Here are 100 books that The Life And Strange Surprizing Adventures Of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner fans have personally recommended if you like
The Life And Strange Surprizing Adventures Of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner.
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Growing up in a small town and realizing I was gay, I saw nothing but dread ahead of me. In graduate school, I came across a one-sentence description of Margaret Anderson as a “lesbian anarchist.” I knew I was home. My book is the first full-length biography of Anderson and her partner, Jane Heap. They went through a lot of crap–they were tried for publishing Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses–but above all, they were witty rebels, strong women, and proud and out.
Like Anderson, Gertrude Stein had a sense of humor about gay Paree. Who else would write someone else’s autobiography?
I love her tone of detached amusement when describing the artistic titans of the Lost Generation. If you don’t get it, try the recipe for Alice B. Toklas brownies.
The best fiction explores complex relationships between friends and lovers. I’ve been fascinated by this for as long as I can remember because love and friendship are the cornerstones of human existence. As concepts, they give life meaning yet can also take it away. They bring us together but can also leave us estranged. The sun-soaked cities of Europe have for so long been playgrounds for young lovers and friends, enjoying both the best of life and the most melancholy. I love traveling Europe–the grandeur, the romance, the happy-sad sentiment of it all. It embodies the topic and makes for the most beautiful setting.
I read this book in a few sittings. That’s how hooked it had me. There’s something about the delicacy and complexity of the relationship between the two protagonists that makes this book stand out. I love the book for this. I felt connected to the characters, invested in their future, and even furious at their inability to make things work at times (they were made for each other!). Their insecurities and feelings of inadequacy are so relatable yet so often not talked about.
I loved the way the book explores deeper male emotions and the pressure felt by men in a world where talking about feelings has historically been seen as a weakness. Lastly, I love it because it is lyrical, melancholic, hopeful, and real. All of that is what life is.
NOW AN EMMY-NOMINATED HULU ORIGINAL SERIES • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A stunning novel about the transformative power of relationships” (People) from the author of Conversations with Friends, “a master of the literary page-turner” (J. Courtney Sullivan).
ONE OF THE TEN BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE—Entertainment Weekly
TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—People, Slate, The New York Public Library, Harvard Crimson
AND BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, O: The Oprah Magazine, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Vogue, Esquire, Glamour, Elle, Marie Claire, Vox, The Paris Review, Good Housekeeping, Town &…
I am eternally fascinated by the way in which a string of words can take on a life of its own. With a mere 26 letters, a good writer can have a reader believe anything. When realist fiction first became a category in the 18th century in England, there was a lot of handwringing over whether readers were being lied to. Of course, they were! That is the point of fiction. My own work has always played with the boundary of realist fiction, fairytale, and truth. I’m interested in the way a story can make meaning—and the more hijinks, the better!
Reading Kenzaburo Oë is like falling into a dreamscape. I love this book because it weaves the personal and the fictional in ways that make it impossible to distinguish them.
Is not all of life a melding of dream, reality, and the stuff we make up? Much of Oë’s writing is influenced by his son, Hikari, who was born with cognitive disabilities. This makes the story of the young man in A Personal Matter, who is struggling with the stress of his sick newborn, a fiction heavily informed by personal history.
To take one’s own story and use it to bring to life another one is the height of art-making. It felt like a healing to read.
From the Nobel Prize–winning author: “One of the great short novels of the 20th century” (The Wall Street Journal).
Internationally acclaimed as one of the world’s most influential writers, Kenzaburō Ōe brings to the fore the post-WWII rage and anxiety of a decorous society in this “deathly black comedy . . . dripping with nuclear terror” (The Japan Times).
Bird is an antisocial twenty-seven-year-old intellectual hanging on to a failing marriage with whiskey. He dreams of going to Africa where the sky sprawls with possibilities. Then, as though walloped by a massive invisible fist, Bird’s Utopian fantasies are shattered when…
I am eternally fascinated by the way in which a string of words can take on a life of its own. With a mere 26 letters, a good writer can have a reader believe anything. When realist fiction first became a category in the 18th century in England, there was a lot of handwringing over whether readers were being lied to. Of course, they were! That is the point of fiction. My own work has always played with the boundary of realist fiction, fairytale, and truth. I’m interested in the way a story can make meaning—and the more hijinks, the better!
I set out very determined to despise this first book of Knausgard’s series. Knausgard’s life is no more fascinating than anyone’s. This is not necessarily his life but some reasonable facsimile that dips in and out of reverie, philosophy, and the hardcore reality of cleaning up after an alcoholic parent dies. Hoarding, self-loathing, and Nordic landscape are all features. I mean, what is NOT to love about that?
My lust for this book is not so much what it is about, though, as how it does this thing of drawing me along in its unadorned vocabulary to wholesale belief in everything that is put down. It is a supreme hoax that I am grateful to have encountered.
