Fiction Friday: Some of My Go-To Recommendations

I’m first and foremost a fiction writer and reader, and I’ve been a longtime bookseller. So what better way to get some of my recommendations out there than through some book recs here on the blog! I sent this out a few weeks back on my Boston Book Blog newsletter, but figured I’d kick off Fiction Friday with some of my go-to book recommendations for you. Don’t forget to order these from your local independent bookseller, as they need your support right now! Don’t have an indie near you? Buy through Bookshop.org.

To Kill a Mockingbird

My favorite comfort novel is To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, which, despite its heavy topics, provides that kind of assurance that there is still good and love in the world. I read it every few years (the last time I read it I realized how tightly edited of a bookit is!), so maybe it's time for you to pick it up again. (I haven't read it yet, but Casey Cep's new non-fiction book Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, which recounts Lee's failed attempt at writing a book based on another trial in the South, is on my bookshelf staring at me!)

Moby-Dick

My favorite intellectual novel is Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, which is less about Ahab's chase after the White Whale, and more about Ishmael's philosophic journey towards Truth and understanding an objective reality beyond the "pasteboard mask." Hey, if author Yiyun Li can start an isolation time War and Peace book club, maybe now's the time to read Moby-Dick. (I wrote a master's thesis on it, ran a book club on it, and go to the annual marathon read, so if you want some tips and tricks on how to actually get through it, hit me up!)

Evening

There were two novels that influenced me as a young fiction writer: The first is Evening, by Susan Minot (local author). It's a beautifully-written, stylistic novel about a woman on her death bed reminiscing back to a weekend in the 1950s and the love affair that altered her life. Because the main character's in essentially a morphine coma at that point, the narrative pops in and out of stream of consciousness, and just takes you away with it. So well done. (The movie with Claire Danes is also recommended.)

The Intuitionist

The other novel that inspired me early in my writing career is The Intuitionist, by Colson Whitehead - his first novel. It's a stylistic, cool noir-like tale about the first black female elevator inspector in an industry where the pragmatic Empiricist inspectors are pitted against the soulful Intuitionist inspectors. It's also an allegory about racial uplift, with some philosophy thrown in. (While I haven't read The Nickel Boys yet, I do think that this is a stronger novel than The Underground Railroad, and might be tied with Zone One as my favorites of his.)

Anything by Lauren Groff

For anyone who knows me in real life, you know that I am a Lauren Groff evangelist. Every book and story she writes is vastly different, and she's got incredible stylistic talent, but makes it look easy. Even though her magnum opus is Fates and Furies (she wrote an opera in the middle of the book!), don't start there if you've never read her before. Start with her first work, the short story collection Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories. My introduction to Groff was reading the title story for a workshop at Emerson College, and we all sat speechless, staring at one another, like, "Oh my gosh, this story exists. Someone wrote this story." The other stories are incredibly diverse – some historical fiction, some circling around specific images, some quirky. After that, jump to The Monster of Templeton, about a twenty-something women who returns to her hometown in Upstate NY and begins researching her family history – and the ancestors start taking over chapters of the book. Then tackle Fates and Furies.

The Body and Other Parties: Stories

Speaking of great short story collections, I just finished Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado, which was unlike anything I have read before, and I've read a lot of stuff. Each story was just fascinatingly unique in a genre-bending kind of way: in one story, women are fading away; in another, the main character writes an inventory of lovers against the backdrop of a worldwide plague (let's not talk about that one); another is a writing residency horror story; another uses the titles of Law and Order: SVU episodes as writing prompts. I haven't yet read her new memoir, In the Dream House, which is told in a similar genre-bending stylistic structure, but it's on my list (and I may have stood in a bookstore for a while and read portions of it)!

Friday Black: Stories

Ok, one more short story collection for you: Friday Black, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Genre-bending as well (George Saunders was his mentor, after all), these stories address the heavy topics of racism, consumerism, and even the apocalypse through fantasy and satire. I was thinking of the story "Zimmer Land" just the other day, which centers around a theme park that essentially monetizes racism and turns it into a live video game. The opening story, "The Finkelstein Five," is a raw look at racial injustice. And the final story imagines a world where the world literally ends every evening, yet restarts every morning – and how the community copes with that knowledge (mostly by forming rival gangs).

The Great Believers

My favorite novel I read last year was The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai. Told in both the past and modern day through interchanging chapters, it tells the story (mostly) of Yale, a young art gallery development director in 1980s Chicago, who is about to make his first big acquisition, just as the AIDS epidemic begins to rise around him. In present day, we follow one of the tertiary characters from the past as she searches for her daughter in Paris. But we're left wondering in the present day passages what happened in the past, and Makkai holds that tension until about two-thirds of the way through the book when we discover what happened to Yale and the friends he was surrounded with.

Leading Men

Another novel I loved from last year that had a similar past/present structure was Leading Men by Christopher Castellani. It imagines a lost week from Tennessee Williams' journals, when he and his partner Frank Merlo were invited to a party by Truman Capote in the hills of Italy. (What a premise!) The past chapters are told from Merlo's perspective as waits for Williams on his deathbed. The present chapters focus around an actress from the party who finds a lost Williams play, and wants to produce it in Provincetown. It's not only a fascinating piece of historical fiction, but it's beautifully written – there were some sentences I read that I found myself saying, "Gosh, I hope I can write sentences like that someday."

Want to see what else I’m reading? Check out my Bookshelf!