The Books & Music That Inspired Grief Is The Thing With Feathers by Max Porter
Max Porter is the author of the experimental debut novel Grief Is The Thing With Feathers – Dua’s Monthly Read for April for the Service95 Book Club. This lyrical novella explores the raw experience of loss, following a grieving father and his two young sons after the sudden death of their wife and mother. As they struggle to cope, they are visited by Crow – a mischievous, shape-shifting figure who embodies grief itself. Here, Max shares the books that inspired his novel, and the songs to soundtrack your reading...
10 Books That Inspired Grief Is The Thing With Feathers
1. Crow: From the Life And Songs Of The Crow by Ted Hughes
“In the book, Dad is obsessed with Ted Hughes’ Crow – and so am I. Fifty years young, this is the atomic feathered explosion at the heart of 20th-century British poetry. It challenges God and language itself. It’s a wild, wicked, shame-drenched reckoning with creation. It’s outrageous. There’s no book like it. Badly behaved men sometimes make extraordinary work.”
2. Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose by Ted Hughes
“His prose, like his letters, give an insight into a gigantic mind. A colossus of the language and the spirit. Years ahead of his time in terms of ecology. Radically of-the-old-ways in terms of his shamanistic reckoning with the animal world and the human consciousness. The paragraph in Poetry In The Making, where he describes the futility and rich challenge of using language to describe a Crow, is one of the most exciting and clarifying things I’ve ever read.”
3. The Complete Poems by Emily Dickinson
“The book that cracked open my mind – it’s the most complex account of the human soul I have ever read. You could spend a lifetime with these poems and still not have a decent handle on what she does and how she does it.”
4. Crow by Boria Sax
“This brilliant book about Corvids in myth, science, literature and legend was a companion when I was trying to make a piece of prose that was Crow-like: behaved like a bird; felt like a bird. Humans and crows have a gloriously messy, entangled history and keep learning from one another.”
5. Dart by Alice Oswald
“The great permission giver of my reading life. This is a book which is a river. A polyphonic living miracle of a book. All her work is incredible but this is the one that made me believe I could find a form that would be completely bespoke to the emotional work I wanted to do.”
6. Glass & God by Anne Carson
“I went through a heavy Anne Carson phase in my twenties. What I loved the most was the way that whatever she is doing, she is translating: moving ideas, feelings and languages; shuttling things between forms; and playing, always playing. She is fearless, but rigorous. She feels to me like the through-line between ancient Greek, Samuel Beckett and your dry-as-a-bone aunt’s WhatsApp bantz.”
7. Angry Arthur by Hiawyn Oram and Satoshi Kitamura
“My favourite picture book. It’s about a boy having a tantrum, but it sums up the entire human race and was the engine of my interest in how to write about childhood, masculinity, apocalyptic feeling and the curse and blessing of being alive. If any of my books land in a reader like this landed in my six-year-old heart, then I can rest easy.”
8. Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
“If you know, you know. A post-apocalyptic adventure told in a new dialect, full of puppet shows and weird salvaged scraps of our civilisation. I’ve read it maybe 10 times, and each time I’m as terrified, lonely and exhilarated as the first . Like all great innovations in literature, it teaches you to read it as you go, and by the end you are fundamentally changed.”
9. Russian Fairy Tales by Alexsandr Afanas’Ev
“I binged on fairy tales and folk stories from around the world for five years. They’re so fresh, so adaptable, and so batshit crazy. An incredible shared global storytelling treasure chest. The Russian stories helped me find a certain kind of brutal, fantastical tone and energy for the violent way the Boys and Crow use storytelling to challenge and heal one another.”
10. The Notebook by Agota Kristof
“The book I use if I want to blow a reader’s mind. A lethally disturbing and funny book about two monstrously immoral twins making their way in our morally compromised universe. It makes other books run away and pee their pants.”
The Playlist To Soundtrack Your Reading Of Grief Is The Thing With Feathers
“The idea of this playlist is that it leaps from jump-around-family-joy to heartbreak to uplift to misery, as the book does,” says Max. “A lot is based on what I was listening to at the time; a lot is also from the family favourites.” Featuring Nina Simone, Roots Manuva, Four Tet, Nick Drake, Whitney Houston and the New London Children’s Choir, immerse yourself in the eclectic music that shaped Max’s world as you journey through the novel.
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