because he will need them.
★ 5.3
Bridge to Terabithia
1977 · 144 pages
Jess can outrun everyone in fifth grade until Leslie moves in next door. They swing over a creek into Terabithia, the kingdom they rule together, and Paterson refuses to protect them from grief.
★ 4.8