What is a Modern Traditional Novel?

This collection is made up of written, book-length narratives that preserve aspects of traditional culture alongside modern colonial influence. The novel format¹ provides a concise and enjoyable frame within which these stories can be told—⁠—sometimes autobiographical, sometimes fictionalized, sometimes invented entirely, but always tied to the realities of human experience within the world's various ecologies.

A United States-er's media diet consists primarily of Euro-American news, TV, film, books, and articles dealing with topics suited to current sensibilities, and any international (i.e. foreign, i.e. not mine, unlike the redwood forests that do belong to me and not to the Amah Mutsun or Muwekma Ohlone or Yurok peoples) perspective that may exist is typically filled out by Western European works in translation, along with imports from U.S. allies like Japan and South Korea in East Asia for the open-minded. Even when one encounters media from outside these high-traffic channels, a colonial perspective (e.g. light-skinned Spanish actors in a Mexican telenovela) prevails. International geopolitical alliances, dictated by economic utility and reinforced by foreign policy, carve the paths by which information reaches us and resultantly define the boundaries of our worldview.

So, the UN geoscheme-derived sorting method is one attempt at a mechanism for circumventing the external and internal impediments to broad artistic exposure as a member of humanity, and the Modern Traditional Novels collection can serve as an entrant proof of concept. Every book on this list provides a wealth of perspective, both in some way characteristic of the region from which it hails and comprehensive in its range of experience, presented in an approachable narrative format. Seriously, every one of these books is so good.

Stirring Poetry is a feeling.

Simply through the act of reading, and while doing so paying attention, these poems quite literally cause something within me to tremble with recognition. That’s the basic qualification for inclusion in this collection of Stirring Poetry, and though admittedly very subjective, my response finds some solidarity in the generations of people who have celebrated these works as the pinnacle of literary craft, sustained them across centuries of oral tradition, and counted on them for support in times of need, abundance, and normalcy.

In selecting translations, where multiple were available, I prioritized the use of clear, contemporary English that sought foremost to convey the semantic content of the originals, eschewing archaic language, forced rhyme schemes, and other techniques of affect that contribute little to the meaning of the text. The image accompanying each entry was selected to visually parallel aspects of the poetry (e.g. a contemporaneous depiction of the poet or performers; architectural styles amongst which the poetry would have originally been performed; traditional or historical artwork from the same culture in cases where the poetry is traditional or historical, and portraiture with clear foreign influence in cases to the contrary).

Ideas that have moved a thousand generations.

Traditions are the foundations upon which our lives can be built, the roots from which our ideas can grow, from which our decisions in turn can branch; this is the motivating spirit behind the Foundational Religious Texts collection, which brings together representatives from a wide range of traditions of independent origin.

Whether most popular in their oral or written format, these Foundational Religious Texts are some of the most powerful compositions in human history, directly responsible for the thoughts, actions, and behavior of hundreds of generations of people. The stories, chants, songs, and prayers gathered into these collections share a foundational relationship with the complete breadth of historical and contemporary human cultures, and it’s from these that all other literary achievement is born. Due to the antiquity of these narrative traditions, the assumption might be that the texts are a strictly pure apotheosis of their class; but to the contrary, they are an ever-culminating synthesis¹ of a variety of influences, interpreted and incorporated from the firsthand perspective of the values of a people.