100 books like Autumn Country

The Elephant Vanishes includes two of my favorite stories by any contemporary writer.

Set in the forested vicinity of a factory that makes elephants, “The Dancing Dwarf” follows the adventures of a marvelous dwarf who once danced for the king, alas, now pursued by soldiers of the revolution. The other side of the spectrum, “The Last Lawn of the Afternoon” partakes of the fantastic only by osmosis. The care this teenage boy takes mowing and trimming his assigned lawns feels so real it reminds me of myself.

This range keeps the reader slightly off balance and full of expectation, which might not be so exciting if we weren’t in the hands of one of the finest practitioners of the craft anywhere in the world.  

Isabel Allende shows us marvels from South American traditions, archetypal stories with the excitement of passionate lovers and desperate bandits.

Once you finish the stories—not one a clunker—your mind will have been temporarily readjusted to the dangerous and fantastical world of deeply hidden human motivations. It’s as good as her autobiographical Paula, which is an education between covers. At first, I wouldn’t read Isabel Allende because two friends told me she imitated Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

I later learned they had not actually read any of her books. I decided to see for myself. Not true, I told them. Read the books.

This collection reads like realistic stories from the perspective of a single point-of-view that throws common life into the realm of the weirdly uncommon.

In fact, I kept reading to figure out what I was reading. What changed in the process? My own perception of the world in which we live. These people may be like us, but the writer looks at them with new and different eyes. These stories sneak up on you and take over your mind for a marvelously short time because it’s a short book of short stories—one I recommend because it’s so unusual.

Daniyal Mueenuddin derives the marvelous from the depiction of wealthy and poor Pakistani characters surviving as gracefully or gracelessly as humanly possible.

Reading at times like social anthropology, at times like magical realism, the stories are folk tales with inspections of and lessons about human foibles. Characters come to life with large and small schemes, machinations, and quasi-unconscious action that arises from a combination of tradition, desperation, and privilege.

The underlying humor, both dark and loving, is something the writer shares with the reader.  

In classical detective fiction, the story of the crime is like a puzzle, and piece by piece, clue by clue, we arrive at the big picture. Subdivision is, in some ways, a classic puzzle mystery (it even involves a puzzle!)—except it doesn’t start at a crime scene. It starts with a woman arriving at a guesthouse in the surreal and Kafkaesque Subdivision where she now lives. She can’t remember why she is there or really anything from her past.
Unlike more classical detective fiction, she is not a guide; I followed her—tracking, assembling, interpreting—but when certain elements of the real (maybe) slid into focus, they did so mostly despite her. I couldn’t put it down, and notwithstanding its fairly cerebral tone, I cried at the end.

This is the dirty realist poet, Charles Bukowski's, last novel and is filled with intriguing code and name-dropping of people he knew and was influenced by. As well as being as poetic as hell. Pulp also gives a glimpse of what it might have been like if Bukowski had lived on and ventured fully into crime fiction or pulp noir.

I love the book’s surface-level simplicity to draw you into its world. However, it then subversively lets bigger themes creep in: including surrealism and spiritualism, as the author faces his own death. All this with Bukowski’s deftly poetic touches.

This showed me how semi-autobiographical elements can fuse and influence fiction and vice versa. And, that it doesn't have to be hard to absorb or distract from the story. By acknowledging layers in writing which are there for those who want to peel back and discover them. And when they don’t,… show more.

Stephen J. Golds is a prolific powerhouse of dirty realist poetry and gritty modern crime fiction. I’ve been lucky enough to work with him on a number of projects now and admire his mind and words greatly. 

Say Goodbye When I’m Gone is a breakthrough work of art for someone well-studied in his craft. It’s punchy, atmospheric, and brutal…but also, so sensitively poetic and soulful.

Say Goodbye When I’m Gone, and his other books generally, are prime examples of how a masterwork doesn’t have to be a doorstop in page length. Like The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain, these gems of noir fiction are often in novella format. Soulful, concise, sharp, and lean. Like the best poetry, which Golds happens to be unsurprisingly masterful with too.

Imagine coming back from the dead only to realize the world doesn't want you: You move in with parents who are disgusted by you, random strangers on the street throw food or pull mean jokes on you and your friends, and being caught out past your curfew sends you to the dog pound. That's the life that Andy Warner reanimates into after a fatal accident. It's not all bad, though. At least he's got some friends at the Undead Anonymous support group, including the dead-sexy Rita, and Ray, a guy whose “venison” seems to come with some miraculous healing abilities. This is a darkly comedic book filled with a colorful cast, and you can't help but delight in the tragic spiral of the characters as they become increasingly inhuman. After all, can you blame them? 

The Wild Boys is at once dystopian and utopian, featuring a band of boys who’ve gone rogue and have perfected strange and poetically beautiful sex rites which allow them to ritually and meditatively conjure or reproduce more wild boy offspring. At once science fiction and fantastical in its imaginative scope, it is also, like all Burroughs’s work, a profound exploration of social control, the excesses and assumptions inherent in state and religious terror, and the sexual and erotic oppression and misunderstanding that is the real enemy of freedom. Fearless and experimental, Burroughs inspires me to be bold, blunt, and not afraid to disturb or offend in exploring the poetic and erotic relationships between all manner of ideas.

The Big Book of Hell is the holy grail of dark humor, packaged perfectly in a comic format. Growing up as a sarcastic kid from Brooklyn, this was the first humor book I read that I felt was aimed directly at my sensibilities. It has a very unique “substance-over-style” aesthetic that is striking and somehow managed to become widely identifiable. It dances around subjects, poking fun at the absurdities of the world it was written in. It really showed me that you don’t need to be a conventionally great artist to publish comics and that there is a market for dark humor comics. The book, which reads almost like a variety show, opened my eyes to ways to play with structure of an individual comic and a whole book.