Top ten books about the body

Molly McCully Brown is the author of the essay collection Places I’ve Taken my Body and the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics and Feebleminded, which won the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and was named a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2017. With Susannah Nevison, she is also the coauthor of the poetry collection In The Field Between Us.

At the Guardian Brown tagged ten books "across genres, and styles, and periods, that influenced the writing of ... Places I’ve Taken My Body and the living that led to it." One title on the list:

The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken

This tender, extraordinary novel about a small-town librarian named Peggy Court and the “over-tall” James Carlson Sweatt – who is six feet by age 11, then seven, and then eight – is a love story above all else. But it’s also an examination of the profound ways a body can both other and connect you, and of how you can love a body even as it fails you, or fails someone you love. It is both glorious and painful to be alive: this book knows both things in equal measure.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue