Here are 100 books that Hoarders fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve loved weird horror from a young age, and that passion only grew as the years went on. It all started when I was ten, and I got an anthology of classic horror for my birthday. Inside I read The White People by Machen, Cast the Runes by MR James, and The Colour Out of Space by Lovecraft, and I was hooked. Ever since then I chased that same thrill of the horror that is so out there and strange it just breaks your brain and changes you inside out. I have a feeling I’ll be chasing that obsession until the end of my days.
A very dark turn in my list, indeed. A hole opens up in their apartment, who knows who or why? It doesn’t matter. They dub it the funhole, and would do what any of us would do, and start sticking things inside of it. Things get dark, fast.
If you want to be up all night, unable to sleep, give this book a whirl.
Kathe Koja's classic, award-winning horror novel is finally available as an ebook.
Nicholas, a would-be poet, and Nakota, his feral lover, discover a strange hole in the storage room floor down the hall - "Black. Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you look at it too closely, the sense of something not living but alive." It begins with curiosity, a joke - the Funhole down the hall. But then the experiments begin. "Wouldn't it be wild to go down there?" says Nakota. Nicholas says "We're not." But they're not in control, not from the first moment, as…
Although I’m an academic by training, I secretly struggle with heavy nonfiction tomes (think: massive histories of long-ago countries). I start reading these with the best intentions but quickly get sleepy, bored, or both, setting them aside and instead picking up a novel, which I’ll immediately devour. That’s why I love memoiristic, hybrid work so much: writing that pairs the intimacy of fiction with the information buffet of nonfiction, where you learn without realizing you’re learning. These books feel like a conversation with a close friend who is intelligent, thought-provoking, and passionate about various subjects—what could be better than that?
I read Olivia Laing’s bookat the height of my own loneliness: isolated, in lockdown, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Part memoir, part art history, part cultural criticism, the book managed to be both intimate and expansive—just what I needed as I sat by myself in front of a computer, anxiously refreshing virus graphs.
I became absorbed by the lives of Andy Warhol and Edward Hopper, Henry Darger, and David Wojnarowicz, artists I’d heard of but knew nothing about, and by the various aspects of loneliness I’d never previously considered. It’s the perfect example of the type of hybrid writing that I find truly magical.
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism
#1 Book of the Year from Brain Pickings
Named a best book of the year by NPR, Newsweek, Slate, Pop Sugar, Marie Claire, Elle, Publishers Weekly, and Lit Hub
A dazzling work of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism on the subject of loneliness, told through the lives of iconic artists, by the acclaimed author of The Trip to Echo Spring.
When Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her mid-thirties, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Increasingly fascinated by the most shameful of experiences, she began…
I respond to the darkness and the darkness responds to me. Before writing anything creative, I was studying to be a sociologist. I didn’t get there but all those peculiarities that criminology, deviant behavior, and symbolic interactionism (don’t get me started on Foucault or else we’ll be here all day) stuck with me. I won’t say I don’t care about characters but I’m more interested in stories that examine a character in relation to their status and situation within society. So yeah, lots of poverty, loneliness, and identity issues.
Matthew Revert and I go way back. He’s a true polymath in that he’s a designer, musician, and also the author of multiple novels and collections. My favorite of his is Basal Ganglia, a novel about two lovers that live in this insane pillow fort. There’s a movie, I think it’s called Dave Builds a Maze, that kind of taps into the full-flung dive into implausibility to explore personal space and intimacies but of course, Revert’s just hits different.
Basal Ganglia casts an unsettling spell, but one that in its aphoristic intensity and lightning-flash insights into human loneliness and connection, achieves a genuine empathic wisdom." - SERGIO DE LA PAVA, author of A Naked Singularity
"Matthew Revert is one of the visionaries. What else can you say?" - SCOTT MCCLANAHAN, author of Hill William and Crapalachia
As teenagers, two lovers, Rollo and Ingrid, escape the world as it is known to live underground in a sprawling pillow fort that mirrors the structure of the human brain. Construction of the fort takes 25 years and once complete, their life exists…
I respond to the darkness and the darkness responds to me. Before writing anything creative, I was studying to be a sociologist. I didn’t get there but all those peculiarities that criminology, deviant behavior, and symbolic interactionism (don’t get me started on Foucault or else we’ll be here all day) stuck with me. I won’t say I don’t care about characters but I’m more interested in stories that examine a character in relation to their status and situation within society. So yeah, lots of poverty, loneliness, and identity issues.
