Here are 100 books that Arcadia fans have personally recommended if you like
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Flannery O’Connor once said that all fiction is ultimately about the “mystery of personality.” I agree. In fact, I have always suspected that all good novels, genre-based or otherwise, are secretly mystery novels, if only in the psychological sense. Conversely, many so-called genre novels have just as much depth, insight, and realism as any literary work. I have read a lot of genre and literary fiction in my time, and I have long been fascinated by works that blur the line between the two. My favorite kind of book is one that feels like a genre novel (that is, it has a great plot) but also has the depth and vividness of a literary novel.
This is my favorite novel. I read it every year or so, and each time, I feel like it makes my own writing better.
Set in the latter years of the Vietnam War, it tells the story of two friends—Converse, a war-traumatized journalist, and Hicks, a world-weary, cynical marine—who smuggle three kilos of heroin back to Berkeley, California.
I love the realism of this book, but it might be too brutal were it not tempered by how intelligent and sympathetic the main characters are, even when doing terrible things. The book feels exactly like a crime/adventure novel, exploring the dark underbelly of the counterculture in the 1970s. It’s also an amazingly complex and philosophical novel about the balance between morality and ego.
In Saigon during the last stages of the Vietnam War, a small-time journalist named John Converse thinks he'll find action - and profit - by getting involved in a big-time drug deal. But back in the States, things go horribly wrong. His courier disappears, probably with his wife, and a corrupt Fed wants Converse to find him the drugs, or else.
Dog Soldiers is a frightening, powerful, intense novel that perfectly captures the underground mood of the United States in the 1970s, when amateur drug dealers and hippies encountered the violent world of cops on the make and professional killers.…
I grew up living in a housing co-op on Vancouver Island, BC. While not technically a commune, it did have some of the hallmarks. There were gangs of partially clothed kids roaming wild. There were a bunch of idealistic adults who had dreams of shared land stewardship and, well, shared everything. The housing project succeeded in many ways (it still exists today) and, it failed in other ways (over the years there were many fractures in the community). I’ve always been fascinated by attempts at communal living. I suppose my obsession with cult life is just an extension of this. It is my life imagined one step further.
If you’re as obsessed with Charles Manson as I am, you’ll love this novel, which tells the story of Evie, a bored and misguided 14-year-old girl who ends up inadvertently joining a cult that, while not directly stated to be the Manson cult, certainly alludes to it.
In this cult, the leader is Russell Hadrick, and though I find him less charismatic than Manson, he wields the same power over people. The other cult members and their eventual crime is the same as the real-world cult too. What I’m most impressed with about this book is the way it details everyday cult life, what with its musty piles of communal clothes, the tedium of chores, and the listlessness of too many people with too much time on their hands.
A gripping and dark fictionalised account of life inside the Manson family from one of the most exciting young voices in fiction.
If you're lost, they'll find you...
Evie Boyd is fourteen and desperate to be noticed.
It's the summer of 1969 and restless, empty days stretch ahead of her. Until she sees them. The girls. Hair long and uncombed, jewelry catching the sun. And at their centre, Suzanne, black-haired and beautiful.
If not for Suzanne, she might not have gone. But, intoxicated by her and the life she promises, Evie follows the girls back to the decaying ranch where…
I came of age during the tumult of the 1960s and 1970s. I stood more on the sidelines than at the burning center, so I’ve always wondered what it was like for those who did. That’s why I wrote my first novel, to go beyond the borders of my own experience. The 60s/70s era of political and sexual upheaval has reduced itself over time to a series of cliches. What I love about the books on my list is how willing they are to break through to real feelings and events and sensations. Hope you like them, too.
I’ve always loved how Philip Roth populates his fiction with transgressors. It’s hard not to envy their boldness, bad as they may be. Narrated by Roth’s stand-in, bad boy Nathan Zuckerman,American Pastoral focuses on Zuckerman’s high school idol, ‘Swede’ Levov. Swede’s triumphs on the sporting field and later in business, anoint him for a life marked by pure American success. His inevitable fall from grace feels moving and tragic and infuriating. Swede can’t comprehend how his darling teenage daughter has become an anti-Viet Nam War terror bomber, responsible for bystander death. No happy lessons here. Read American Pastoral if you like books that leave you with as many questions as answers—the way life does.
Philip Roth's fiction has often explored the human need to demolish, to challenge, to oppose, to pull apart. Now, writing with deep understanding, with enormous power and scope and great storytelling energy, he focuses on the counterforce: the longing for an ordinary life. Seymour 'Swede' Levov - a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's glove factory - comes of age in thriving, triumphant, postwar America. He has a beautiful wife - Miss New Jersey 1949 - and a lively, precocious daughter, Merry. She is the apple of his eye…
Given the state of the world today, laughter truly is the best coping mechanism. The best satire is all about excess in design, intention, characterization, and deployment of attitude. The more extreme, the better; leave restraint to the prudish moralists!
