18 Best nonfiction books like Inciting Joy: Essays by Ross Gay

Cover of Inciting Joy: Essays by Ross Gay

Inciting Joy: Essays

By: Ross Gay

4.16

Format: 256 pages, Hardcover

An intimate and electrifying collection of essays from the New York Times bestselling author of The…

"And when we catch the grave light shimmering from the tethers between us when it happens, our dying again and again in each other's presence, this falling together, it is called, this holding each other through the falling, I am pretty sure of this, one of the names anyway: joy."

-Ross Gay, Inciting Joy: Essays

"And when we catch the grave light shimmering from the tethers between us when it happens, our dying again and again in each other's presence, this falling together, it is called, this holding each other through the falling, I am pretty sure of this, one of the names anyway: joy."

-Ross Gay, Inciting Joy: Essays

"But when we allow and expect each other to change and, even more to the point, when we witness the learning, the changing, the grieving, with curiosity and patience and care and love; when we make room for and witness and invite each other's unfixing and so are unfixing ourselves; when we join the grieving, or when we join in grieving, and when we do it again and again, making of that soft, mutual, curious, groundless witnessing not only an endeavor, but also a practice (we're talking about practice again); when we do these things, we fall apart into one another. We fall into each other."

-Ross Gay, Inciting Joy: Essays

"But when we allow and expect each other to change and, even more to the point, when we witness the learning, the changing, the grieving, with curiosity and patience and care and love; when we make room for and witness and invite each other's unfixing and so are unfixing ourselves; when we join the grieving, or when we join in grieving, and when we do it again and again, making of that soft, mutual, curious, groundless witnessing not only an endeavor, but also a practice (we're talking about practice again); when we do these things, we fall apart into one another. We fall into each other."

-Ross Gay, Inciting Joy: Essays

If you liked the nonfiction plot in Inciting Joy: Essays by Ross Gay , here is a list of 18 books like this:

Cover of The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year by Margaret Renkl

1. The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

By: Margaret Renkl

4.37

Format: 270 pages, Hardcover

From the beloved New York Times opinion writer and bestselling author of Late Migrations comes a “h… read more

Similar categories in Margaret Renkl's The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year book and Ross Gay's Inciting Joy: Essays

  • nonfiction
  • memoir
  • essays
  • audiobook
Cover of Somehow: Thoughts on Love by Anne Lamott

2. Somehow: Thoughts on Love

By: Anne Lamott

3.95

Format: 204 pages, Hardcover

From the bestselling author of Dusk, Night, Dawn and Help, Thanks, Wow , a joyful celebration of lo… read more

Similar categories in Anne Lamott's Somehow: Thoughts on Love book and Ross Gay's Inciting Joy: Essays

  • self help
  • memoir
  • nonfiction
  • essays
  • audiobook
"I don’t know"

-Anne Lamott, Somehow: Thoughts on Love

"…nobody in isolation becomes who they were designed to be."

-Anne Lamott, Somehow: Thoughts on Love

"Sometimes it all just sucks, as Jesus says somewhere in the Gospels (although off the top of my head I can’t recall chapter and verse."

-Anne Lamott, Somehow: Thoughts on Love

"When I first got sober, a man told me that upon waking every morning, instead of reciting the standard flowery recovery prayer, he said, “Whatever,“ and at night when he turned off his lights to go t…"

-Anne Lamott, Somehow: Thoughts on Love

Cover of How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler

3. How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures

By: Sabrina Imbler

4.12

Format: 263 pages, Hardcover

A queer, mixed race writer working in a largely white, male field, science and conservation journal… read more

Similar categories in Sabrina Imbler's How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures book and Ross Gay's Inciting Joy: Essays

  • memoir
  • nonfiction
  • essays
  • adult
  • audiobook
"But when I think about ponds infested with gallon-big goldfish, I feel a kind of triumph. I see something that no one expected to live not just alive but impossibly flourishing, and no longer alone. …"