A polarizing book for sure, Ballard was an early influence of mine, probably because I’ve always viewed reality from behind a sociological lens and Ballard famously (or infamously?) tackled increasingly dire sociological topics like technology, isolation, and repression. In High-Rise, which just might be his best novel, Ballard turns a high-rise apartment block into ground zero of a class war wherein the floors themselves are demarcated and stratified according to property values, which leads to all kinds of scenes readers get to tear apart and inspect like a social scientist.
"Harsh and ingenious! High Rise is an intense and vivid bestiary, which lingers unsettlingly in the mind." —Martin Amis, New Statesman
When a class war erupts inside a luxurious apartment block, modern elevators become violent battlegrounds and cocktail parties degenerate into marauding attacks on “enemy” floors. In this visionary tale, human society slips into violent reverse as once-peaceful residents, driven by primal urges, re-create a world ruled by the laws of the jungle.
I’ve always been preternaturally attentive to the way words work—as components of meaning, but also as visual, aural, and functional objects with their own erratic behaviors. Since joining the Oulipo in 2009, I’ve had even more occasion to think and talk about how those behaviors can be pointed in a literary direction, and to recognize successful experiments when I read them.
A full-length rewrite of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” that preserves only the first and last letter of each line, Shelfis a consummate work of potential literature—from the “why on earth would someone do that” all the way to the “wait, this is actually dope.” Without ever estranging himself from Whitman’s transcendentalist trumpeting, Quintavalle burrows deep into the poem’s form and instills a disenchanted eloquence all his own.
Poetry. In this poem, Rufo Quintavalle has rewritten Walt Whitman's Song of Myself keeping the first and last letter of each line, and replacing the middle. Within this strict constraint, Quintavalle the poet has achieved a remarkable and touching intimacy at a distance with Whitman's inner world.
I’ve always been preternaturally attentive to the way words work—as components of meaning, but also as visual, aural, and functional objects with their own erratic behaviors. Since joining the Oulipo in 2009, I’ve had even more occasion to think and talk about how those behaviors can be pointed in a literary direction, and to recognize successful experiments when I read them.
I truly never thought I’d laugh out loud at an erasure poem. ThenInk Earl came along. Holbrook starts with a hundred copies of the original fifties ad pitch for the Pink Pearl eraser—get it yet?—and hacks away different parts of each, yielding a series of meditations and diatribes and bouts of spirited near-nonsense. The poems are consistently clever delights, and the project’s conceptual wholeness is icing on the cake.
ink earl takes the popular subgenre of erasure poetry to its illogical conclusion.
Starting with ad copy that extols the iconic Pink Pearl eraser, Holbrook erases and erases, revealing more and more. Rubbing out different words from this decidedly non-literary, noncanonical source text, she was left with the promise of "100 essays" and set about to find them. Among her discoveries are queer love poems, art projects, political commentary, lunch, songs, and entire extended families.
The absurdity of the constraint lends itself to plenty of fun and funny, while reminding us of truths…
I’ve always been preternaturally attentive to the way words work—as components of meaning, but also as visual, aural, and functional objects with their own erratic behaviors. Since joining the Oulipo in 2009, I’ve had even more occasion to think and talk about how those behaviors can be pointed in a literary direction, and to recognize successful experiments when I read them.
Subverting common non-literary forms is a staple of Oulipian exploration, and here, as the title suggests, Ian Williams trains a laser-guided eye on the personal ad, that essentially bygone realm of yearning and melancholy and lust. The gimmick is quick to give way, but the author’s obsessive formal restlessness remains, and the resulting poems, with their twitches and swerves and pitch-perfect interruptions, are all the more devastating for it.
