Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a debut novelist who loves a good family drama. I’m a fiction professor at the University of Memphis, where I teach a course on the dysfunctional family novel featuring books on this list. I’m also an atheist, a bisexual, and a father to a one-year-old—all of which influenced my book. In addition to the novel, I’ve written a story collection called Quantum Convention. My stories have aired on Public Radio International’s Selected Shorts and appeared in American Short Fiction, Gulf Coast, and Electric Literature, among other journals. I also have a new essay up at Lit Hub about channeling my bisexuality through queer characters.


I wrote

Eli Harpo's Adventure to the Afterlife

By Eric Schlich,

Book cover of Eli Harpo's Adventure to the Afterlife

What is my book about?

When Eli Harpo was four, he underwent open-heart surgery, flatlined, and went to heaven. Or at least that’s what his…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of Middlesex

Eric Schlich Why did I love this book?

When it comes to family sagas turned myth, it’s hard to top Calliope Stephanides tracing the passage of the hermaphroditic gene—transforming Callie into Cal—through three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family.

An epic origin story that moves from Asia Minor to Detroit, Michigan, complete with incest and a nuanced exploration of gender identity. It also has one of my all-time favorite novel openings ever. “Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome!”

By Jeffrey Eugenides,

Why should I read it?

7 authors picked Middlesex as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974.'

So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and her truly unique family secret, born on the slopes of Mount Olympus and passed on through three generations.

Growing up in 70s Michigan, Calliope's special inheritance will turn her into Cal, the narrator of this intersex, inter-generational epic of immigrant life in 20th century America.

Middlesex won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.


Book cover of Beloved

Eric Schlich Why did I love this book?

This book would have to go on my list of top five novels ever. It’s a work of pure genius that I can re-read over and over.

Morrison’s magical realist rendering of Margaret Garner’s history—a slave’s murder of her child to free her from slavery—enters myth with Beloved’s reincarnation. The novel is about the aftermath of trauma, and the exorcism of Beloved shows Sethe overcoming the shame of the murder through the support of the Black community.

In Paul D’s words: “You are your best thing.” I also have a soft spot in my heart for Denver.

By Toni Morrison,

Why should I read it?

40 authors picked Beloved as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours... Beloved is a heart-breaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all' Margaret Atwood, New York Times

Discover this beautiful gift edition of Toni Morrison's prize-winning contemporary classic Beloved

It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her…


Book cover of Swamplandia!

Eric Schlich Why did I love this book?

My novel shares a kinship with this book, also set in a Florida theme park—although one less Noah’s ark and a lot more alligators.

The myth of the Bigtree family is a roadside attraction: the family matriarch Hilola Bigtree’s daredevil dive into a pit of gators. The novel begins after Hilola’s death from cancer, and grapples with the dissolution of the family and their loss of purpose with the closure of the park. Ava, Kiwi, and Osceola are all on their own paths through the void their parents left behind.

Russell’s world-building is always top-notch, and here, the siblings must navigate a Bird Man, the World of Darkness, and ghost boyfriends.

By Karen Russell,

Why should I read it?

6 authors picked Swamplandia! as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

New York Times Bestseller | Pulitzer Prize Finalist

"Ms. Russell is one in a million. . . . A suspensfuly, deeply haunted book."--The New York Times

Thirteen-year-old Ava Bigtree has lived her entire life at Swamplandia!, her family’s island home and gator-wrestling theme park in the Florida Everglades. But when illness fells Ava’s mother, the park’s indomitable headliner, the family is plunged into chaos; her father withdraws, her sister falls in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, defects to a rival park called The World of Darkness.

As Ava sets out…


Book cover of The Family Fang

Eric Schlich Why did I love this book?

Wilson’s novels often interrogate art and morality in a hilarious fashion.

In this book, siblings Annie and Buster struggle to overcome their childhood personas of Child A and Child B in their parents’ performance art pieces. When Caleb and Camille disappear under mysterious circumstances, Annie and Buster must investigate to find out if their parents are really dead or if this is yet another elaborate scheme in the name of art.

