Soap operas may have no actual relation to soap—the term comes from radio dramas that were sponsored by soap companies—but they’re certainly related to opera, full of melodrama and grandiosity. With my second novel, a multi-generational family saga, my goal was to write a literary soap opera. I wanted it to be finely crafted, attuned to language and characterization, but also dishy, riddled with heightened drama, vivid personalities, and theatrical events. Below are five literary soap operas I studied while writing my own.
For years I described my second novel by saying, “It’s like One Hundred Years of Solitude, except instead of South America it’s set in the American South.” I must have used that line two dozen times. When I was halfway through writing my book, I decided it would probably be a good idea to actually read Gabriel García Márquez’s novel.
How stupid I was to have waited so long! I’m hardly the first to claim this, but One Hundred Years of Solitude, about the many generations of the Buendía family, is one of the greatest literary achievements in far more than a hundred years. It’s one of the greatest in a thousand years, and thousands more to come.
One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, and alive with unforgettable men and women -- brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul -- this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.
The same way hearing “soap opera” used as a pejorative upsets me so much I want to fake my own death, frame my estranged father for murder, and wrest control of his business empire, hearing “fairy tale” used that way makes me want to wave a wand and turn the detractors of science fiction and fantasy into horny toads.
John Crowley’s Little, Big, winner of the World Fantasy Award, is not only a fairy tale with actual fairies, but also one that’s an actual tale. So many novels described as literary forget to tell a story. This is not one of them. In Little, Big, you’ll meet the charismatic Drinkwater family; I would say more, but it’s best if you see for yourself where this tale takes them.
Edgewood is many houses, all put inside each other, or across each other. It's filled with and surrounded by mystery and enchantment: the further in you go, the bigger it gets.
Smoky Barnable, who has fallen in love with Daily Alice Drinkwater, comes to Edgewood, her family home, where he finds himself drawn into a world of magical strangeness.
Crowley's work has a special alchemy - mixing the world we know with an imagined world which seems more true and real. Winner of the WORLD FANTASY AWARD, LITTLE, BIG is eloquent, sensual, funny and unforgettable, a true Fantasy Masterwork.
This short-story collection—the cover calls it a novel, but let’s be honest, it’s really a (brilliant) collection of (beautifully) interconnected stories—maximizes the concept of multi-generationalism. Each story follows the subsequent generations of a family rooted in Ghana. With cool, precise prose, Gyasi follows two branches of the family across continents and through real-world events, populating each generation with characters who both represent and defy the circumstances of their historical milieu. Homegoing weds the historical to the personal to create that rare thing: a work of fiction that’s profound, true, and vibrantly alive.
Effia and Esi: two sisters with two very different destinies. One sold into slavery; one a slave trader's wife. The consequences of their fate reverberate through the generations that follow. Taking us from the Gold Coast of Africa to the cotton-picking plantations of Mississippi; from the missionary schools of Ghana to the dive bars of Harlem, spanning three continents and seven generations, Yaa Gyasi has written a miraculous novel - the intimate, gripping story of a brilliantly vivid cast of characters and through their lives the very story of America itself.…
History can be a challenge and a rebuke to novelists. How can we expect, I’ve often wondered, to create a work of the imagination as surprising and majestic as the trajectory of time? World’s End is T.C. Boyle’s answer to that question. Set in the Hudson River Valley and spanning four centuries, with enough characters to fill a three-page list of them in the front matter, this darkly comic, brightly tragic novel proves that history doesn’t repeat, as the saying goes, nor does it rhyme. History braids, over and over, strand upon strand, and the only people who can see the tapestry are those who take a step back. Boyle, like all great historical novelists, knows how to step back.
Haunted by the burden of his family's traitorous past, woozy with pot, cheap wine and sex, and disturbed by a frighteningly real encounter with some family ghosts, Walter van Brunt is about to have a collision with history.
It will lead Walter to search for his lost father. And it will send the story into the past of the Hudson River Valley, from the late 1960's back to the anticommunist riots of the 1940's to the late seventeenth century, where the long-hidden secrets of three families--the aristocratic van Warts, the Native-American Mohonks, and Walter's own ancestors, the van Brunts--will be…
In his review of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, the critic James Wood coined the term “hysterical realism” to describe novels in which “stories and sub-stories sprout on every page.” My immediate response to that description? “I want to write a book like that!”
Although I soon realized, after reading the rest of Wood’s review, he meant the term as a criticism of Smith’s novel, my desire to write that sort of book, one with an abundance and exuberance of narrative, was reinvigorated by reading the text itself. White Teeth is at once hilarious and heartbreaking, outlandish and grounded, a sensational work of sensationalism. It reads like the juiciest gossip from your most erudite friend. Where’s the tea? Right here, waiting to be poured.
One of the most talked about fictional debuts of recent years, "White Teeth" is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike. Dealing - among many other things - with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle, it is a life-affirming, riotous must-read of a book.
A stylish and witty epic saga of family, ambition, tragedy, and passion, American Pop by Snowden Wright brings to life one unforgettable Southern dynasty, the Forsters, founders of the world’s first major soft-drink company.
Blending fact and fiction, the mundane and the mythical, American Pop is an irresistible tour de force of original storytelling. Utilizingtechniques of historical reportage, the novel captures how, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s words, “families are always rising and falling in America,” and explores the many ways in which nostalgia can manipulate cultural memory—and the stories we choose to tell about ourselves.
Constance is a wild, stubborn young girl growing up poor in a small industrial town in the late 1800's. Beneath her thread-worn exterior beats the heart of a dreamer and a wordsmith. But at age twelve, she’s orphaned. Running away to join the circus—like kids do in adventure books—seems like such a brilliant idea…or is it?
"Flight to Brassbright appeals to my inner child's desire for adventure and independence as well as my (mostly) grown-up desire for really well-written stories that capture my imagination and hold my attention." - Tricia, Amazon Reviewer
"...well plotted with a likable protagonist...upbeat with…
Constance is a wild, stubborn young girl growing up poor in a small industrial town in the late 1800's. Beneath her thread-worn exterior beats the heart of a dreamer and a wordsmith. But at age twelve, she’s orphaned. Running away to join the circus—like kids do in adventure books—seems like such a brilliant idea… or is it?