A New York Times bestseller, My Struggle: Book 1 introduces American readers to the audacious, addictive, and profoundly surprising international literary sensation that is the provocative and brilliant six-volume autobiographical novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard.
It has already been anointed a Proustian masterpiece and is the rare work of dazzling literary originality that is intensely, irresistibly readable. Unafraid of the big issues—death, love, art, fear—and yet committed to the intimate details of life as it is lived, My Struggle is an essential work of contemporary literature.
The anthology form unites diverse voices around a common theme—in the case ofDistant Flickers, identity and loss. The stories in the anthology explore intense personal relationships—of mother and child, old lovers, etc. Some of the stories are in the moment and some recounted with the perspective of time, some are fable-like, some formal, and others more colloquial. Reading them the reader is struck by the variety of approaches a writer might take to a subject. The device of the contributor’s notes enables the reader to see the story behind the story and how life informs art—life furnishing the raw material or day residue of the story.
As a writer, I am always pondering the question of how our lives inform our work. As one of my fellow writers, Melissa Ostrom, put it, our experience is the rich compost from which we form our fictional narratives. To use a Freudian dream analogy, I like to think that our lives are the “day residue” of the work—elements from daily life show up in different contexts or transformed in some other way. The twentieth-first century has witnessed an explosion of so-called auto-fiction, fiction that more consciously underscores this process of transforming life into art—think of the work of Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, and Karl Ove Knausgard. This recently-released anthology, edited by Caitlin Forst, features work by established writers as well as new voices that interrogates the relationship between writer and text, between art and life.
An exciting new anthology of autofiction featuring a wide range of today's best writers, both established and up-and-coming.
Collected autofictions from mainstays of literary, art, and internet avant-garde writing. The contributors in this anthology produce a contemporary, subversive primer of works engaging the relationship between the writer and the text.
Featuring: Aiden Arata Nathan Dragon David Fishkind Rindon Johnson Aristilde Kirby Tao Lin Chris Molnar Vi Khi Nao Elle Nash Gina Nutt Brad Phillips Sam Pink Darina Sikmashvili BR Yeager
My favorite books are funny/sad. In my own writing, I aspire for balance between satire and sympathy, going to dark places and shining a light of hilarity on them. I’m compelled by the psychological complexities of desire, particularly in female characters—flawed, average women, struggling for empowerment. For me, desire is inextricably bound with loss. I’m inspired by loss both superficial and profound, from misplaced keys to dying fathers. Many voices clamor in my head, vying for my attention. I’m interested in ambitious misfits, enraged neurotics, pagans, shamans, healers, dealers, grifters, and spiritual seekers who are forced to adapt, construct, reinvent and contort themselves as reality shifts around them.
I love I Love Dick! This is a hilarious, shocking, keenly intelligent interrogative adventure into the art world and ideas about stalking a muse and being female. The book was published in 1997 but I didn’t discover it until a decade later, so I was late to the game. In her forward, Eileen Myles describes Chris Kraus as “marching boldly into self-abasement and self-advertisement,” which is a perfect way of putting it. Shredding the veil between reality and fiction, in her relentless pursuit of Dick (a real person), Chris Kraus embraces the world, no holds barred. If you’re curious about being female, being an artist, being a failure (whatever that means), chasing your desires, and fighting your way out of limitations both within and without, this riveting, lacerating, revealing, surprising book is for you.
When Chris Kraus, an unsuccessful artist pushing 40, spends an evening with a rogue academic named Dick, she falls madly and inexplicably in love, enlisting her husband in her haunted pursuit. Dick proposes a kind of game between them, but when he fails to answer their letters Chris continues alone, transforming an adolescent infatuation into a new form of philosophy.
Blurring the lines of fiction, essay and memoir, Chris Kraus's novel was a literary sensation when it was first published in 1997. Widely considered to be the most important feminist novel of the past two decades, I Love Dick is…
Ever since I was a little guy, I've been told that I complicate things unnecessarily. I overthink and over-communicate, and often, my feelings are outsized to the situation. These are not things I do on purpose, but involuntary, like a sneeze or the way you reflexively clench with cuteness aggression when you see a grizzly bear’s little ears, even though you know it can hurt and eat and kill you. I love to find books with narrators who seemingly share this affliction. It makes me feel less alone, but more importantly, I love to see how other people's Rube Goldberg machines function.
I didn't realize a book could get the zoomies. América del Norte has instilled in me such great wonder and vicious prose envy that I may never recover. Rambunctious, bombastic, and sprawling, this work of autofiction left me saying things like, “No way!” and “What the hell?!” out loud like a complete buffoon. Sometimes because of the story and sometimes because of the audacity of the sentence structures.
Medina Mora weaves history, literature, politics, translation, and much more into a grand chronicle. Amid devastating historical narratives and global tragedy, I still laughed out loud at some parts and startled my little cat, who then also got the zoomies.
Moving between New York City, Mexico City, and Iowa City, a young member of the Mexican elite sees his life splinter in a centuries-spanning debut that blends the Latin American traditions of Roberto Bolaño and Fernanda Melchor with the autofiction of US writers like Ben Lerner and Teju Cole.
Sebastián lived a childhood of privilege in Mexico City. Now in his twenties, he has a degree from Yale, an American girlfriend, and a slot in the University of Iowa’s MFA program.
But Sebastián’s life is shaken by the Trump administration’s restrictions on immigrants, his mother’s terminal cancer, the cracks in…
I write strange, emotional novels from my book-filled apartment in Vancouver, a short walk from the ocean. This may be why I’m obsessed with islands. Or perhaps it’s because they evoke the feeling of being apart from the world, adrift, of protecting something rare. Whatever the reason, my novel takes place on an uncanny island off the coast of Mexico, where the locals drink tea in the afternoon and pray to skeletons hidden in caves. The story that unfolds on this island could not have taken place on the mainland, and I believe the same goes for the books on my list.
This novel brings together the past and present experiences of Asian Canadians in a story that’s bursting with light and energy. Much of the book depicts the discrimination faced by Chinese immigrants in Newfoundland in the early 20th century, and I loved how humour was interspersed between moments that stirred feelings of intense anger and sadness.
Throw in a cheeky, time-travelling spirit named Mo and the privileged millennial who learns about the hardship that’s granted him the life he leads, and we’ve got a fresh take on a tragic history from an exciting new literary voice.
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE TELEGRAM AND WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
The hilarious and heartbreaking story of two William Pings in Newfoundland—the lost millennial and the grandfather he knows nothing about
William Ping’s millennial life revolves around eating at restaurants, posting online about eating at restaurants, then overanalyzing it. This changes unexpectedly when a dinner with his Chinese girlfriend’s family goes sideways and his insecurity about his biracial identity and his ignorance of his own Chinese heritage overflow. During a much-needed break from the…
Alongside writing, I’ve been running workshops, teaching and mentoring writers for nearly twenty years, helping people get unstuck and keep going. So I spend most of my working life thinking about creativity and writing—then suddenly I, too, couldn’t write the book I needed to write. Every book in this list is about not-writing for different reasons, in different circumstances, but between them they tell us so much about how we write, why we write, how we get writing to happen—and what’s happening when we can’t. These very different stories resonate with each other, and I hope some of them resonate with you.
After eight successful books, Marie Chaix was abruptly dropped by her publisher. An editor-in-chief of another publisher picked her up, helped her dust herself down, became her writing support, friend and best reader, and published her next book. Three months later, he went to bed and never woke up. Shattered, Chaix decided that she couldn’t—wouldn’t—just didn’t write, not for thirteen years. In finally breaking her silence, Chaix draws a strange, delicate self-portrait of a writer paradoxically both stubborn and profoundly unconfident. I’m not Chaix, and I don’t always like autofiction, but as she weaves in and around the causes and consequences of her decision, her story seems to be about all writers.
A meditation on the themes of separation and silence, The Summer of the Elder Tree was Marie Chaix's first book to appear in fourteen years, and deals with the reasons for her withdrawal from writing, as well as the events in her life since the death of her mother (as detailed in Silences, or a Woman's Life). With uncompromising sincerity, and in the same beautiful prose for which she is renowned, Marie Chaix here takes stock of her life as a woman and writer, as well as the crises that caused her to give up her work. The Summer of…
I have always tried to find books that explain and explore my life stage. When I was a young mother of little babies, I read many books about early motherhood. When I was studying and travelling and working as a waitress, those topics were represented in my reading too. Now that I’m a woman writer in midlife, with growing children and an art practice, I’m keen to read books by and about women writers who evoke the joys and struggles of this period: aging, the tensions between freedom and responsibility, marriage and separation, ambition and desire.
I have never read a book about motherhood or writing like this one. As I read Debre’s autofictional account of losing custody of her child after leaving her marriage, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was reading something truly original.
Women are not supposed to leave their families to pursue their artistic ambitions, but Debre’s queer character does just that. This is a really slim, sometimes shocking book. I will admire and continue thinking about this book forever.
'Destined to become a classic of its kind' Maggie Nelson
'One of the most compulsive voices I've read in years' Olivia Laing, Observer
When Constance told her ex-husband that she was dating women, he made a string of unfounded accusations that separated her from her young son, Paul. Laurent trained Paul to say he no longer wants to see his mother, and the judge believed him.
She approaches this new life with passionate intensity and the desire for an unencumbered existence, certain that no love can last. Apart from cigarettes, two regular lovers and women she has brief affairs with,…