The poems in Ian Williams's Personals are jittery, plaintive, and decidedly fresh. They are almost-love poems, voiced through a startling variety of speakers who continually rev themselves up to the challenge of connecting with others, often to no avail. Williams pays beautiful homage to traditional poetic forms: ghazals, a pantoum, blank sonnets, mock-heroic couplets, while simultaneously showcasing his own inventiveness and linguistic dexterity through the creation of brand new forms: poems that spin into indeterminacy, poems that don't end. With a deft hand and playful ear, Williams entices the reader to stumble alongside his characters as they search, again and…
I’ve always been preternaturally attentive to the way words work—as components of meaning, but also as visual, aural, and functional objects with their own erratic behaviors. Since joining the Oulipo in 2009, I’ve had even more occasion to think and talk about how those behaviors can be pointed in a literary direction, and to recognize successful experiments when I read them.
First published in 1971 and reissued in 2021, EECCHHOOEESS is a gem of visual and/or concrete poetry, a book whose narrative universe is the physical space of the book itself. Pritchard, a member of the radical Umbra collective, is in good company among textual experimentalists like Robert Lax and bpNichol, to name two more or less at random, but among the pileups and run-ons and gibberish, the constellations of words repeated and skipping and laid out backwards, he creates his own elegant vibe, at once frenetic and deeply serene.
An exacting facsimile of Umbra protagonist Norman H. Pritchard’s long-rare 1971 collection of visually kinetic poetry
American poet Norman H. Pritchard’s second and final book, EECCHHOOEESS was originally published in 1971 by New York University Press. Pritchard’s writing is visually and typographically unconventional. His methodical arrangements of letters and words disrupt optical flows and lexical cohesion, modulating the speeds of reading and looking by splitting, spacing and splicing linguistic objects. His manipulation of text and codex resembles that of concrete poetry and conceptual writing, traditions from which literary history has mostly excluded him. Pritchard also worked with sound, and his…
I was eleven when my brother died in a car accident and, although I didn’t know it at the time, this experience shaped me in ways I couldn’t anticipate. Many years later, when I began working as a social worker at a local hospice, I realized that I was drawn to the work as a way to finally grieve that early loss. As I helped people navigate their own losses I found myself feeling my own grief for the first time. It wasn’t until I started writing about the hospice work that I found my brother again. I am powerfully drawn to the parallels between writing and the work of dying.
Sorrow is plural but grief is singular writes American poet, Victoria Chang, in her latest book Obit.
To me, this phrase resonates all the more powerfully as we find ourselves emerging from the Covid pandemic and assessing the impact it had on us. We were united, around the world, in our sorrow but the way we grieved was unique to each one of us.
This long poem, written after the death of her mother, is an elegy to grief itself. Taken from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the epigraph at the beginning of the book reads: give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak. This is exactly what the writer has done.
Los Angeles Times Book Prize
PEN Voelcker Award
Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize
The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2020
Time Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of 2020
NPR's Best Books of 2020
National Book Award in Poetry, Longlist
National Book Critics Circle, Finalist
Griffin Poetry Prize, Shortlist
Frank Sanchez Book Award After her mother died, poet Victoria Chang refused to write elegies. Rather, she distilled her grief during a feverish two weeks by writing scores of poetic obituaries for all she lost in the world. In Obit, Chang writes of "the way memory gets up after someone has died and…
Sometimes, you just want to feel like you’re reading in an old library during a storm, you know? Because I’ve read so widely and studied so many Classics, I’ve had the opportunity to immerse myself in old books in a way that many others haven’t. Take that obsessive bookishness and add a love for magical, literary, character-driven stories, and voilà! I’m lucky I got to write my own dark academia novel for people looking to have that experience. Hopefully these books make you just as cozy and melancholy as they make me.
John Keats is one of my all-time favorite poets. It breaks my heart to think of how many poems were left unwritten when he died young. The ones he left behind are melancholy and absolutely gorgeous. The language tastes like chocolate. He’s a master of using sound to evoke nostalgia (for people who care about the mechanics of these things. It’s okay if you don’t.) His poetry speaks for itself. Read one of his poems slowly, and you’ll feel like you’re lying in a moonlit meadow with a glass of wine, pondering eternity.
Covering the entire output of an archetypal - and tragically short-lived - romantic genius, the Penguin Classics edition of The Complete Poems of John Keats is edited with an introduction and notes by John Barnard.
Keats's first volume of poems, published in 1817, demonstrated both his belief in the consummate power of poetry and his liberal views. While he was criticized by many for his politics, his immediate circle of friends and family immediately recognized his genius. In his short life he proved to be one of the greatest and most original thinkers of the second generation of Romantic poets,…
