Here are 100 books that Glamorama fans have personally recommended if you like
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Iâve always looked at the world with a sense of wonder. As a child, I was drawn to the magical and the fantastical, but a budding fascination with the scientific method eventually led me to discover the beauty and wonder of the natural world. I assumed science fiction would scratch that itch, but too many genre novels left me feeling empty, like they were missing something essentialâwhat it feels like to be human. Novels that combine a wonder of the world with an intimate concern for character hit just the right spot for me. Maybe they will for you as well.
I love this book for its Matroyska doll-style structure: The first five sections tell stories in different periodsâ from the mid-19th century to the 22ndâloosely connected by repeating characters and media, each ending abruptly and without resolution. The sixth section, set in the 24th century, is the spine of the novel, told in its entirety. Then Mitchell revisits the time periods in reverse chronological order, resolving each story, ending where we began in the mid-19th century.
It was a highly satisfying experience that changed my view of how a story could be told. It is widely considered one of the finest novels of the 21st century. It covers ideas I would normally balk at, like reincarnation and the existence of eternal consciousness. Still, the storytelling is so powerful that it all came across as believable to me. I loved the way Mitchell demonstrated how an idea in one time periodâŠ
Six lives. One amazing adventure. The audio publication of one of the most highly acclaimed novels of 2004. 'Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies...' A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan's California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified 'dinery server' on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation - the narrators of CLOUD ATLAS hear each other's echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways greatâŠ
Growing up in the seventies in the UK was a fertile time for lovers of the uncanny, with memorable childrenâs dramas like Children of the Stones, The Changes and Ace of Wands. Like many others, I keenly collected junkshop editions of Herbert Van Thalâs horror anthologies. Occultism was in the air in the troubled, economically stagnating Age of Aquarius, and though too young to see them, we schoolboys all knew of The Exorcist, Rosemaryâs Baby, and The Omen. A friend gave me a Lovecraft biography for my 18th birthday, and though Iâd read none of his work, I went on to become fascinated by him and his Weird Tales compadres.
A friend complained about being saddled with reading this bible-thick book by a fellow creative writing student on his MA course. Never having heard of it, though Iâve since discovered itâs a major cult favorite, I flicked through it and quickly became intrigued by its faux academic footnotes and citations, quirky layout (pages might contain a single line of text as the narrative accelerates, for instance) and tale of paranormal investigation.
âPostmodernâ, though apt, makes it sound tedious; actually, itâs an intriguing, clever, and in places touching take on the psychic investigator genre, using a myriad of haunted house motifs from the trashy (The Amityville Horror; âFound footageâ movies) to the cerebral (cultural theory, references to Umberto Eco). While self-consciously âcleverâ, it delivers sincerely on the uncanniness I want from a haunted house tale.
âA novelistic mosaic that simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.â âThe New York Times
Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations,âŠ
Iâve been a sci-fi/fantasy fan ever since my dad introduced me to the original Star Trek (in reruns) and The Lord of the Rings in my youth. Iâve always loved thinking about possibilitiesâlarge and smallâso my work tends to think big when I write. I also write poetry, which allows me to talk about more than just the everyday or at least to find the excitement within the mundane in life. These works talk about those same âpossibilitiesââfor better or worse, and in reading, I walk in awareness of what could be.
This book scratches my genre itch and is also âliteraryâ at the same time. Croninâs superb world-building is so subtle that you donât realize that the bookâs world and ours are separate until you are half-way through the book and see that there were clues all along the way.
Amy Harper Bellafonte is six years old and her mother thinks she's the most important person in the whole world. She is. Anthony Carter doesn't think he could ever be in a worse place than Death Row. He's wrong. FBI agent Brad Wolgast thinks something beyond imagination is coming. It is. THE PASSAGE. Deep in the jungles of eastern Colombia, Professor Jonas Lear has finally found what he's been searching for - and wishes to God he hadn't. In Memphis, Tennessee, a six-year-old girl called Amy is left at the convent of the Sisters of Mercy and wonders why herâŠ
A hair-raising, side-splitting supernatural adventure!
In the idyllic town of Pine Port, Kelsey was on the cusp of realizing her dreams. In weeks, she'd clasp her high school diploma and beauty license. Or so she thought, until her life took a supernatural detour, far removed from the ordinary path she'dâŠ
Iâve always looked at the world with a sense of wonder. As a child, I was drawn to the magical and the fantastical, but a budding fascination with the scientific method eventually led me to discover the beauty and wonder of the natural world. I assumed science fiction would scratch that itch, but too many genre novels left me feeling empty, like they were missing something essentialâwhat it feels like to be human. Novels that combine a wonder of the world with an intimate concern for character hit just the right spot for me. Maybe they will for you as well.
