10 books like The Bell Jar

Man’s Search for Meaning is a chronicle of twentieth-century evil, and how one man overcame it.

Viktor Frankl’s grisly ordeal in four Nazi death camps, and his capacity to survive their horrific conditions, is a mind-numbing account of our darkest period in history. This ninety-three-page narrative exposes an unparalleled genocide, and the power of the human spirit to transcend insurmountable odds.

I mean, hello! The opening sentence “All happy families are alike…” is probably my favorite opening sentence of all time. This book is what I place in the “epic story telling” category for its breadth and scope of time. In many ways it is the story of two separate families and it hits on several themes I have come to crave and demand from art. Tolstoy looks at class, cultural and societal norms, and the emotional toll of familial expectations. It is a book so dense with interesting, flawed characters and it is one of the rare works I come back again to read every few years.  

This play, inspired by the experiences of a racially diverse group of New York City teenage girls, explores the intersection of slut-shaming and sexual violence. At its core, the play questions the wisdom of girls embracing the “slut” label for themselves. “Slut” may seem like a carefree term of endearment, and it is—until the moment Joey, a member of her school’s dance team, informally known as the Slut Squad, is sexually assaulted by two boys from school. She brings charges against them, and every sexually provocative thing she previously has done is used as evidence that she is lying. If you want to understand the pressures teenage girls face today, this play breaks it down for you.

This book is so expansive, Audre Lorde invented a whole new genre for it. She terms it “biomythography,” bringing together autobiography, mythology, fiction, poetry, and other forms of writing to tell her story of queer life.

I fell in love with Zami in college back in the day and have been re-reading it ever since. From her childhood in 1930s and 40s Harlem to her coming out as the self-proclaimed fat black lesbian “warrior poet,” who would come to shape black feminism in the late 20th century and beyond, Zami charts the life, loves, and transformative ideas of one of our most important writers.

Zami is both muse and guide, showing us how the iconic feminist writer came to be, and how pleasure, power, creative expression, and community are indispensable to our own freedom today.  

A list like this cannot be complete without Kingston, who uses in her book a literary technique called “perhapsing”—defined by Lisa Knopp as “the use of speculation in creative nonfiction”—in which Kingston uses myth and the question “what if” to imagine what might’ve happened in the stories she half-knows about her family. 

Written in 46 short vignettes, this is a coming-of-age story of Esperanza Cordero, a young girl growing up in a Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago. Yet the novel is anything but one protagonist’s story, as it consistently juxtaposes Esperanza’s story with stories of secondary characters who make a brief appearance in the novel to seldom reappear and tie loose ends of the “sub-plots”: Marin, Louie, Alicia, Geraldo, Rafaela, Minerva, and others. Narrative continuity via a protagonist’s psychological journey that is a key trait of coming-of-age novels, or of mainstream Western or realist novels at large, is repeatedly disrupted here, making the reader wonder, who is the novel’s protagonist?: Esperanza, Mango Street, or its Brown community, or young Latina girls and women in a 20th century USA, alluded by “las Mujeres” to whom the book is dedicated.

I do not recommend 1984 because it is one of the most powerful books ever written. Readers know that. I love this book for its artful prescience.

While Yevgeny Zamyatin’s Me normally gets credit for being the first dystopian novel, Orwell perfected the genre. The novel becomes more important with each passing decade. Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth altering documents for the government.

Catchphrases like “doublethink” and “thought police,” coupled with the pervasive use of surveillance technology highlight why science fiction shines a light on a future our “betters” had just as soon we not see and does so in a spare, literary style that is both eloquent and to the point. 

Oliver Sacks merges science and storytelling with elegance and grace in every one of his books about human behavior.

He’s honest, compassionate, and curious—all characteristics that consistently draw me to his writing and make me what to learn more. In An Anthropologist on Mars, Sacks profiles seven neurological patients and the conditions that affect them, including a painter with colorblindness and the scientist Temple Grandin, who has autism.

I love that Sacks uses first person as he guides his readers. He invites us in—we unravel facts and clues just as Sacks does, making each profile fresh and dynamic. 

Kesey’s great American novel shares with Frederick Wiseman’s first and most controversial film, Titicut Follies, a view of the nation as a mental institution.

Like Wiseman’s films, the novel resonates with American mythology, from the falsely mute Native American narrator, chief Bromden, to the boisterous protagonist, Randall Patrick McMurphy, who sports underwear with images of whales on it.

In the book, Chief Bromden refers to “The Combine” as a combination of the military-industrial complex and dominant ideology, the same phrase the governor of the Canal Zone uses to describe the political and economic control of Zonian life in Wiseman's Canal Zone. It is no coincidence that Milos Forman, the director of the award-winning 1975 film adaptation of Cuckoo’s Nest, had his cast and crew watch Titicut Follies multiple times before beginning production.

I get it. This topic is low-hanging fruit, yet classic science fiction is always worth revisiting, particularly when it is the first of the genre. And the first was written by a woman.

It was 1818 when Mary Shelley explored what can happen when a laboratory experiment goes wrong. In this case, an experiment that eliminates the need for human propagation. Taking such an experiment to its logical conclusion eliminates the need for women. Or men for that matter. The prose holds up surprisingly well.

I recommend it because it illustrates why science fiction is as much an art form as anything Rembrandt produced. And perhaps more impactful. A literary masterpiece, Frankenstein considers a future where technology succeeds, but humanity fails.