Recommendations

(Just some of my favorites, originally published 1970 – Present. An evolving list.)

Novels / Novellas:

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

Feed by M.T. Anderson

The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

Chimera by John Barth

Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

Possession by A.S. Byatt

Underworld by Don Delillo

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Open Curtain by Brian Evenson

Erasure by Percival Everett

James by Percival Everett

Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Márquez

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

All Fours by Miranda July

You by Caroline Kepnes

11/22/63 by Stephen King

It by Stephen King

10:04 by Ben Lerner

The Topeka School by Ben Lerner

The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Vanishing Point by David Markson

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange

Jenny in Corona by Stuart Ross

Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth

Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

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Fiction Collections:

Altmann’s Tongue by Brian Evenson

The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

The Boundaries of Their Dwelling by Blake Sanz

The Age of Infidelity & Other Stories by Valerie Sayers

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Essay Collections & Full-Length Nonfiction:

Bloodbath Nation by Paul Auster and Spencer Ostrander

Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays by Eula Biss

American Assassins: The Darker Side of Politics by James W. Clarke

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The White Album by Joan Didion

Raising Raffi: The First Five Years by Keith Gessen

The Earth Dies Streaming by A.S. Hamrah

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny by Kate Manne

Confessions of a Cineplex Heckler by Joe Queenan

Cosmos by Carl Sagan

Other People: Takes & Mistakes by David Shields

On Freedom by Timothy Snyder

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace

90s Bitch by Allison Yarrow

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Memoirs:

One Friday in April by Donald Antrim

Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America by Ryan Busse

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Monsters by Claire Dederer

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

The Film Club by David Gilmour

Stay True by Hua Hsu

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

Patrimony by Philip Roth

The Man They Wanted Me to Be by Jared Yates Sexton

Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron