Here are 99 books that The Lost Episodes of Revie Bryson fans have personally recommended if you like
The Lost Episodes of Revie Bryson.
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I have always loved history, ever since my childhood obsessions with Boudica, Anne Boleyn, and the witch trials. I love exploring different historical periods through literature, as books can help us develop real feelings of connection and empathy with people who lived in times and places very different from our own. I like to think that, in turn, this encourages us to be more empathetic with others in our own time. Since coming out as lesbian when I was 14, I have read a great deal of queer fiction, seeking to immerse myself in my own queer heritage and culture.
This is a coming-of-age novel set in 1950s San Francisco. As teenagers my best friend and I shared a mutual hyperfixation with the Cold War. It beautifully explores that era, from the Space Race to the McCarthyism that targeted both queer Americans and Chinese Americans. My best friend now lives in San Francisco, and when I last went to visit her I treated myself to going on a little walking tour of some of the places mentioned in the novel, all around Chinatown and Russian Hill.
The desire Lily feels towards her butch friend is beautiful and stirring, and the excitement she feels at exploring the underground gay scene is absolutely infectious.
"That book. It was about two women, and they fell in love with each other." And then Lily asked the question that had taken root in her, that was even now unfurling its leaves and demanding to be shown the sun: "Have you ever heard of such a thing?"
Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can't remember exactly when the question took root, but the answer was in full bloom the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club.
America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall…
I went to four different boarding schools when I was younger, which at the time didn’t seem weird but it definitely is. I think boarding schools are peculiar places, full of teenagers with raging hormones, secret homesickness, and a certain sort of reckless swagger that is a recipe for all sorts of drama i.e. the perfect setting for a novel.I was on quite hefty scholarships and know how lucky I was to be there, but whether you have or haven’t been to boarding school, there is an endless fascination with them. I had a lot of fun writing The Islanders, wallowing happily in my nostalgia and reminiscing with old friends about what we got up to.
Another book about a misfit at a US boarding school. Frankie, our heroine, is sharp, possibly a criminal mastermind, and an ugly duckling turned pretty. At her school–Alabaster Prep–she gets in with a group of older boys and starts to undermine their secret prank society by outdoing them all, with (un)predictably disastrous consequences. This book is so much fun; adults and adolescents alike will love it.
The hilarious and razor-sharp story of how one girl went from geek to patriarchy-smashing criminal mastermind in two short years, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of We Were Liars and Genuine Fraud.
* National Book Award finalist * * Printz Honor *
Frankie Landau-Banks at age 14:
Debate Club. Her father's "bunny rabbit." A mildly geeky girl attending a highly competitive boarding school.
Frankie Landau-Banks at age 15: A knockout figure. A sharp tongue. A chip on her shoulder. And a gorgeous new senior boyfriend: the supremely goofy, word-obsessed Matthew Livingston.
The stories I’ve loved the most in my life have all been about the richness of human relationships, told by a memorable narrator who can find humor and hope in almost everything, no matter how screwed up. Whether it’s Charles Dickens poking fun at his contemporaries in Victorian England or Armistead Maupin sending up friendship and love in San Francisco in the 1980s, I’m a sucker for well-told, convoluted, and funny tales about people who find life with other human beings difficult, but still somehow manage to laugh about it and keep on going. As the author of six novels myself, these are the kinds of stories I always try to tell.
On the surface, this is a coming-of-age story with a protagonist similar to many others in the genre—bright, witty, snobbish, and pissed off at almost everybody he meets. But what makes this book so good is the narrator’s intelligence and self-awareness, and the complexity of all the characters and their relationships.
My own upbringing was a far cry from the wealthy, highly-cultured world depicted here—I grew up in a tiny town in southern Iowa, and though there was a college in town I had little access to culture—yet I could completely relate to the gay narrator’s fish-out-of-water feeling and his desire to be understood. I also loved his close relationship with his grandmother, since my grandmother was equally important to me.
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is the story of James Sveck, a sophisticated, vulnerable young man with a deep appreciation for the world and no idea how to live in it. James is eighteen, the child of divorced parents living in Manhattan. Articulate, sensitive, and cynical, he rejects all of the assumptions that govern the adult world around him–including the expectation that he will go to college in the fall. He would prefer to move to an old house in a small town somewhere in the Midwest. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You takes place…
Secrets, misunderstandings, and a plethora of family conflicts abound in this historical novel set along the Brazos River in antebellum Washington County, East Texas.
It is a compelling story of two neighboring plantation families and a few of the enslaved people who serve them. These two plantations are a microcosm…
My father passed away in early 2005, but it wasn’t until after I finished drafting Touching the Surface, that I became consciously aware of how my writing was deeply connected to the thoughts I had about losing my Dad. The realization only added to my fascination with stories about the afterlife. Simultaneously it also expanded my intrigue with the themes of bad things happening to good people and life-altering mistakes being meant to alter lives. The more I explored the stories I loved and dug deeper into my own writing, the more I realized these themes overlapped like carefully folded origami. Complicated choices are intriguing.
