Poetic Outlaws: The Bookshelf

Welcome to the Poetic Outlaws: The Bookshelf. You’ll find this tab on top of the home screen. This is where I will share some of my favorite reads with you. It’s going to be an ongoing process so check back often. In the words of the great Franz Kafka, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.


Top Favorites (all genres)

Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals by John Gray
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths by John Gray
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror by Thomas Ligotti
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
Escape From Evil by Ernest Becker
Holderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche: The Struggle with the Daemon by Stefan Zweig
Restoring Pride by Richard Taylor
On Photography by Susan Sontag
The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud by Henry Miller
Stand Still Like the Hummingbird by Henry Miller
The Wisdom of the Heart by Henry Miller
William Blake vs. the World by John Higgs
Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America by Charles Bowden
Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future by Charles Bowden
The Undiscovered Self: The Dilemma of the Individual in Modern Society by Carl Jung
To Have or To Be? by Erich Fromm
The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett by John Calder
The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig
The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell
Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion
How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch by Henry Miller
The Outsider by Colin Wilson
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Trouble with Being Born by Emil Cioran
Francois de la Rochefoucauld – Maxims and Other Reflections
Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson
The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich
Solitude: A Return to the Self by Anthony Storr
The Seasons of the Soul: The Poetic Guidance and Spiritual Wisdom of Hermann Hesse

Fiction


Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski
Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac 
Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
The Thief’s Journal by Jean Genet
Narcissus and Goldmund By Hermann Hesse
Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
A Confederacy Of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
The stories of Anton Chekhov
Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Poetry

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems by Fernando Pessoa
The Last Night of the Earth Poems by Charles Bukowski
Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg
The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton
All of Us: The Collected Poems by Ramond Carver
Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness by Bob Kaufman
The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers
Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver
A Wild Peculiar Joy: The Selected Poems by Irving Layton
The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems
Collected Poems of Jack Gilbert
The Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition by Federico García Lorca
The Last Poet of the Village by Sergei Yesenin

Philosophy/Psychology/History

The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Myth As Metaphor and As Religion by Joseph Campbell
The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
All Things are Possible and Selected Essays by Lev Shestov
Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Jung
The Classic Friedrich Nietzsche Collection
Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper
Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail by William Ophuls
Philosopher Of The Heart by Clare Carlisle
Listen, Little Man! by Wilhelm Reich
Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm
Man’s Search for Himself by Rollo May
The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing by Joost Mereloo
Meditations: A New Translation by Marcus Aurelius
Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are by John Kaag
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton
Lyrical and Critical Essays by Albert Camus
The Divided Self by R. D. Laing
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
Self-Reliance & Other Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Apocalypse: And the Writings on Revelation by D.H. Lawrence