-Sabrina Imbler, How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures

Cover of All Fours by Miranda July

4. All Fours

By: Miranda July

3.81

Format: 336 pages, Hardcover

The New York Times–bestselling author of The First Bad Man returns with an irreverently sexy, tende… read more

Similar categories in Miranda July's All Fours book and Ross Gay's Inciting Joy: Essays

  • audiobook
  • adult
  • contemporary
"But maybe the road split between: a life spent longing vs. a life that was continually surprising"

-Miranda July, All Fours

"Maybe we shouldn't do that," Jordi said. "Flatten ourselves like that. Erratic doesn't have to mean crazy or irresponsible. Shouldn't we be normalizing change?"

-Miranda July, All Fours

"I guess any calling, no mater what it is, is a kind of unresolved ache," I said, giving in to knowing more than him. "It's a problem that you can't fix, but there is some relief in knowing you will c…"

-Miranda July, All Fours

"For me lying created just the right amount of problems and what you saw was just one of my four or five faces- each real, each with different needs. The only dangerous lie was one that asked me to co…"

-Miranda July, All Fours

Cover of Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange

5. Wandering Stars

By: Tommy Orange

3.89

Format: 315 pages, Hardcover

The eagerly awaited follow-up to Pulitzer Prize-finalist Tommy Orange’s breakout best seller There … read more

Similar categories in Tommy Orange's Wandering Stars book and Ross Gay's Inciting Joy: Essays

  • audiobook
  • adult
  • contemporary
"And in the year 1924 Indian citizenship will have been granted, even though they will mean to dissolve tribes by giving citizenship, dissolve being another word for disappearance, a kind of chemical …"

-Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars

Cover of Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

6. Martyr!

By: Kaveh Akbar

4.24

Format: 352 pages, Hardcover

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves… read more

Similar categories in Kaveh Akbar's Martyr! book and Ross Gay's Inciting Joy: Essays

  • audiobook
  • poetry
  • contemporary
Cover of The Hurting Kind: Poems by Ada Limon

7. The Hurting Kind: Poems

By: Ada Limon

4.34

Format: 120 pages, Hardcover

An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ou… read more

Similar categories in Ada Limon's The Hurting Kind: Poems book and Ross Gay's Inciting Joy: Essays

  • poetry
  • adult
  • nonfiction
  • audiobook
"There is a solitude in this world I cannot pierce. I would die for it."

-Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

"Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested…"

-Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

Cover of Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H.

8. Hijab Butch Blues

By: Lamya H.

4.48

Format: 284 pages, Hardcover

A queer hijabi Muslim immigrant survives her coming-of-age by drawing strength and hope from storie… read more

Similar categories in Lamya H.'s Hijab Butch Blues book and Ross Gay's Inciting Joy: Essays

  • nonfiction
  • memoir
  • audiobook
"Sort of?"

-Lamya H., Hijab Butch Blues

"Queer indispensability?"

-Lamya H., Hijab Butch Blues

"I feel tired. Or reckless. Or maybe brave."

-Lamya H., Hijab Butch Blues

"I want to figure her out, this girl, and I want to know everything about her."

-Lamya H., Hijab Butch Blues

Cover of Inciting Joy: Essays by Ross Gay

9. Inciting Joy: Essays

By: Ross Gay

4.16

Format: 256 pages, Hardcover

An intimate and electrifying collection of essays from the New York Times bestselling author of The… read more

Similar categories in Ross Gay's Inciting Joy: Essays book and Ross Gay's Inciting Joy: Essays

  • audiobook
  • poetry
  • memoir
  • unfinished
  • short stories
  • nonfiction
  • essays
  • contemporary
  • adult
  • self help
"And when we catch the grave light shimmering from the tethers between us when it happens, our dying again and again in each other's presence, this falling together, it is called, this holding each ot…"

-Ross Gay, Inciting Joy: Essays

"But when we allow and expect each other to change and, even more to the point, when we witness the learning, the changing, the grieving, with curiosity and patience and care and love; when we make ro…"

