Want to know what books Diane Purkiss recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Diane Purkiss's favorite book recommendations of all time.
1
Emily Bronte, Edward Chitham, et al. | 5.00
Emily Bront�'s achievement as a poet has been eclipsed by her masterpiece, Wuthering Heights. The Poems of Emily Bront� is the first edition to appear with full scholarly apparatus, and to preserve the writer's original (sometimes unorthodox) presentation and revisions. With no manuscript of Wuthering Heights extant, this edition of her sometimes undervalued poetry gives the reader the rare chance of seeing the writer's creative mind at work. Recreating the literary context of the poems, this edition also takes into account recent critical insights. The enlightening... more Emily Bront�'s achievement as a poet has been eclipsed by her masterpiece, Wuthering Heights. The Poems of Emily Bront� is the first edition to appear with full scholarly apparatus, and to preserve the writer's original (sometimes unorthodox) presentation and revisions. With no manuscript of Wuthering Heights extant, this edition of her sometimes undervalued poetry gives the reader the rare chance of seeing the writer's creative mind at work. Recreating the literary context of the poems, this edition also takes into account recent critical insights. The enlightening introduction and commentary place the poems in their literary context, and a large number of echoes and parallels from Scott, Byron, Moore, and other authors are identified.
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Diane PurkissEmily Brontë’s poems, which are mostly written for the paracosm she created of Gondel, contain huge numbers of sorceress-like women. Multiple murderers, adulteresses, faithless queens … The result is these searingly beautiful and musical poems, a lot of which are female voices, speaking confidently. It intersects superbly with her very powerful sense, again of the weather, and of the landscape,... (Source)
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2
Edward Thomas, Edna Longley | 4.45
Diane PurkissEdward Thomas, perhaps more than anyone, was alive to the incredible strangeness of England as an entity that had been inhabited for thousands of years by people who had left ample traces, and yet those traces are still lined with other forms of life that also supersede and go beyond those local Anglo-Saxons or Romans or Celts. (Source)
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This is an insightful, highly original ethnographic interpretation of the hunting life of the Yukaghirs, a little-known group of indigenous people in the Upper Kolyma region of northeastern Siberia. Basing his study on firsthand experience with Yukaghir hunters, Rane Willerslev focuses on the practical implications of living in a "hall-of-mirrors" world—one inhabited by humans, animals, and spirits, all of whom are understood to be endless mimetic doubles of one another. In this world human beings inhabit a betwixt-and-between state in which their souls are both substance and nonsubstance,... more This is an insightful, highly original ethnographic interpretation of the hunting life of the Yukaghirs, a little-known group of indigenous people in the Upper Kolyma region of northeastern Siberia. Basing his study on firsthand experience with Yukaghir hunters, Rane Willerslev focuses on the practical implications of living in a "hall-of-mirrors" world—one inhabited by humans, animals, and spirits, all of whom are understood to be endless mimetic doubles of one another. In this world human beings inhabit a betwixt-and-between state in which their souls are both substance and nonsubstance, both body and soul, both their own individual selves and reincarnated others. Hunters are thus both human and the animals they imitate, which forces them to steer a complicated course between the ability to transcend difference and the necessity of maintaining identity. less Diane PurkissThis book is fantastic is because it’s about the way in which being a shaman is nearly destroyed by Stalin and his policies. He wants to wipe it out for the same sort of reason that Protestants want to wipe out the grey areas that I’ve been describing in late medieval culture: because he wants everybody to have exactly the same mindset. Of course it fails, which is the good news. The bad news is... (Source)
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4
In second-century Britain, Macey and a gang of fellow deserters from the Roman army hunt and are hunted by deadly local tribes. Fifteen centuries later, during the English Civil War, Thomas Rowley hides from the ruthless troops who have encircled his village. And in contemporary Britain, Tom, a precocious, love-struck, mentally unstable teenager, struggles to cope with the imminent departure for London of his girlfriend, Jan.
Three separate stories, three utterly different lives, distant in time and yet strangely linked to a single place, the mysterious, looming outcrop known as... more In second-century Britain, Macey and a gang of fellow deserters from the Roman army hunt and are hunted by deadly local tribes. Fifteen centuries later, during the English Civil War, Thomas Rowley hides from the ruthless troops who have encircled his village. And in contemporary Britain, Tom, a precocious, love-struck, mentally unstable teenager, struggles to cope with the imminent departure for London of his girlfriend, Jan.
Three separate stories, three utterly different lives, distant in time and yet strangely linked to a single place, the mysterious, looming outcrop known as Mow Cop, and a single object, the blunt head of a stone axe: all these come together in Alan Garner's extraordinary Red Shift, a pyrotechnical and deeply moving elaboration on themes of chance and fate, time and eternity, visionary awakening and destructive madness. less Diane PurkissIt was completely unlike any book I’d ever read, in that it trusted the reader to make sense of things without holding one’s hand at all, or explaining anything ever. And at 15, I was so flattered by this book that seemed at once very exciting but unwilling to explain itself. So I read it over and over and over again. (Source)
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5
Magic, sorcery and witchcraft are among the most common themes of the great medieval Icelandic sagas and poems, the problematic yet vital sources that provide our primary textual evidence for the Viking Age that they claim to describe. Yet despite the consistency of this picture, surprisingly little archaeological or historical research has been done to explore what this may really have meant to the men and women of the time. This book examines the evidence for Old Norse sorcery, looking at its meaning and function, practice and practitioners, and the complicated constructions of gender and... more Magic, sorcery and witchcraft are among the most common themes of the great medieval Icelandic sagas and poems, the problematic yet vital sources that provide our primary textual evidence for the Viking Age that they claim to describe. Yet despite the consistency of this picture, surprisingly little archaeological or historical research has been done to explore what this may really have meant to the men and women of the time. This book examines the evidence for Old Norse sorcery, looking at its meaning and function, practice and practitioners, and the complicated constructions of gender and sexual identity with which these were underpinned. Combining strong elements of eroticism and aggression, sorcery appears as a fundamental domain of women's power, linking them with the gods, the dead and the future. Their battle spells and combat rituals complement the men's physical acts of fighting, in a supernatural empowerment of the Viking way of life. What emerges is a fundamentally new image of the world in which the Vikings understood themselves to move, in which magic and its implications permeated every aspect of a society permanently geared for war. In this fully revised and expanded second edition, Neil Price takes us with him on a tour through the sights and sounds of this undiscovered country, meeting its human and otherworldly inhabitants, including the Sami with whom the Norse partly shared this mental landscape. On the way we explore Viking notions of the mind and soul, the fluidity of the boundaries that they drew between humans and animals, and the immense variety of their spiritual beliefs. We find magic in the Vikings' bedrooms and on their battlefields, and we meet the sorcerers themselves through their remarkable burials and the tools of their trade. Combining archaeology, history and literary scholarship with extensive studies of Germanic and circumpolar religion, this multi-award-winning book shows us the Vikings as we have never seen them before. less 
Tom Holland@Ziyad_F It’s a fantastic book. Wonderfully written, full of jaw-dropping material. (Source)
Diane PurkissEverybody’s been waiting with bated breath for the second edition to appear, because for about ten years it was one of the most sought-after books on secondhand book sites. And it’s been revised, too. Why I’m glued to it is because I think Neil Price does a fantastic job of explaining to a modern, post-Enlightenment person what is a very strange series of cultures. He particularly focuses on the... (Source)
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