This book is a literary novel set in part on the Moon. Thatâs not a sentence youâll read often, which is a big part of why I love this novelâitâs not what I expected, even though thereâs a big hint in the title.
Like many readers, my introduction to Emily St. John Mandel was her post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven. In that story, the most interesting characters arenât concerned with simple survivalâŠif they are going to fight to live, they want a culture worth fighting for. When I picked this book up, I deliberately chose not to read the story summary and was completely caught off guard by how the novel unfolded. Typically, stories questioning time and our perception of reality do so by sending the protagonist on a dangerous quest looking for answers.
Like all my favorite novels, the scope is intimate and vast in this one. The storyâŠ
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER âą The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.
One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads
âOne of [Mandelâs] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet.â âThe New York Times
Poetry is language at its most condensed and pure, potent and directâthe closest thing to thought. At its best, this mode and method is cinematic and penetrates like a powerful dream, and bringing it to narrative prose in a legend and key that can be woven together, like a tapestry, has been my lifework. Nothing in this list is ancient or even old, nor is any of it newâI've picked all books from the 20th century, because that was the world and writing that immediately influenced me, it's long enough past to be settled and safely buried, but still new enough to have some currency with the life and language of now.
I was so overwhelmed by the perfection of this American masterwork that I sought out the founder of The Thomas Wolfe Society, the greatest Thomas Wolfe collector who ever lived and who will ever live, and became his very close friend.
This is a huge book, with the music of pitch-perfect prosody from beginning to end, and yet it's only part of a much greater wholeâevery one of Wolfe's books connect together in some way, forming a massive cadency of music in words. If you examine them, there's only two main branches (Eugene Gant as the protagonist in one, and Monk Webber as the protagonist in the other). But it's really all one big expanding fable. This volume has, in my opinion, the richest writing, from the opening proem to the tiny diamond-sharp moving-picture painting of the final line.
The sequel to Thomas Wolfe's remarkable first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, Of Time and the River is one of the great classics of American literature. The book chronicles the maturing of Wolfe's autobiographical character, Eugene Gant, in his desperate search for fulfillment, making his way from small-town North Carolina to the wider world of Harvard University, New York City, and Europe. In a massive, ambitious, and boldly passionate novel, Wolfe examines the passing of time and the nature of the creative process, as Gant slowly but ecstatically embraces the urban life, recognizing it as a necessary ordeal for the birthâŠ
Second novels rarely get the love that they deserve. People come to them with all kinds of presumptions and expectations, mostly based on whatever they liked (or didnât like!) about your first novel, and all writers live in fear of the dreaded âsophomore slump.â I spent a decade trying to write my second novel and was plagued by these very fears. To ward off the bad vibes, I want to celebrate some of my favorite second novels by some of my favorite writers. Some were bona fide hits from the get-go, while others were sadly overlooked or wrongly panned, but theyâre all brilliant, beautiful, and full of heart.
Sam Lipsyteâs sentences are demented and perfect. Heâs one of the
funniest writers I have ever read.
The story behind this book is one of publishing legend. Here's the way
I've always heard it told: Lipsyteâs first book, The Subject Steve, was a
brutal satire of contemporary American life that had the deep
misfortune of being published on September 11, 2001. (Yes, I know, it
wasnât the worst thing that happened on 9/11, but still.)
He followed it with Home Land, a vitriolic, sleazy, hilarious novel in
the form of epic pissy dispatches to a high school alumni newsletter. As
narrators go, Lewis Miner is as unimprovable as he is unredeemable.
This book was passed around to every publishing house in New York City,
read and cherished by dozens of editors who were scared to put their
colophon where their heart was.
Welcome to the most twisted high-school reunion imaginable, from a rising star of American satire. 'Sam Lipsyte is a gifted stylist, precise, original, devious, and very funny.' Jeffrey Eugenides, author of 'Middlesex' 'It's confession time, fellow alumni. Ever since Principal Fontana found me and commenced to bless my mail slot, monthly, with the Eastern Valley High School Alumni Newsletter, I've been meaning to pen my update. Sad to say, vanity slowed my hand. Let a fever for the truth speed it now. Let me stand on the rooftop of my reckoning and shout naught but the indisputable: I did notâŠ
What happens when youâre face-to-face with a truth that shakes you? Do you accept it, or pretend it was never there?