Really hard to pick just one Pynchon for this list, as he is an all-around master of satire. But Inherent Vice is probably his LOL funniest, a stoner take on the detective genre set in the hippie world of 1970s southern California. The cinematic adaptation by Paul Thomas Anderson ain’t half bad, either.
Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon-Private eye Doc Sportello surfaces, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era
In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre that is at once exciting and accessible, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there.
It's been a while since Doc Sportello has seen his ex- girlfriend. Suddenly she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. It's the tail…
Maybe it’s because I come from a family that expresses conflict, shall we say, indirectly, but nothing fascinates me the way relationships do. What do we desire, what do we offer? And how much more do we care about friendships and family bonds than world peace? I also love stories about passions we pursue professionally, and ever since I fell in love with the food and wine world, that’s the world I’ve written about and the world in which my characters’ intense relationships play out. Real drama plays out over a drink or at a dinner table, and of course a glass of wine only unleashes a little more.
Is there no end to my obsession with adolescent friendship? Apparently not.
Adolescence is the moment when everything blossoms, collides, and explodes: Sils and Berie were inseparable and insufferable teenagers together (it’s okay, we all were) and Berie is looking back on the summer they were fifteen from her own flawed marriage years later.
They were just girls: smoking and drinking, leaving each other cottage cheese sandwiches after school, strumming guitars, cracking on Sils’s besotted, lunkhead boyfriend. Then why does it feel like such a lost paradise to Berie and to us? Because this is the moment you feel adult powers awaken, before you grasp the consequences of your power. Because no one is running the frog hospital. Because it’ll never be that vivid again.
"Touches and dazzles and entertains. An enchanting novel." --The New York Times
In this moving, poignant novel by the bestselling author of Birds of America we share a grown woman’s bittersweet nostalgia for the wildness of her youth.
The summer Berie was fifteen, she and her best friend Sils had jobs at Storyland in upstate New York where Berie sold tickets to see the beautiful Sils portray Cinderella in a strapless evening gown. They spent their breaks smoking, joking, and gossiping. After work they followed their own reckless rules, teasing the fun out of small town life, sleeping in the…
I grew up in a large family that initially didn’t include my mother or father. My mother made the sacrifice of leaving our island of Trinidad to make a home for us in Canada. She was separated from us for years while my grandparents raised me and my brothers. I think that type of upbringing triggered my curiosity about what a family can be. When I became a father at 18, the question of what kind of family I would build became the central theme of my life. It still is today, which is why stories that revolve around family are so captivating for me.
Oh, this book was so spicy. It felt like reading someone’s personal journal mixed with celebrity gossip. I almost felt guilty for enjoying all of the drama in the home, which was the primary setting for most of the novel. I laughed and giggled and tried to put this book down, but it was no use.
What I admired most about this novel was the subtlety. Even though there was plenty of drama, the book felt almost calm (in the best way possible). None of the events felt super shocking or out of place. As an author, I just love how Kincaid was able to find that balance.
The coming-of-age story of one of Jamaica Kincaid's most admired creations--available now in an e-book edition.
Lucy, a teenage girl from the West Indies, comes to America to work as an au pair for a wealthy couple. She begins to notice cracks in their beautiful façade at the same time that the mysteries of own sexuality begin to unravel. Jamaica Kincaid has created a startling new heroine who is destined to win a place of honor in contemporary fiction.
Father-daughter relationships have always fascinated me. I wrote my first book to explore what it might be like for a girl to have a father with whom communication is, if not easy, possible. Although my own father was around when I was growing up, he was a distant figure. A mechanical engineer, he lost himself in ruminations on machines and mathematics and was made still more distant by his alcoholism. As a kid, I tried to glean from books what having a “regular” father might be like. I still haven’t figured it out, but I love seeing other authors capture the formative effects of this particular parental relationship.
It can be difficult for kids to see their parents as real people, and that’s why I loveSome Places More Than Others. When Amara finally convinces her parents she should get to go on a trip with her dad to New York City’s Harlem to meet the grandfather she’s only spoken to on the phone, she uncovers the fact that her dad and her grandfather haven’t spoken in twelve years. I love the depiction of Amara’s father as a person in his own right, someone with a history and his own problems and how, as Amara slowly unravels the mysteries of her father’s past, she begins to understand herself better too.