Fifteen-year-old Jam’s boyfriend has died, and she’s been sent to the Wooden Barn, a therapeutic boarding school. Assigned to a selective class called Special Topics in English, Jam and the other struggling students discover that a journal-writing assignment transports them to a place where past trauma seems to be undone and the dead are returned to the ones they love. But as Jam spends more and more time in a static version of her boyfriend’s afterlife, she must figure out if she should hold on to what she once had or reach for something else. Belzhar is twisty tale of magical realism that I will never stop thinking about.
“Everyone has something to say. But not everyone can bear to say it. Your job is to find a way.”
"Expect depth and razor sharp wit in this YA novel from the author of The Interestings." - Entertainment Weekly
"A prep school tale with a supernatural-romance touch, from genius adult novelist Meg Wolitzer." -Glamour
"Basically everything Meg Wolitzer writes is worth reading, usually over and over again, and her YA debut . . . is no exception." -TeenVogue.com
If life were fair, Jam Gallahue would still be at home in New Jersey with her sweet British boyfriend, Reeve Maxfield. She'd be watching old comedy sketches with him. She'd be kissing him in the library stacks. She certainly wouldn't be at…
I’ve been passionate about absurdist literature since my early youth when we read Kafka’s Metamorphosis in school. Later in life, friends recommended Irving, Vonnegut, Bellow, and Boyle to me. I discovered Murakami, Mendoza, and Niven. Films like Common Wealth or The Last Circus by Spanish filmmaker Alex De La Iglesia, which are equally entertaining and thought-provoking, gave me the spark to start writing myself. I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I have!
I loved the book because it made me laugh a lot and gave me a whole different take on religion. Pop stars had become a thing, and even though I didn’t enjoy them, the story of God’s son entering the contest amazed me.
I can’t recommend the book enough, as it reflects certain aspects of modern life that are truly absurd.
God takes a look at the Earth around the time of the Renaissance and everything looks pretty good - so he takes a holiday. In Heaven-time this is just a week's fishing trip, but on Earth several hundred years go by. When God returns, he finds all hell has broken loose: world wars, holocausts, famine, capitalism and 'fucking Christians everywhere'. There's only one thing for it. They're sending the kid back.
JC, reborn, is a struggling musician in New York City, trying to teach the one true commandment: Be Nice! His best chance to win hearts and minds is to…
I’m a history professor, but I’m also a reader. I love books—fiction and nonfiction—that reveal a world, a character, an idea, or a political movement in ways that I didn’t previously fully understand. That make me see more deeply and think more clearly. I teach and write about the history of the United States, especially its history of radical or extreme political groups. Where did this interest come from? Well, I first visited the U.S. in 1980, when I was eleven years old, and truth be told, my fascination with the country and its people has not abated since.
I always love it when a work of history connects with and helps me understand the present, and Linda Gordon’s book certainly does that.
Not only does she provide a riveting account of the revival of the Klan in the 1920s, she clearly demonstrates the tremendous impact the organization had on America during this period and long beyond, through its skillful use of demagoguery, its canny media strategy and its underlying politics of resentment.
Extraordinary national acclaim accompanied the publication of award-winning historian Linda Gordon's disturbing and markedly timely history of the reassembled Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. Dramatically challenging our preconceptions of the hooded Klansmen responsible for establishing a Jim Crow racial hierarchy in the 1870s South, this "second Klan" spread in states principally above the Mason-Dixon line by courting xenophobic fears surrounding the flood of immigrant "hordes" landing on American shores. "Part cautionary tale, part expose" (Washington Post), The Second Coming of the KKK "illuminates the surprising scope of the movement" (The New Yorker); the Klan attracted four-to-six-million members through secret…
Ava Winston likes her life of routine in Lexington, Kentucky. Then a tornado blows it away. Ava is safe in the basement, but when she emerges, only one corner of her home stands. Rather than crumbling under the loss, she feels a load lifted. Maybe something beyond the familiar is…
Ever since I was 12 years old, I told my mom I would figure out this thing called, “life.” It wasn't until 7 years later that I started my journey to dive deep to find the deep profound truths of this world, our life, and how it all works. I've read over 1,000 books on many topics that span from mindset, psychology, neuroscience, near-death experiences, spirituality, universal laws, and much more. I wanted to find out how this all works so I can help myself which in return, can help the ones I love and help the world. Since then, I've written 3 books that have been the accumulation of this journey so far.