Award-winning author Mark A. Rayner smudges the lines between realist and fabulist, literary and speculative in this collection of stories that examines this questionâwhat Homer called passing through TheâŠ
During my 25-year journalism career and now, in my books, Iâve specialized in telling powerful, human stories that are often humorous and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. To me, humor is an essential part of life. Real stories might make us cry, but just as often, they make us laugh. Thatâs the balance I try to achieve with all my writing.
From the start, you know Norwood is not the brightest bulb in the lamp, but I fell in love with him as he sets out on a hilarious road trip to retrieve $75 heâs owed by an ex-army buddy.
Portis wrote another of my favorite books, True Grit. All his books combine great writing, humor, and quirky charactersâa trifecta I strive for in my writing.
Sent on a mission to New York he gets involved in a wild journey that takes him in and out of stolen cars, freight trains, and buses. By the time he returns home to Texas, Norwood has met his true love, Rita Lee, on a bus; befriended the second shortest midget in show business and "the world's smallest perfect fat man"; and helped Joann "the chicken with a college education," realize her true potential in life. As with all Portis' fiction, the tone is cool, sympathetic, and funny.
Figuring out who we are, figuring out our identity and where we fit in the scheme of things is one of the great themes in our lives, and in literature. In my life, Iâve gone through many identity crises, some recounted in my memoirs. These are five books that had a profound effect on meâsometimes emotionally, sometimes psychologically, and sometimes led me to think differently about my own life. In all of these books, characters have to make decisions, face struggles, and figure out who they are and how to find themselves and their authentic identity.
In this book, a young Hasidic Jew and artist faces the conflict between his orthodoxy and his desire to explore what lies outside his orthodoxy, such as the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. He is pulled in two directionsâby his parents' idea of his identity and by searching for the truth about the human condition through his art.
I read this many years ago, in my 30s, and was heartbroken by how the main character has so much integrity to keep searching and finding in spite of so many forces trying to label him and forbid him from certain explorations. I, too, was searching for my place in those years of creating a career, and it deepened the authenticity of my search.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER âą In this modern classic from the National Book Awardânominated 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.
âA novel of finely articulated tragic power .... Little short of a work of genius.ââThe 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 ritualâŠ
Richard Vetereâs screenplay Caravaggio won The Golden Palm for the Best Screenplay at the 2021 Beverly Hills Film Festival. He co-wroteThe Third Miraclescreenplay adaptation of his own novel. The movie was produced by Francis Ford Coppola, starring Ed Harris and Anne Heche and directed by Agnieszka Holland released by Sony Pictures Classics. His teleplay adaptation of his stage playThe Marriage Foolstarring Walter Matthau and Carol Burnett is the most viewed CBS movie ever and is currently running on Amazon. He also wrote the cult classic film Vigilantecalled by BAM as one of the âbest indies of the 1980s.â
Bright Lights, Big City published in 1984 written by Jay McInerney captures 80s NYC from an outsider who experiences it head-on. I was drawn to the novel because I lived the same world and went to the club Heartbreaks but as an insider. McInerneyâs lead character is a copy editor for a reputable publishing house and he is madly in love with his wife who is now a hot model and no longer has any interest in him. On top of that his mother just died of cancer and his younger brother comes to NYC hoping he will be strong for him. But he has no strength at all turning to cocaine for solace. Good read that captures a time and place as I tried to do in my own novel. Unfortunately, the movie adaptation with Michael J. Fox is a disappointment.
It is six am, the party is over and reality is threatening to intervene in the power-fuelled existence of a young man who should have everything but who might just end up with nothing at all. His wife has left him, his job is in jeopardy, and his social life is about to end.
Growing up in a mostly pre-Internet time, I was hungry for androgynous and queer characters and didnât know why. Books offered an escape hatch into the heads of the people I wanted to be. As I got older, writing was how I processed this disconnect, but for a long time, my lack of clarity negatively affected many of my relationships. It was through words (mine and othersâ) that I learned who I am. Amongst other things, a fragile and flawed and wildly imperfect person. Itâs been great to see all the wholesome, positive LGBT rep thatâs come out in literature over the last years, but my heart and stories will always belong to the bad-angel queers struggling to get a foot into Heaven.
Oh man, this book! Itâs everything I want: Sweet, simple, cute, nostalgic, at times, just awful. Gutterboys taught me that a book with a soul and a soundtrack and a firm jab in the gut is the type of book I want to make. Set in the 80s, Jeremy is a naĂŻve suburban Jewish teen who falls crazy-stupid in love with a gorgeous older hustler. Colin wonât date Jeremy, but he does take him on a New York adventure that will only unhinge innocent Jeremy more and more. If you like that intoxicatingly toxic unrequited gay love, give it a go!