Edmund de Waal's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Edmund de Waal recommends? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Edmund de Waal's favorite book recommendations of all time. At Shortform, we know books. Our book guides are the best in the world. Learn why.

A Potter's Book

Bernard Leach

4.5

This now famous book was the first treatise to be written by a potter on the workshop traditions handed down by Koreans and Japanese from the greatest period of Chinese ceramics in the Sung dynasty. It deals with four types of pottery: Japanese raku, English slipware, stoneware and oriental porcelain. With its help, potters can learn how to adapt recipes for pigments and glazes, and designs of kil

Recommended by Edmund de Waal.

Edmund de Waal

Incredibly important because of its ability to allow any reader who picks it up to understand the excitement and energy of the making of pots. [source]

Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

Walter Benjamin

4.4

Studies on contemporary art and culture by one of the most original, critical and analytical minds of this century. Illuminations includes Benjamin's views on Kafka, with whom he felt the closest personal affinity, his studies on Baudelaire and Proust (both of whom he translated), his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's Epic Theater.

Also included are his penetrating study on "The Work of Art in the

Recommended by Edmund de Waal.

Edmund de Waal

It’s a meditation on history, a meditation on philosophy, a meditation on collecting and an autobiography as well. [source]

Austerlitz

W.G. Sebald, James Wood

4.1

This tenth anniversary edition of W. G. Sebald’s celebrated masterpiece includes a new Introduction by acclaimed critic James Wood. Austerlitz is the story of a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife

Recommended by Edmund de Waal.

Edmund de Waal

Austerlitz is an incredibly beautiful book. Sebald was a really interesting German writer, and I think this is his masterpiece. He blows away genre. [source]

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The Collected Poems

Wallace Stevens

4.2

This definitive poetry collection, originally published in 1954 to honor Stevens on his 75th birthday, contains:

- "Harmonium"
- "Ideas of Order"
- "The Man With the Blue Guitar"
- "Parts of the World"
- "Transport Summer"
- "The Auroras of Autumn"
- "The Rock"

Recommended by Caterina Fake and Edmund de Waal.

Edmund de Waal

If I had to pick a book of poems for my desert island, I would probably end up with Wallace Stevens. [source]

The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches (Yuasa)

Matsuo Basho, Nobuyuki Yuasa

4.4

In later life Basho turned to Zen Buddhism, and the travel sketched in this volume relfect his attempts to cast off earthly attachments and reach out to spiritual fulfillment. The sketches are written in the "haibun" style--a linking of verse and prose. The title piece, in particular, reveals Basho striving to discover a vision of eternity in the transient world around him and his personal evocati

Recommended by Edmund de Waal.

Edmund de Waal

He was a 17th century haiku poet, and this is the record of his journey through the Japanese countryside. It’s a very beautiful travelogue. [source]