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The Dead and the Living

Sharon Olds · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

Kaddish and Other Poems

Allen Ginsberg · 104 pages

Poetry CollectionDeath of a ParentGrief and MourningLyrical Prose
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The Liars' Club

Mary Karr · 320 pages

The Texas refinery town of Leechfield, perched on the swampy rim of the Gulf, is famous for mosquitoes and the manufacture of Agent Orange - a place where the only bookstores are religious ones and the restaurants serve only fried food. A handful of the Leechfield oil workers gather regularly at the American Legion Bar to drink salted beer and spin long, improbable tales. They're the Liars' Club.

Toxic Family DynamicsDeath of a ParentLyrical ProseGrief and Mourning
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A Thousand Acres

Jane Smiley · 377 pages

This powerful twentieth-century reimagining of Shakespeare’s *King Lear* centers on a wealthy Iowa farmer who decides to divide his farm between his three daughters. When the youngest objects, she is cut out of his will. This sets off a chain of events that brings dark truths to light and explodes long-suppressed emotions. Ambitiously conceived and stunningly written, *A Thousand Acres* takes on t

Toxic Family DynamicsGrief and MourningDeath of a ParentLyrical Prose
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The Shipping News

Annie Proulx · 337 pages

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Shipping News is a celebration of Annie Proulx's genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing

Toxic Family DynamicsGrief and MourningLyrical ProseDeath of a Parent
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Shizuko's Daughter

Kyoko Mori · 227 pages

After her mother's suicide when she is twelve years old, Yuki spends years living with her distant father and his resentful new wife, cut off from her mother's family, and relying on her own inner strength to cope with the tragedy.

Toxic Family DynamicsDeath of a ParentLyrical ProseGrief and Mourning
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Toxic Family DynamicsGrief and MourningLyrical ProseDeath of a Parent
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Native Guard

Natasha Trethewey · 57 pages

Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Natasha Trethewey's elegiac *Native Guard* is a deeply personal volume that brings together two legacies of the Deep South. The title of the collection refers to the Mississippi Native Guards, a black regiment whose role in the Civil War has been largely overlooked by history. As a child in Gulfport, Mississippi, in the 1960s, Trethewey could gaze a

Poetry CollectionDeath of a ParentGrief and MourningLyrical Prose
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Out of the Dust

Karen Hesse · 235 pages

"Dust piles up like snow across the prairie. . . ." A terrible accident has transformed Billie Jo's life, scarring her inside and out. Her mother is gone. Her father can't talk about it. And the one thing that might make her feel better -- playing the piano -- is impossible with her wounded hands. To make matters worse, dust storms are devastating the family farm and all the farms nearby. Wh

Death of a ParentPoetry CollectionGrief and MourningLyrical Prose
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The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Aimee Bender · 345 pages

The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse. On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attention, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in t

Toxic Family DynamicsDeath of a ParentLyrical ProseGrief and Mourning
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The Princess Saves Herself in this One

Amanda Lovelace · 177 pages

"From Amanda Lovelace, a poetry collection in four parts: the princess, the damsel, the queen, and you. The first three sections piece together the life of the author while the final section serves as a note to the reader. This moving book explores love, loss, grief, healing, empowerment, and inspiration"--Publisher's website.

Poetry CollectionDeath of a ParentGrief and MourningEmotional
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Love & Misadventure

Lang Leav · 176 pages

Poetry CollectionLyrical ProseGrief and MourningEmotional
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Fates and Furies

Lauren Groff · 400 pages

Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years. At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the env

Toxic Family DynamicsDeath of a ParentLyrical ProseEmotional
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Love, an Index

Rebecca Lindenberg · 96 pages

"A man disappears. The woman who loves him is left scarred and haunted. In her fierce debut, Rebecca Lindenberg tells the story—in verse—of her passionate relationship with Craig Arnold, a much-respected poet who disappeared in 2009 while hiking a volcano in Japan. Lindenberg's billowing, "I contain multitudes" style lays bare the poet's sadnesses, joys, and longings in poems that are lyric and na

Poetry CollectionLyrical ProseGrief and MourningEmotional
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What the Living Do: Poems

Marie Howe · 91 pages

Poetry CollectionLyrical ProseGrief and MourningEmotional
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Black Butterfly

Robert M. Drake · 272 pages

Poetry CollectionLyrical ProseEmotionalGrief and Mourning
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The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson · 770 pages

The only edition currently available that contains all of Dickinson's poems. The works were originally gathered by editor Johnson and published in a three-volume set in 1955.

Poetry CollectionGrief and MourningLyrical ProseEmotional
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Poetry CollectionGrief and MourningLyrical ProseEmotional
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Thirst

Mary Oliver · 79 pages

In this collection of 43 new poems the author grapples with grief at the death of her beloved partner of over forty years. She strives to experience sorrow as a path to spiritual progress, grief as part of loving and not it end. She also chronicles for the first time her discovery of faith, without abandoning the love of the physical world that has been a hallmark of her work for four decades.

Poetry CollectionGrief and MourningLyrical ProseEmotional
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Hamlet

William Shakespeare · 192 pages

Toxic Family DynamicsDeath of a ParentGrief and MourningLyrical Prose
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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Tennessee Williams · 158 pages

Members of a neurotic Southern family gather to face the impending death of their patriarch, Big Daddy, and battle over the inheritance of his vast estate.

Toxic Family DynamicsDeath of a ParentGrief and MourningEmotional
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The Optimist's Daughter

Eudora Welty · 180 pages

The Optimist's Daughter is the story of Laurel, a widow who returns to Mississippi when her father is ill and witnesses his death and funeral. From there, she embarks on a deeply personal journey to explore her past and her family in order to make sense of her future.

Death of a ParentToxic Family DynamicsLyrical ProseGrief and Mourning
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Mary and O'Neil

Justin Cronin · 243 pages

Mary and O'Neil frequently marveled at how, of all the lives they might have led, they had somehow found this one together. When they met at the Philadelphia high school where they'd come to teach, each had suffered a profound loss that had not healed. How likely was it that they could learn to trust, much less love, again?Justin Cronin's poignant debut traces the lives of Mary Olson and O'Neil Bu

Death of a ParentGrief and MourningLyrical ProseEmotional
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Gabriel: A Poem

Edward Hirsch · 96 pages

Poetry CollectionLyrical ProseGrief and MourningEmotional
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We Were Liars

E. Lockhart · 240 pages

A beautiful and distinguished family. A private island. A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy. A group of four friends -- the Liars -- whose friendship turns destructive. A revolution. An accident. A secret. Lies upon lies. True love. The truth. Spending the summers on her family's private island off the coast of Massachusetts with her cousins and a special boy named Gat, teenaged

Toxic Family DynamicsGrief and MourningLyrical ProseEmotional

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