The best books where being a hot mess is presented as an empowering lifestyle

Unlike Welty’s works featuring honorable or broadly comic characters, this dense story cycle was never excerpted in anthologies. It’s a trickier cast: consider Jinny Love Stark and Virgie Rainey, who cut through the languor of Depression-era Mississippi with stone-cold intention. Jinny Love plays croquet with her lover to enrage her volatile husband; she encourages her daughter to wear lizards as earrings to offend the propriety of her own controlling mother. Impoverished piano prodigy Virgie flouts her gift merely to watch her teacher go mad. Later, she trims her dead mother’s yard with sewing scissors while neighbors do the real work of laying out the body and receiving mourners. The heat presses forward. What day is it? What hour? This is weird, experimental Welty, and the payoff is sweet.

I’m 51 and my twin sister and I have always lived together, which some people find peculiar. Sisters Merricat and Constance Blackwood also live together, shut off in infamy after one of them is accused of murdering their parents, aunt, and brother. They spend tranquil days in the remnants of the family estate, a place that was spooky even before the old house burned half to the ground and got ransacked by villagers. Shirley Jackson’s slim novel, one of her lesser-known works, is a primer of introvert goals disguised as a gothic fairy tale. Even though there’s a 50% chance of guessing the “mystery,” you’ll still be surprised when you find out which sister put arsenic in the table sugar.

For uptight readers like me who can barely handle a stiff drink, the Druggy Road Trip genre can feel dumb and snobbish. But Johnson’s close, lucid prose is, well, addictive. Strung out in small-town ’70s America, a young guy called F**khead navigates unreality in 11 intertwined stories. The collection is just over 100 pages, and by the end, F**khead finds himself across the country and in rehab. But sobriety isn’t even the point. Passages like this are: “Georgie and I had a terrific time driving around. For a while the day was clear and peaceful. It was one of the moments you stay in, to hell with all the troubles of before or after. The sky is blue and the dead are coming back.”

Now 91, the Canadian short-story guru won The Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013. She also made “Southern Ontario Gothic” a genre. Where to start in Selected Stories’ canon of genius? At the end, with “Vandals,” the last, long story in this important early anthology. Under the guise of house sitting, a rootless young woman, Liza, desecrates the home of Bea and Ladner, an older couple whose taxidermy-filled rural property was her childhood playground. Ladner has recently died, and Bea and Liza have maintained a friendly correspondence—and so Liza’s violent act seems bizarre and random. Her reasons for wrecking the place are proven emotionally valid, but the reveal is so subtle, so masterful, it might make everything else you’ve ever read (or written) feel overdone.

Moshfegh revels in gross bodily functions, using them almost as an artistic palette. If it stinks, bleeds, sweats, erupts, or otherwise makes you gag, it shows up in her celebrated book of short stories, individually published in Paris Review, The New Yorker, and Granta before being collected in Homesick. Just by its title, the story “Slumming” could stand for the whole. A depressed, middle-aged, New York City schoolteacher sleeps all her summers away, holing up and doing hard drugs in an equally depressed Upstate hamlet, where the local “zombies,” i.e. young opioid dealers, emerge as the most stable element, always there to sell sweet oblivion. The story lambasts sentimental rural regionalism but also serves as a surreal paradigm of self-care.