-Ross Gay, Inciting Joy: Essays

Cover of Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hersey

10. Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto

By: Tricia Hersey

4.08

Format: 224 pages, Hardcover

Far too many of us have claimed productivity as the cornerstone of success. Brainwashed by capitali… read more

Similar categories in Tricia Hersey's Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto book and Ross Gay's Inciting Joy: Essays

  • audiobook
  • nonfiction
  • self help
Cover of You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie  Smith

11. You Could Make This Place Beautiful

By: Maggie Smith

4.08

Format: 320 pages, Hardcover

In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of… read more

Similar categories in Maggie Smith's You Could Make This Place Beautiful book and Ross Gay's Inciting Joy: Essays

  • poetry
  • memoir
  • nonfiction
  • essays
  • adult
  • audiobook
"At our wedding, our college creative writing professor read a poem—John Ciardi’s “Most Like an Arch This Marriage."

-Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

"How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves–all of our selves–wherever we go. Inside forty-somethin…"

-Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

Cover of Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age by Katherine May

12. Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

By: Katherine May

3.62

Format: 212 pages, Hardcover

From the New York Times-bestselling author of Wintering, an invitation to rediscover the feelings o… read more

Similar categories in Katherine May's Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age book and Ross Gay's Inciting Joy: Essays

  • self help
  • memoir
  • nonfiction
  • essays
  • audiobook
"Sometimes we are visited by destruction. Other times, it seems, the world flexes its claws and lets us feel its hot breath, just to remind us how small we are, how helpless."

-Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

"I have started to look up the meaning of place names recently. It is perhaps an interest that awakens in you ass you age, this enthusiasm for peering back through time to find lost meaning."

-Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

"Sacred places are no longer given to us, and they are rarely shared between whole communities. They are now containers for our own knowing, our own meanings. They don't translate across minds. It fal…"

-Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

"You do not need to walk in the wilderness to make contact with the wild. If you know your stories--if you understand the mythologies of your land--then you can leap from a sunlit stroll with your dog…"

-Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

Cover of Above Ground by Clint   Smith

13. Above Ground

By: Clint Smith

4.56

Format: 128 pages, Hardcover

A remarkable poetry collection with "inextinguishable generosity and abundant wisdom" (Monica Youn)… read more

Similar categories in Clint Smith's Above Ground book and Ross Gay's Inciting Joy: Essays

  • poetry
  • nonfiction
  • contemporary
  • adult
  • audiobook
Cover of There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib

14. There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

By: Hanif Abdurraqib

4.40

Format: 352 pages, Hardcover

A poignant, personal reflection on basketball, talent and allegiance, and of course, LeBron James—f… read more

Similar categories in Hanif Abdurraqib's There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension book and Ross Gay's Inciting Joy: Essays

  • poetry
  • memoir
  • nonfiction
  • essays
  • audiobook
"Heartbreak itself is a primary color. Stagnant without a series of secondary colors to activate it. Longing is an activator."

-Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

"With enough repetition, anything can become a religion. It doesn’t matter if it works or not, it simply matters if a person returns."

-Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

"It is a strange miracle to be able to trace your own aging, your own mortality through someone who's living alongside you, someone who has survived eras at the same time as you have in some of the sa…"

-Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

Cover of Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World by Pádraig Ó Tuama

15. Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World

By: Pádraig Ó Tuama

4.53

Format: 384 pages, Hardcover

Expanding on the popular podcast of the same name from On Being Studios, Poetry Unbound offers imme… read more

Similar categories in Pádraig Ó Tuama's Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World book and Ross Gay's Inciting Joy: Essays

  • poetry
  • unfinished
  • nonfiction
  • essays
  • contemporary
  • adult
  • audiobook
Cover of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden by Camille T. Dungy

16. Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

By: Camille T. Dungy

4.19

Format: 321 pages, Hardcover

A seminal work that expands how we talk about the natural world and the environment as National Boo… read more

