74 books like Homesick for Another World

On any given day, this is my favorite book with one of my favorite bars, The Vine, a dive that Johnson describes as “like a railroad club car that had somehow run itself off the tracks into a swamp of time where it awaited the blows of the wrecking ball.” Is it a nice place? No. Would you take a date here? Not if you wanted them to respect you. Could you find yourself in mortal danger? Absolutely. But amongst the addicts and runaways, the small-time crooks and ne’er do wells, you’ll find moments of beauty that transcend the pain of everyday life, becoming, in its best moments, like reading scripture.

The atmosphere and voice created by Robinson in this timeless and widely beloved novel, which is potent in a way that’s difficult to quantify, has endured in my memory since I first read it as a teenager. In prose rich with imagery and allusion, narrator Ruth tells the story of how she and her sister, Lucille—orphaned after their mother’s suicide—came to be cared for by their aunt, Sylvie, an eccentric drifter, who moves into their rural Idaho home and alters the tenor of their lives.

This is written with the precision of poetry, containing such sentences as, “When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate.” A novel to re-read and savor.

Unlike Welty’s works featuring honorable or broadly comic characters, this dense story cycle was never excerpted in anthologies. It’s a trickier cast: consider Jinny Love Stark and Virgie Rainey, who cut through the languor of Depression-era Mississippi with stone-cold intention. Jinny Love plays croquet with her lover to enrage her volatile husband; she encourages her daughter to wear lizards as earrings to offend the propriety of her own controlling mother. Impoverished piano prodigy Virgie flouts her gift merely to watch her teacher go mad. Later, she trims her dead mother’s yard with sewing scissors while neighbors do the real work of laying out the body and receiving mourners. The heat presses forward. What day is it? What hour? This is weird, experimental Welty, and the payoff is sweet.

I could have picked anything by George Saunders, really. He’s the closest thing I have to a personal deity. Such is the level of awe and wonder that he invokes in me, I actually find him difficult to discuss. It’s like trying to look directly at the sun.

Suffice it to say that CivilWarLand in Bad Decline—the title refers to a failing theme park—is like all of his other short story collections. It’s beautiful and wise and heart-breaking and deeply intelligent and, yes, desperately funny. I would pay a lot of money to be able to read it again for the first time. 

As the author no doubt intended, right from the first page, I took a dislike to the protagonist (he makes his weekly visit to a prostitute). It emerges that David is, in fact, a sexual obsessive, and it is not long before he is forced to leave his university professorship after aggressively pursuing and bedding one of his students. 

I was surprised, therefore, when the story took off in a different direction and ended up as a graphic and sad portrayal of the predicament of white families in South Africa recently coming to terms with black rule. The portrait that emerges is a bleak one that includes violence, dislocation, theft, and (I thought this a nice circular touch back to the MeToo opening chapters) the rape of David's daughter by a young black man. I found the book disturbing as well as compelling.

Now 91, the Canadian short-story guru won The Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013. She also made “Southern Ontario Gothic” a genre. Where to start in Selected Stories’ canon of genius? At the end, with “Vandals,” the last, long story in this important early anthology. Under the guise of house sitting, a rootless young woman, Liza, desecrates the home of Bea and Ladner, an older couple whose taxidermy-filled rural property was her childhood playground. Ladner has recently died, and Bea and Liza have maintained a friendly correspondence—and so Liza’s violent act seems bizarre and random. Her reasons for wrecking the place are proven emotionally valid, but the reveal is so subtle, so masterful, it might make everything else you’ve ever read (or written) feel overdone.

My wife and I and half of our friends have had the same experience reading this book, namely, bursting into tears while reading it on the subway. About half the stories in this collection have endings that are devastating/ecstatic gut punches, and the reason is that they are explorations of disgrace. Curtis is hilarious, but the everyday ostracizations that befall the young women in this book would tear you apart even if they weren’t funny. 

These short stories lure you in to a world of fantastical distortions and mythical resonances, which make you look differently at women’s lives.

A young girl with an eating disorder turns into an eel; a group of female friends go hunting for male conquests whom they kill and eat to satisfy their appetites. In a world of anarchic desires and obtuse relationships, strange and inexplicable metamorphoses take place. Violence bridges the gap between human and animal, between desire and carnal action.

In candid language not for the faint-hearted, this book probes the potentially dark recesses of the female psyche against a timeless backdrop of rural folklore and magical possibility. 

This pared-back and intense analysis of female isolation in a modern city breaks all the rules of ‘good writing.’ Telling not showing; unrelievedly inward; arguably solipsistic; it charts the descent of a conscientious copywriter into drunken depression. Could an off-beat relationship with a man who seems to care about her, for what she is, possibly haul her back into a functioning life?

In its totally absorbing dramatization of our hopes, desires, disappointments, and perennial insecurities, this book shows our flawed and fragile human selves in remorseless clarity. At the same time, it gives hope in the value of human affection and the kindness of friends.  

I know most people’s favorite Shirley Jackson haunted house book is The Haunting of Hill House, but I find the mystery in this book even more compelling.

Give me two sisters, a family killed by poison under mysterious circumstances, a suitor, an angry mob filled with class envy, and an unreliable narrator, and I will be filled with that peculiar combination of happiness, unease, and dread that all of us haunted house readers desire. I love this novel.