100 books like For the Relief of Unbearable Urges

Georgia-born Flannery O’Connor gifted the world with dozens of stories, which can be read individually or collectively.

Set on farms, in small towns, and off-the-beaten path, she colorfully explores both people and places, inviting readers along to do the same. Some stories are folksy, some are humorous, and some are dark, but one thread is constant: her highly individualized style is built on strong literary conventions.  

One of my top short story writers, the word ‘unique’ was invented for Saunders. Selling in the literary category, he has a vernacular style all his own. His stories comment on American society and the horrors of capitalism but never shove a message down your throat. Saunders is simply immersed in these concerns and it comes out naturally in his writing. His stories contain sci-fi and futuristic elements, and use these, as well as a deadpan surrealism, to comment on the now. The story I will never forget from this collection is "The Semplica Girl Diaries", in which ‘Semplica Girls’, women from ‘third-world’ countries, are trafficked to be used as human lawn ornaments. Saunders faces things head-on, with dark hilarity.

If you’ve read all 783 pages of World of Our Fathers and are still looking for more about early Jewish-American life in New York—or just something more immediate—this is the book for you.

An autobiographical fever-dream of a novel, Jews Without Money is a vivid, violent, look at the life of the Jewish slum kids whose parents emigrated to America. A lifelong communist, Gold only wrote one novel, but it anticipates the hallucinatory fiction of writers like Denis Johnson by half a century.

At once entirely Jewish and entirely American, Jews Without Money gives an unvarnished first-person glimpse into the surreal world of turn-of-the-century New York. 

While we all know Kurt Vonnegut as a brilliant satirist, his humor very often is covering something incredibly dark that is lurking just under the surface. I find Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan can make me go from laughing at the absurdity of a situation to tears at the outcome, all of this in a matter of a few sentences. 

His writing is so tight and clean, but his storytelling is richly layered. While I’ve read this book several dozen times, I still find something new upon every re-read. It’s like it has something new to show me on each reading. 

Vonnegut was the first to teach me humor and horror are but two sides to the same coin.

I read somewhere that Franz Kafka would laugh so loud when writing his stories that he woke up his neighbors. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I get it. It’s not what is commonly thought of when someone talks about Kafka’s stories. I mean, his name has come to mean a certain style. “Kafkaesque” is used to describe stories that are absurd, nightmarish, offensive, and heavy with bureaucratic pretentiousness and deceit.

Where is the humor? Oh, it’s there. I think sometimes readers get caught up in the horror and bizarreness of it all that they miss the subtle, absurdist, dark, and very dry humor dripping in all these stories in this collection.

Drawing on history, literature, and a wealth of primary sources, World of Our Fathers paints a comprehensive portrait of the first major wave of Eastern European Jews to come to America—and specifically, New York—following the assassination of Alexander II.

In this massive but deeply engaging work of art, Howe does nothing less than recreate a lost time, place, and culture. With chapters covering immigration, ghetto life, labor politics, and the Yiddish theater, among others, this is essential reading for American Jews—and anyone else interested in their story.

The golden age of Jewish-American literature began in the early 1950s and lasted until the early 1980s.

Pulitzers abounded: Saul Bellow won Humboldt’s Gift, and Bernard Malamud won for The Fixer. Norman Mailer won twice, in nonfiction and in fiction, for The Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song. (Grace Paley would win one in 1994 for stories originally published in this period.)

Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, a novel about jerking off, sold more than 400,000 copies in hardcover in its first year. But you can’t talk about the golden age without mentioning Cynthia Ozick. The Pagan Rabbi, published in 1971, contains such essential stories as “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” one of the most searing (and hilarious) indictments of assimilation—and writerly envy—ever printed.

In The Price of Whiteness, historian Eric L. Goldstein documents the uneasy shift in Jewish-American identity throughout American history.

Are Jews a religion or a race or something else entirely? How did Ashkenazi Jews come to be seen as white? Goldstein addresses these questions and others in his rigorously researched book, which touches on topics like Black-Jewish relations, and features a surprisingly profound analysis of Adam Sandler’s “The Chanukah Song.”

This book is a luminously honest, unflinching, and brave memoir by the marvelous Dani Shapiro, whose most recent memoir, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love, caused a sensation when it was published in 2019. 

When Slow Motion begins, Dani is in her early 20s, adrift, rebelling against her Jewish heritage, dabbling in acting and modeling, involved in a dead-end affair with a married man. 

Then one night, a phone call changes everything- her parents have been in a dreadful car accident. Her father dies a few weeks later, and her mother requires months of intensive rehab.

Dani's tragic loss of the father she idolized and adored prompts a reckoning with her choices and a reevaluation of her life. Slow Motion is beautifully written, wrenching, and unwaveringly candid.

I enjoyed Yezierska’s ability to effectively portray the struggles of a young girl growing up in a poor immigrant Jewish household. I found myself cheering Sara on as she yearned to escape her household and the expectation placed upon her to marry.

Yezierska’s use of language and vivid imagery made the act of reading an almost palpable experience. I felt as though I was living Sara’s life as she lived it herself.