100 books like The Lottery

This is a short story collection I return to every few years. There are four novellas in this collection, but each of them was delivered directly to my cerebral cortex. I can recall passages from each story. And I can see the locations.

I feel King is at his best when he's twisting his way through novellas and short stories. After reading "1922", it was weeks before I stopped seeing the well. And weeks before, I stopped shaking my head at what Wilfred James did or the grit of Tess in "Big Driver" or the pettiness of Dave Streeter. This is worth reading every year.

This book unleashed my interest in gothic literature, and soon after, I wrote my book.

I enjoy the way the narrative begins innocently and picks up momentum. Racing to the ending like a runaway train. I did something similar in my book with the pacing. Stetson's novella feels so much more prominent in scope than a novella. What makes this gothic is that it captures the deterioration of a woman into madness, in much the same way Edgar Allen Poe did with his male protagonist in The Raven.

You can read Stetson's novella for free. It's in the public domain. 

His physicality transformed, Gregor awakes no longer a man, but instead, a giant grotesque creature.

As I read this masterpiece, I too understood how it is, to appear not how I desire. To sound different, to look different, to appear different than the paragon of myself I have created in my mind. And to strive to be more than this body I inhabit can give. But is this not the condition of us all?

A truly brilliant Kafka, this book created a world that is my own, yet unreal, and my reality yet a waking dream.

Each one of these stories is a mini-novel, which are the sort of stories I love. Black never leaves you hanging, like some writers do, and you will feel like you’re right in there watching the story unfold. The writing has been called pitch-perfect and I agree. Every word is right, every moment fits and every character is trying to make sense of the world as we all do, every day. She deftly explores the emotional DNA passed from generations before and what that means for each of our lives going forward. So you get a great tale well told. and a lot to think about at the same time. Exactly what I love to read and what smart modern women are drawn to. 

Joseph Wood creatively uses landscape, settlement patterns, and the built environment to challenge a fabled view of the Currier and Ives New England village. The compact village center, with a steepled church, tidy white homes, and quaint shops surrounding the village green has too long colored our historical imaginings about an idealized New England past. But these forms, Wood convincingly argues, do not describe our colonial past. They are a 19th c invention that both romanticizes and obscures the actual colonial landscape of scattered farmsteads, meadows, and pastures. Early New England was shaped by a land-hungry people who sought competency & security in an expansive countryside. Richly illustrated with maps and images, this book is a model of how to use unusual evidence to recover the past. 

Jack Larkin, former historian of Old Sturbridge Village, befriended me when I was a research fellow at the Village years ago. He was one of the most generous and original scholars I’ve ever known. Though deeply versed in the primary sources of the Village’s rich research library, Jack’s understanding of the past was richly informed by his immersion in the living history of the Village. He knew the past intimately – how it felt, looked, smelled. For Jack, being “in the room where it happened” had a different meaning: he knew their homes, barns, workshops, meetinghouses. He married this rich evidence with his knowledge of village life – family and neighborly dynamics, the growth of material desires, popular politics, and religious revivalism. This book engagingly preserves Jack’s rare understanding of daily life in the early Republic. 

Quabbin is a relic of a lost world – both figuratively and literally. In his old age, Francis Underwood remembered his childhood village, the buildings, the personalities, their dress, manners, and speech, their faith and their passions for reform, their old social customs and their emerging middle-class sensibilities – and most of all their stories. But it is a world, as Underwood knew, that was passing away. His secluded old New England village was opening to the world, and its agrarian ways were soon to be eclipsed by the industrial village. What Underwood did not know, but we do, is that his childhood home has literally disappeared, under the flooding waters of the Quabbin Reservoir. This is an extraordinary testimonial to that lost world!

I love a New England mystery, especially one that includes recipes.

Katherine Hall Page fills the bill with her twenty-six delightful Faith Fairchild mysteries. Faith is a high-end New York City caterer who falls in love and marries a minister from a New England village. Will she be bored? Can love conquer all?

It turns out that this sleepy New England town has murders aplenty, but luckily, Faith is on the scene. I have tried her recipes, and they are wonderful!

Dooling's nonfiction account of the searches for a girl and two women who disappeared in New England in the 1940s and 1950s is another good example of weaving together true crime and historic context. Only one of the victims' remains have been found, but all of the victims may have met up with the still-unknown killer. In addition to covering the missing person searches as they were conducted in their times, Dooling provides new hope by looking back on these cases with twenty-first-century eyes.  

Harriette Merrifield Forbes pioneered the field of American gravestone studies. Her admirable study has separate chapters on several artisans, including the 17th and 18th-century stonecutters of Boston, the Lamsons of Charlestown, the Fosters of Dorchester, the stonecutters of Groton and Harvard, and the “Thistle-Carver” of Tatnuck. It also has chapters on the gravestones of Rhode Island and Connecticut. 

Forbes initiated real interest in this area of research. I found it astounding that she could have accomplished so much in the 1920s—before the introduction of modern battery-powered flash systems (which I relied on so often in highlighting shallow carvings and lettering)—and almost singlehandedly lit the fire of inquiry in so many of us who followed her model. She was also attentive to the human side of this craft, with many interesting observations on the stonecutters’ intentions and skills.