Books like The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh
The collected letters of Vincent van Gogh, most of them to his brother Theo, a portrait of artistic obsession, poverty and vision in the painter's own words.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh
An Angel at My Table
Janet Frame's autobiography, from a poor childhood in Oamaru through eight years in mental hospitals to her escape into writing and to Europe.
Rosshalde
On the estate of Rosshalde, the celebrated painter Johann Veraguth lives estranged from his wife, his one joy their small son Pierre, as a friend urges him to leave for India.
The Diary of a Young Girl
Two years of entries by a Jewish teenage girl hiding with her family above an Amsterdam warehouse, from her thirteenth birthday in 1942 until the Gestapo found the annex in 1944.
Girl with a Pearl Earring
A young Protestant maid enters the Catholic Vermeer household in 1660s Delft and slowly, against every domestic and erotic pressure, becomes the girl in the painting.
The Collected Schizophrenias
Thirteen essays on living with schizoaffective disorder, the diagnosis, the institutions and Wang's own experience of a high-functioning illness, written with a clinician's precision.
Abandoning a Cat
A short memoir of Murakami's father, a teacher drafted into the war in China, that starts from a childhood afternoon when the two of them left a cat at the beach and found it waiting at home.
The First Man
Jacques Cormery, forty, visits the grave in France of the father he never knew, killed in the First World War, and goes back to the poor Algiers neighbourhood where he grew up.
Istanbul: Memories and the City
Pamuk's memoir of growing up in Istanbul in the 1950s and 60s, of his family, and of the melancholy of the city, which Turks call hüzün.
Tonio Kröger
Tonio Kröger, son of a north German merchant and a dark-haired southern mother, grows up envying his town's ordinary, golden-haired boys and girls, and becomes a writer who belongs neither among artists nor among them.
The Fire Next Time
Two essays on race in America, a letter to Baldwin's nephew and a reflection on religion and the Nation of Islam, that remain as urgent and incandescent as when they were written.
The Other Name: Septology I-II
An ageing Norwegian painter reflects on his life, art, and faith in single unbroken sentences across seven books; the first two arrive here.
To the Lighthouse
A family vacations at a Scottish lighthouse, and the passage of time between two visits reveals everything about love, art, loss, and the impossibility of reaching the things we yearn for.