This book was what I needed at the time of my life at 19. It shared the teachings of Jesus in such a simple way that is well beyond what I was ever taught for 18 years being a Catholic and had me see Jesus more in the human form than how he is normally perceived.
In this remarkable book, Paramahansa Yogananda reveals the hidden yoga of the Gospels and confirms that Jesus, like the ancient sages and masters of the East, not only knew yoga but taught this universal science of God-realization to his closest disciples. Compiled from the author's highly praised two-volume work, The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You, this insightful and compact book transcends the centuries of dogma and misunderstanding that have obscured the original teachings of Jesus, showing that he taught a unifying path by which seekers of all faiths can enter the kingdom of God.…
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.
This biography gives you the inside experience of one of the most visible lesbians in Paris during the mid-twentieth century.
Genet was the pseudonym for Janet Flanner, The New Yorker’s correspondent for France. Flanner knew and wrote about everyone. Her column noting Anderson’s death is particularly touching. From Indiana to the City of Lights in one lifetime.
The daughter of an Indianapolis mortician, Janet Flanner really began to live at the age of thirty, when she fled to Paris with her female lover. That was in 1921, a few years before she signed on as Paris correspondent for the New Yorker, taking the pseudonym Genet. For half a century she described life on the Continent with matchless elegance.
I'm a self-taught artist and sometimes a sculptor. I'm best known for illustrating the Discworld novels of Sir Terry Pratchett which I have been working on for almost 30 years. Not having had formal training, looking at the work of other artists was an important part of my learning. I have a large collection of art books and have been inspired by all sorts of creatives ranging from Leonardo Da Vinci to Jamie Hewlett. I'm often drawn to draughts-people who have a scientific approach to their work and limited use of colour. If I can’t escape to a gallery for inspiration I can always turn to the pages of a book.
Doré was a prolific artist who illustrated editions of the Bible, Dante's Inferno, Poe's The Raven, and The Adventures of Don Quixote. He was a veritable ‘dream machine’ with multi-disciplinary skills. His depictions of London never cease to amaze me with the intricacy of his observation. The fact that he also turned to sculpture and not to mention his influence on early cinema are all aspects that fill me with awe especially when considering his life was cut short at 51. The epic quality of his work inspires me hugely and this big book encompasses his whole career with lots of well-reproduced images, and the photograph of him on page 17 always makes me laugh.
The diverse oeuvre of Gustave Doré—illustrations, paintings, sculpture—combines with biography and critical essays and attests to the artist’s enduring impact on contemporary culture. Proclaimed "the most illustrious of illustrators," Gustave Doré is best known for his engravings, which appeared in editions of the Bible, Dante’s Inferno, Poe’s The Raven, The Adventures of Don Quixote, and even in Hollywood, from King Kong to Seven. Yet the extent of his genius remains largely unknown. Here, along with his renowned illustrations, his paintings and sculptures are also examined, bringing to light the rich diversity of his talent. Using watercolor, vivid oil paint, or…
Pete is content living a simple life in the remote Montana town of Sleeping Grass, driving the local garbage truck with his pot-bellied pig Pearl and wondering about what could've been. Elderly widow Wilma is busy meddling in Pete's life to try and make up for past wrongs that he…
I’m a writer married to a theologian. My husband and I often discuss Augustine and Aquinas, Austen and Tolstoy, Christie and Sayers, and trends in popular fiction—when we’re not discussing Frog and Toad, Elephant and Piggie, baby diapers, and what to make for dinner. Love stories have long been my favorite stories, and I’ve always enjoyed historical settings. My award-winning novel In Pieces, a 1793 Boston-set historical romance with elements of family drama, society drama, and political suspense, combines all these interests. I even managed to sneak in a diaper-changing scene.
Biblical allegory is hard to do well. Bible stories themselves have infinite depths, but their allegories are often didactic, especially when author parallels the original story too closely. Stephanie Landem’s In a Far-Off Landis anything butdidactic. Set in 1930s Hollywood, the novel is equal parts Prodigal Son retelling, romance, and murder mystery. By allowing the story to take on a life of its own, Landsem avoids the Sunday School vibe, and in the end, I understood the Prodigal Son archetypal characters better.
“Immersive, enchanting, and gripping, In A Far-Off Land is do-not-miss historical fiction.” —Patti Callahan, NYT Bestselling author of Becoming Mrs. Lewis
It’s 1931 in Hollywood, and Minerva Sinclaire is on the run for a murder she didn’t commit.
As the Great Depression hits the Midwest, Minerva Sinclaire runs away to Hollywood, determined to make it big and save the family farm. But beauty and moxie don’t pay the bills in Tinseltown, and she’s caught in a downward spiral of poverty, desperation, and compromise. Finally, she’s about to sign with a major studio and make up for it all. Instead, she…
