100 books like Whereabouts

Rose grows up in a working-class family in a town in Southern Ontario between the wars. She is good in school, makes it to university, marries the son of a department store owner, moves to Vancouver, divorces, becomes an actor, teaches acting, grows older, and returns to the town to take care of her stepmother.

These connected stories give us a picture of Rose’s life, but each is a masterpiece by itself. The Beggar Maid, about her marriage, has the most devastating yet subtle ending I have ever read: a precise flick with a small, very sharp knife. I read this first when I was fourteen and too young to comprehend it. Now, I reread it every few years and probably will for the rest of my life.

This book is an outlier in the sense that most of the stories dwell in the fantastic. Women shed their skins. A girl becomes hypnotized by a circle of light. An apparently ordinary vintage shop in Toronto’s Kensington Market has something unnerving in the back room.

But I love this book so much that I take every opportunity to recommend it. It’s still (in a heightened mode) expressing the deep strangeness of domestic life—what happens in the spaces we live in, what tensions or tragedies or irreconcilable conflicts result from small clashes between closely related people—in a way that seems to me like one of the things that fiction is for. This book is a hidden gem, like finding a secret compartment in an old desk. 

A lower-middle-class girl grows up in provincial England, and we follow her from early childhood through middle age. That’s it. She has a few relationships, a few kids, and some friendships. She fights with her mother, she works, and she thinks about her life, but only in passing because she’s busy living.

The kind of book that’s not supposed to work, except it does. It was technically marketed as a novel but exists on the disputed border between connected short story collections and novels. Each section can be read by itself and is a world unto itself. This book is full of moments that express how strange it is to have consciousness, how we are caught, suddenly, in the midst of ourselves, unable to believe we are here. 

This is Li’s first collection, a series of stories mostly exploring the lives of Chinese immigrants to the US, though some of the stories are set in China, where Li was born. Li is one of the greatest short story writers alive today, period. Part of her greatness is her profound understatement: the prose is disarmingly simple, hiding how brilliant it is.

Reading this collection is like a conjuring trick in which a familiar room becomes unfamiliar, but you aren’t sure how; you only know that the interior has altered. A standout: The Princess of Nebraska, in which a Chinese woman studying in the US goes for abortion care, supported by an older man. I use the opening paragraph of this story when I teach as a demonstration of how to convey, apparently without effort, every significant detail within the first page, except one crucial detail, which you could never… show more.

Oh, this one? It is everything. The villain is a virgin! Which deep down we all want. Seraphena is promised to him since childhood, groomed into marrying him and killing him in order to save her country. When the wedding night comes – he rejects her, leaving her behind. People blame her. If she hated him before, she loathes him even more. Until he reappears into her life to save her and they both fight this attraction. She still has a mission, and this is her excuse to try to seduce him. He is a tough nut to crack. He is actually more in control of himself than she is. As she grows to know him in his supernatural surroundings, hatred is hard to keep and so is distance…

When I wake up in the middle of the night I want to re-read something that will make me feel safe, and the character of Stuart is so sweet and funny, and familiar, that I come back over and over and always find something new to love in this book. The pictures are also just right, with Stuart looking jaunty as he sails his boat in Central Park, or rides his mother's wedding ring up out of the bathroom sink drain. I'm a New Yorker, so I have a soft spot for stories that take place in New York, but it's also just a story about a wonderful little guy named Stuart. It's also a love story, and a coming-of-age story. It's not easy being a mouse born into a household of humans, no matter how much they love you. This is a book that is filled with hope, and… show more.

This is a novel about Italian immigrants struggling to survive in New York City’s Little Italy during the early years of the twentieth century amid the growth of the Black Hand, the precursor to the American mafia. The book is unique in that most of the characters are the author’s actual ancestors and people with whom they had come into contact during that era. Similarly, the grisly central events described in the story all occurred.

It is beautifully written and filled with fascinating historical details. The characters and the descriptions of places and events come alive on the page. Fabiano includes an extensive Glossary of Italian Terms used in the book, as well as a multi-generational family tree. Elizabeth Street makes for very good reading!

Lady Oracle was one of the novels I read in the several years after first having the vague notion that I might like to write a novel akin to Steppenwolf but that would be set in the approximate present day and have a female protagonist. As Lady Oracle’s main character is a writer who, after periodically reinventing herself, now fakes her own death, flees her intellectual, non-dancing husband, and holes up in an Italian village, I saw possible avenues for my own husband-leaving Kari. Would Kari flee to another country? Would she have secret lovers or a history of being fat? Would she, too, fake her own death? Kari ultimately didn’t follow many of Joan Foster’s paths, but she might have.

Gabrielle Hamilton isn’t just a ‘reluctant chef’ (in her own words), she’s also an absolutely exquisite writer (her MFA really paid off!). Her memoir traces her life and love of food from her New Jersey childhood, through her many professional ups and downs and international travels (I especially love the parts where she’s staying at her Italian mother-in-law’s home, describing the incredible produce she was able to get. Oh, the tomatoes!) Did I extra love this because she grew up in the same small town I was born in? Maybe, but it’s a wonderful book no matter where you’re from.

Who would have thought Catholic Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would have tolerated widespread abortion? John Christopoulos brilliantly shows that, despite the moral proscription and legal prohibition of abortion from church and state leadership, women across the social spectrum from elites to peasants practiced abortion with the tacit or explicit support of key people in their communities. Compelling mini-narratives about individual women’s abortion stories are interwoven with an expert analysis of the legal, religious, and scientific knowledge and attitudes.