I love it when a writer breaks the rules of a genre like fiction, nonfiction, or poetry to tell a story that can’t be contained in a typical way. Here are five books that think outside the box to narrate a tale that wants to be told in its own fashion.
Manuel Puig (1932–1990) was an Argentine novelist best known for writing The Kiss of the Spider Woman, made into a great movie with William Hurt and Raul Julia. This book, my first recommendation, is about a tangled love affair.
Puig tells the story by collaging together letters the characters write to each other, items in advice for the lovelorn columns, obituaries he invented, and a whole host of other texts. The reader has to put all the clues together like a detective solving a mystery. The book is beautifully translated into English by Suzanne Jill Levine.
Eva Saulitis’ gorgeous book is a meditation on how humanity has wounded nature and how those wounds manifested in her own body as she lived with breast cancer till the end of her truncated life. Widely published as both a poet and a marine biologist who studied orca whales, Eva Saulitis spins together lyrical phrasing with her deep knowledge of science.
The language is stunning, even more remarkable when the reader remembers that she is recording her thoughts when she knows they will soon come to an inevitable end. Here’s an example of her beautiful writing when Saulitis recalls her childhood by the Great Lakes: “Lake Erie could be untamed, wild, a shape-shifter. Midwinter, it froze into a sastrugi-chiseled white expanse, the shoreline berg-choked.”
After beating breast cancer in her late forties, Eva Saulitis again faces the shadow, knowing this time the result will not end well. Saulitis revels in the nostalgia and secret pleasures that come from knowing it's all fleeting. She searches for answers from European poets and Buddhist scholars, from women in treatment chat rooms, from family, from routine; she looks out into the wilderness, at the salmon dying in the river without the ease of morphine, at stone structures broken from water freezing, expanding inside. Becoming Earth is the account of a woman living life in the presence of death,…
The Bible is the greatest mystery novel ever written. It begins in the Old Testament with seemingly random accounts of ancient people in far away places with strange customs. There’s the prophecy of a coming Hero who will conquer the villain and restore peace to the land. The mystery reaches…
André Breton’s book is a patchwork of literary forms, crazy-quilted together to form an amazing image of the world during World War II. At that time, Breton was in exile from Nazi-occupied France, and he visited Quebec in Canada to experience again the comfort and familiarity of being in a French-speaking land.
The book is part poetry and part prose, sometimes a journal, at other times a political meditation, and then a series of stories from mythology and the mystic Tarot. Breton’s ultimate take on living through a world war for the second time is that our daily existence needs to be re-impassioned to prevent violence from becoming the alternative to the mundane. I was fortunate to translate this classic from French to English.
André Breton wrote Arcanum 17 during a trip to the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec in the months after D-Day in 1944, when the Allied troops were liberating Occupied Europe. Using the huge Percé Rock-its impermanence, its slow-motion crumbling, its singular beauty-as his central metaphor, Breton considers love and loss, aggression and war, pacifism, feminism and the occult, in a book that is part prose and part poetry, part reality and part dream. In the 17th card in the Major Arcana of the Tarot deck, a naked woman beneath a sky of stars pours water from two urns into water and…
In this book, W.G. Sebald tells the stories of four Germans who, like the author, left their native land to live abroad. Sebald mixes family memories with stream-of-consciousness musings on history and culture. He inserts unexpected elements into the text, including a found diary written by his Great-Uncle Adelwarth, a gay man who was out of the closet way before it was safe.
Sebald sprinkles into the narrative black and white period photos that have a sort of deadpan, documentary humor that perfectly matches the tone of his prose.
The four long narratives in The Emigrants appear at first to be the straightforward biographies of four Germans in exile. Sebald reconstructs the lives of a painter, a doctor, an elementary-school teacher, and Great Uncle Ambrose. Following (literally) in their footsteps, the narrator retraces routes of exile which lead from Lithuania to London, from Munich to Manchester, from the South German provinces to Switzerland, France, New York, Constantinople, and Jerusalem. Along with memories, documents, and diaries of the Holocaust, he collects photographs-the enigmatic snapshots which stud The Emigrants and bring to mind family photo albums. Sebald combines precise documentary with…
This book is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to…
My book is a memoir about someone I never really knew: my dad, Lee Rogow. He was a widely published fiction writer, drama critic and glamorous man-about-town in Manhattan of the 1950s, captain of a submarine-chaser in World War II—and he died tragically in a plane crash when I was only three.
To solve the mystery of who my dad really was, I created a hybrid mix of my father’s confidential writings that had sat in my sister’s basement for seven decades, vintage photos from World War II and the 1950s, and imaginary conversations between myself and my dad.
In May 1941, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, hums with talk of spring flowers, fishing derbies, and the growing war in Europe. And for the residents of a quiet neighborhood boarding house, the winds of change are blowing.
Self-proclaimed spinster, Bessie Blackwell, is the reluctant owner of a new pair of glasses. The…
Those People Behind Us is set in the summer of 2017, post-Trump election and pre-pandemic. The story takes place in the fictional city of Wellington Beach, California, a suburban coastal town increasingly divided by politics, protests, and escalating housing prices. These divisions change the lives of five neighbors--a real estate…
