nova
Influences
My favorite books tend to have strong first-person voices with characters who are brutally honest and who do questionable things, often to themselves. I love intense novels and breathless short stories. I like to read about hidden things, terrible secrets, degrading acts, unhappy lives, and everyday magic. I like it when a fairy tale is turned on its head. I like it when there seems to be No Way Out and then, just when we hit bottom, we find out maybe there is. The best reading experience is when I come away feeling gutted, the book having torn out a piece of me as I reach the last page. The books below made lasting impressions at significant moments in my life. There are some I have read, and will read, multiple times—each time finding a new passage that speaks to me at just that moment. Others I have read just once, and that once was enough, and I won’t ruin the memory by reading them again.
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
The Last Life by Claire Messud
A Feather on the Breath of God by Sigrid Nunez
Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender
Borrowed Finery by Paula Fox
Look at Me by Jennifer Egan
Eva Moves the Furniture by Margot Livesey
Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson
The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid
Drown by Junot Diaz
Live Girls by Beth Nugent
Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Thicker Than Water by Kathryn Harrison
The End of Alice by A.M. Homes
Use Me by Elissa Schappell
That Night by Alice McDermott
Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig
Hunger by Lan Samantha Chang
Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
Cracks by Sheila Kohler
The stories of Alice Munro
And the Dorrie the Witch books by Patricia Coombs
There are many more, I’m sure, that I’m forgetting…
I also collect stories from literary journals, which I keep in binders to read again and again. I now have seven binders full, and counting. The first-ever story was by Jesse Lee Kercheval, discovered in a writing workshop in college. The most recent story was found in Tin House, one of my most favorite literary journals.
I absolutely love Wide Sargasso Sea! I preferred it to Jane Eyre (someone was horrified with me once for saying that but it’s true!) My copy was pinched while I was at university, so I bought another one from a secondhand shop. But that copy is now living with my parents in another country. I’m hoping to be reunited with it this July… if it hasn’t been reunited with the secondhand shop.
I will be checking out some of the other books on this list, I love a good book recommendation.
Isn’t Wide Sargasso Sea incredible? I also preferred it to Jane Eyre. I read Jane Eyre as a kid and it made a big impression on me, and then I read Wide Sargasso Sea in college. It was a surprise and expanded on what I’d imagined of Jane Eyre when I was young. I love Jean Rhys. Here’s to hoping you are reunited with your book in July!
Drown changed my world and what I thought of short fiction. Great list.
Have you read (surely, you must have!) The Plague by Albert Camus?
That, along with Joanne Harris’s Coastliners is my current favourite!
Narziss: Eek, I haven’t. I haven’t read Coastliners either. Thank you!
Wow, those are great choices. I see you are a Euginedes fan–I haven’t read his stuff yet.