100 books like The Palm-Wine Drinkard

My default stance in life is ‘Meh,’ which infuriates my children, but it's pretty hard to get a rise out of me because I've seen some shit.

Nigeria is such a dysfunctional country full of laughter, sunshine, secrets, and puppeteers; it made everything in this book seem feasible. Like, if you stretch my country out like taffy we'd get to a mad stage that everyone would still shrug off and accept.

It validated the heck out of me, let me tell you. 

Samuel R. Delaney’s masterpiece, Dhalgren, is set in a city in the Midwest that has been emptied by an unnamed catastrophe.

A sense of freedom, violence and disaster hang everywhere as the hero – Kidd, Kid, or the kid, a man with no memory and of ambiguous race (he remembers his mother was Native American) – gains entry into the subcultures that remain behind: parties, high-rise poetry readings with older white people, gun fights, gangs, graphic sex.

Time and perspective seem fluxive, inconstant, and looping. 

This is beautiful, destabilized world building. Dhalgren answers no questions yet evokes a time, place, and milieu that shifts as you read.

I first found it when I was working as a librarian in a prison out on the plains. I didn’t last in prison.

I can’t name what so destroyed me about this book; it speaks to a level of pain for which there’s no language.

I believe a book’s hidden subject will chase a writer down: a fear, a state of mind. Barnes had to write it in order to survive her experience.

A loose group of outcasts appears in Nightwood: a gay doctor, logorrheic, poetic, desperate, witty, alone. A woman obsessed with another woman whom has left her and whom she’ll never reach, never understand.

Dancers and circus performers all in the baroque shimmer of a prose so fascinating it becomes clear almost by virtue of its density. What comes through is the tragedy of what it is to be alive.

I stumbled on this book in a free box outside a bookstore when I was a teenager and the family I had moved across the country to be with had collapsed.

My sisters and stepmother moved out of state, my brother moved to California, and my dad, after borrowing my student loan money for truck driving school, went over the road.

Bloodsport was rain-rippled—with a gigantic, dried fly smashed flat in the middle, sliding like a secret toy over the page.

An entire world opened up. I felt no less alone, but the experience changed my understanding of realism, the mythic, and the surreal: a book of immense oddness about a father and son journey up an apocalyptic river, toward Ratnose, the leader of a motorcycle gang.

Borges loved this 29-volume “book” and consulted it with near religious fascination.

Through all the volumes flows the colonial mind of the British Empire. Its desire to gather “all knowledge” and present it with an index.

What comes forth now are the fascinating, individual voices of the writers (whose work has been used to build Wikipedia) sounding out of the void.

The thing is, they’re all different. Some are clear and calm, some youthful and manic, others stodgy, snobbish. Maps of the States in 1906 have almost no highways, only topography.

A full-page plate, under “Cats,” where no cats appear, only their skins, showing the different patterns of their stripes.

This is a work of world-building, a terraforming “real” fiction. Repulsive, time-folding, fascinating.

I am in love with Lesley’s writing, and everyone should be. Period. I will recommend this book a thousand times. The first time I read it, I was left feeling hopeful–hopeful that stories are soft, intentional, deliberate, magical things that can shift people and places enough to make a difference or change minds. With each story in this collection, Lesley peels away the layers (sometimes softly, sometimes jarring) of lives, relationships, and women.

Smutty ghost sex. I had no business reading this book at nine or whatever, but I had an appetite and the aptitude, and my parents were either too trusting or indifferent because SMUTTY GHOST SEX.

I can't remember much else about it, nor can I get a copy, but for nine-year-old me, it was forbidden and titillating. 

Don't tell my mother. 

I grew up reading fairy tales from other lands and taking our own oral stories back home for granted. At the very least, our stories belonged to dark, scary places.

This book changed all that. It was magical! It showed me new Igbo mythology and made my culture appealing and heroic. What's not to love? 

This is a classic by the late folklorist, Harold Courlander. If you want to get a basic understanding of the stories that make up the Orishas of Yoruba mythological tradition, this is the go-to book. Here is the story of how the Orishas come to earth, and the powers and power struggles of the Yoruba pantheon. Appendices give a quick overview of Orishas in Cuba and the Americas.

This no-frills cocktail handbook has been hailed the “Most-read cocktail expert around” for a good reason.

Regan engagingly romanticizes cocktail and drinking culture. He details the history of specific cocktails, includes theories of how certain drinks came about and adds quotes about drinking from notable figures.

He makes you want to try drinks you have yet to try. He also muses about the philosophy of being a bartender and what it takes to be a good bartender.

Although the author makes it a humorous and fun read, the book is much more. It is a thoughtfully laid-out handbook for creating classic cocktails. Of course, one can search for a recipe by cocktail name.

But the book includes a great glossary, and charts by the family of cocktail, making it easy to be like; it’s been a long day, and we have some leftover rye and lemons in the fridge. What… show more.