Similar categories in Camille T. Dungy's Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden book and Ross Gay's Inciting Joy: Essays

  • nonfiction
  • memoir
  • audiobook
Cover of Quietly Hostile: Essays by Samantha Irby

17. Quietly Hostile: Essays

By: Samantha Irby

3.70

Format: 290 pages, Paperback

Samantha Irby invites us to share in the gory particulars of her real life, all that festers behind… read more

Similar categories in Samantha Irby's Quietly Hostile: Essays book and Ross Gay's Inciting Joy: Essays

  • memoir
  • short stories
  • nonfiction
  • essays
  • adult
  • audiobook
"[...] and my face is sore from smiling so hard in an effort to appear friendly and nonthreatening."

-Samantha Irby, Quietly Hostile: Essays

"I'm so embarrassed by everything all the time, humiliated even by the need to breathe air where other people can see me"

-Samantha Irby, Quietly Hostile: Essays

"I want to push back against this idea that it's not real love if you're not passionately chattering at each other all the time, that it's just as valid (and romantic!) to know instinctively when to s…"

-Samantha Irby, Quietly Hostile: Essays

"I lived in blissful solitude for a long time...and you learn a lot about yourself and what you require for life when it's just you that you have to think about...You can buy frozen fish sticks and ea…"

-Samantha Irby, Quietly Hostile: Essays

Cover of Wild and Precious: A Celebration of Mary Oliver by Mary Oliver

18. Wild and Precious: A Celebration of Mary Oliver

By: Mary Oliver

4.52

Format: 6 pages, Audible Audio

A celebration of the beloved, award-winning poet Mary Oliver, narrated by actress and activist Soph… read more

Similar categories in Mary Oliver's Wild and Precious: A Celebration of Mary Oliver book and Ross Gay's Inciting Joy: Essays

  • poetry
  • memoir
  • nonfiction
  • essays
  • audiobook
Cover of Congratulations, the Best is Over! by R. Eric Thomas

19. Congratulations, the Best is Over!

By: R. Eric Thomas

4.07

Format: 240 pages, Hardcover

The beloved bestselling author of Here for It presents a collection of heartening, thoughtful, and … read more

Similar categories in R. Eric Thomas's Congratulations, the Best is Over! book and Ross Gay's Inciting Joy: Essays

  • memoir
  • short stories
  • nonfiction
  • essays
  • audiobook
"If I'm not heading toward a place where I can feel joy, then hope in the present has nothing to hold on to."

-R. Eric Thomas, Congratulations, the Best is Over!

Cover of You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World by Ada Limon

20. You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

By: Ada Limon

4.11

Format: 176 pages, Hardcover

Published association  with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate o… read more

Similar categories in Ada Limon's You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World book and Ross Gay's Inciting Joy: Essays

  • poetry
  • adult
  • nonfiction
Cover of What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World by Prentis Hemphill

21. What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World

By: Prentis Hemphill

4.54

Format: 256 pages, Hardcover

From one of the most prominent voices in the trauma conversation comes a groundbreaking new way to … read more

Similar categories in Prentis Hemphill's What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World book and Ross Gay's Inciting Joy: Essays

  • audiobook
  • nonfiction
  • self help

6 Top contemporary books like Inciting Joy: Essays by Ross Gay

Transform Your Habits

All Fours

Miranda July

3.81

Transform Your Habits

Wandering Stars

Tommy Orange

3.89

Transform Your Habits

Martyr!

Kaveh Akbar

4.24

Transform Your Habits

Inciting Joy: Essays

Ross Gay

4.16

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18 must-read audiobook books like The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year by Margaret Renkl

Transform Your Habits

After Annie

Anna Quindlen

4.03

Transform Your Habits

The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

Margaret Renkl

4.37

Transform Your Habits

James

Percival Everett

4.54

Transform Your Habits

The Backyard Bird Chronicles

Amy Tan

4.14

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