What is real? What is artifice? Can they escape the myth of their parents’ making and find a healthier way to make their own art?

By Kevin Wilson,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Family Fang as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Mr and Mrs Fang called it art. Their children called it mischief. Performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang dedicated themselves to making great art. But when an artist's work lies in subverting normality, it can be difficult to raise well-adjusted children. Just ask Buster and Annie Fang. For as long as they can remember, they starred (unwillingly) in their parents madcap pieces. But now that they are grown up, the chaos of their childhood has made it difficult to cope with life outside the fishbowl of their parent’s strange world.

When the lives they’ve built come crashing down, brother and…


Book cover of Tom Lake

Eric Schlich Why did I love this book?

This book is the most recently published novel on this list. I love all of Patchett’s works, but this one, in particular, was a delight in its use of its frame—Lara telling the story of her acting career and fling with Peter Duke to her three daughters while quarantining during the pandemic in the family cherry orchard.

Each of the daughters has built up the myth of Lara’s brief brush with fame, but in a twist of dramatic irony, only the reader gets the full story.

By Ann Patchett,

Why should I read it?

32 authors picked Tom Lake as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER * THE NO. 1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A REESE WITHERSPOON AND BBC RADIO 2 BOOK CLUB PICK 'A new Ann Patchett novel is always cause for celebration ... and Tom Lake is one of her best' i 'This comforting summer read has it all ... Young love, sibling rivalry and deep mother-daughter relationships' REESE WITHERSPOON 'Filled with the moments I live for in a story' BONNIE GARMUS, author of Lessons in Chemistry 'One of the most beloved authors of her generation' SUNDAY TIMES ----------------------------- This is a story about Peter Duke who went on…


Explore my book 😀

Eli Harpo's Adventure to the Afterlife

By Eric Schlich,

Book cover of Eli Harpo's Adventure to the Afterlife

What is my book about?

When Eli Harpo was four, he underwent open-heart surgery, flatlined, and went to heaven. Or at least that’s what his father, a devout Baptist minister, raised him to believe. Now, at age thirteen, Eli’s no longer so sure.

But when the famous televangelist Charlie Gideon shows up with a proposal to create a new attraction based on Eli’s trip to the afterlife at his Bible-themed park, Eli can’t say no. As the Harpos head off on a rollicking road trip from Kentucky to Bible World in Orlando, Eli is left to grapple with not just his faith and his sexuality but also his own parents’ messy humanity and what happens when a family held together by mythmaking starts coming apart at the seams.

Book cover of Middlesex
Book cover of Beloved
Book cover of Swamplandia!

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Conditions are Different After Dark

By Owen W. Knight,

Book cover of Conditions are Different After Dark

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Why am I passionate about this?

Author Visionary Compassionate Imaginative Conspiracist Apophenia (or apophenic)

Owen's 3 favorite reads in 2023

What is my book about?

In 1662, a man is wrongly executed for signing the death warrant of Charles I. Awaiting execution, he asks to speak with a priest, to whom he declares a curse on the village that betrayed him. The priest responds with a counter-curse, leaving just one option to nullify it.

Four centuries later, Faith and James move to the country to start a new life and a family. They discover their village lives under the curse uttered by the hanged man. Could their arrival be connected? They fear their choice of new home is no coincidence. Unexplained events hint at threats…

Conditions are Different After Dark

By Owen W. Knight,

What is this book about?

In 1660, a man is wrongly executed for signing the death warrant of Charles I. While awaiting execution, he asks to speak with a priest, to whom he declares a curse on the village that betrayed him. The priest responds with a counter-curse, leaving just one option to nullify it.
Over four centuries later, Faith and James move to the country to start a new life and a family. They learn that their village lives under the curse uttered by the hanged man. Could their arrival be connected?
Faith and James fear that their choice of a new home is…


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