From Newbery Honor- and Coretta Scott King Author Award-winning, New York Times bestselling author Renée Watson comes a heartwarming and inspiring novel for middle schoolers about finding deep roots and exploring the past, the present, and the places that make us who we are.
All Amara wants for her birthday is to visit her father's family in New York City--Harlem, to be exact. She can't wait to finally meet her Grandpa Earl and cousins in person, and to stay in the brownstone where her father grew up. Maybe this will help her understand her family--and herself--in new way.
The books I recommend have stayed with me years after I read them. I’ve always been fascinated by my Jewish heritage and the rich traditions of my forebearers. I’ve incorporated some of that heritage in my own work as an author. Most recently, I published a historical novel about the Jewish Ghetto in Rome, which took me down a rabbit hole of research into Jewish literature. I revisited books I’d loved for decades and discovered new books I loved.
I loved this book when I read it years ago, and I immediately started reading anything I could find by this compelling author.
Through his fine writing, I was able to live in the world of Asher, a young artist grappling with the conflict of being true to his work without defying the tenets of his religion.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this modern classic from the National Book Award–nominated author of The Chosen, a young religious artist is compulsively driven to render the world he sees and feels, even when it leads him to blasphemy.
“A novel of finely articulated tragic power .... Little short of a work of genius.”—The New York Times Book Review
Asher Lev is a Ladover Hasid who keeps kosher, prays three times a day and believes in the Ribbono Shel Olom, the Master of the Universe. He grows up in a cloistered Hasidic community in postwar Brooklyn, a world suffused by ritual…
Much laughter is born out of sadness. Humor can be a way to cope or even reinvent our realities in ways that bring relief—and release. There's a misconception that “serious literature” should be humorless; crack a smile and you’re a fraud. However, the worlds and characters that emerge from this way of thinking do not ring true to me. Who among us hasn’t joked to help deal with sorrow? Or to satirize the outrageous? Or simply because life--however brutal—is also sometimes funny? The more a writer allows laughter to intermingle with tears, the more I believe in the story, and the more I enjoy it. That is why I wrote a “funny-sad” novel, The Australian.
Oreo (originally published in 1974, then out of print, and finally repopularized by Harriette Mullen and republished in 2000), a satirical novel by Fran Ross, a journalist and, briefly, a comedy writer for Richard Pryor, is widely considered to be “before its time.” This aching and hilarious, experimentally structured story is about a girl, Oreo, with a Jewish father and a Black mother, who ventures to New York City to find her father only to discover there are hundreds of Sam Schwartzes in the phonebook, and then goes on a quest to find him.
Oreo is raised by her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. Her black mother tours with a theatrical troupe, and her Jewish deadbeat dad disappeared when she was an infant, leaving behind a mysterious note that triggers her quest to find him. What ensues is a playful, modernized parody of the classical odyssey of Theseus with a feminist twist, immersed in seventies pop culture, and mixing standard English, black vernacular, and Yiddish with wisecracking aplomb. Oreo, our young hero, navigates the labyrinth of sound studios and brothels and subway tunnels in Manhattan, seeking to claim her birthright while unwittingly experiencing and triggering…
I have lived in the US, and particularly lived and worked in New York, for many years. How the events of 9/11 changed the city, its people, and the perceptions of the people all around the country and the world has always intrigued me. 9/11 has put up a prism through which experiences have emanated out in a kaleidoscopic range of stories. A banker by day and a cynical blogger by night, I have traveled the world and have met many interesting people with compelling backgrounds and have experienced many peculiar and beautiful things. I love to explore the confluence of fascinating narrative arcs and life-altering events.
A precocious and inquisitive child Oskar goes on a treasure hunt around New York to solve a mystery left behind by his father who had died on 9/11.
In his quest, you see a child seeking to stay close to his father a little while longer. In his streams of consciousness and hyperactive imagination, you feel him trying to fill the void left behind by a supportive father figure.
With the sheer weight of his innocence, he gets strangers to open up to him, let him into their lives, and add to their life stories. In a moving manner, the narrative follows the path that Oskar, his mother and his grandfather take in dealing with trauma and finding closure in their own personal ways.
From the critically acclaimed author of Here I Am, Everything is Illuminated and We are the Weather - a heartrending and unforgettable novel set in the aftermath of the 9/11
'Utterly engaging, hugely involving, tragic, funny and intensely moving... A heartbreaker' Spectator
'The most incredible fictional nine-year-old ever created... a funny, heart-rending portrayal of a child coping with disaster. It will have you biting back the tears' Glamour
'Pulsates with dazzling ideas' Times Literary Supplement
'It's a miracle... So impeccably imagined, so courageously executed, so everlastingly moving' Baltimore Sun…
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