Here are 78 books that A Slant of Light fans have personally recommended if you like
A Slant of Light.
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I grew up reading murder mysteries and watching old black-and-white films on television. As a teenager, I couldn’t get enough of Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and I loved challenging myself to solve the mystery before the end of the book, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
One thing I noticed in reading the classics is that LGBTQ+ people were either completely absent or used for comic relief or tragic effect. I wanted to change that with my stories, showing that they can be compelling protagonists, solving murders and sometimes finding love.
What’s not to love about this? I first experienced The Big Sleep by viewing the classic Humphrey Bogart movie, and while I thoroughly enjoyed the film, I admit I was a bit perplexed over some of the plot points.
Reading the book cleared up some, but not all, of my confusion, and yet it’s a book I would read again and again. The classic 1930s setting of Los Angeles and Hollywood, the noir elements, and the hard-boiled detective, Phillip Marlowe, are an unbeatable combination in my mind.
Raymond Chandler's first three novels, published here in one volume, established his reputation as an unsurpassed master of hard-boiled detective fiction.
The Big Sleep, Chandler's first novel, introduces Philip Marlowe, a private detective inhabiting the seamy side of Los Angeles in the 1930s, as he takes on a case involving a paralysed California millionaire, two psychotic daughters, blackmail and murder.
In Farewell, My Lovely, Marlowe deals with the gambling circuit, a murder he stumbles upon, and three very beautiful but potentially deadly women.
In The High Window, Marlowe searches the California underworld for a priceless gold coin and finds himself…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
The 1930s have always fascinated me. It was such a historically difficult time for the entire world. The Great Depression, the rise of Nazi Germany, WWII, and the rise of two of the world’s most notable leaders, FDR and Winston Churchill. I have spent years of study on this period and written three novels that take place during the thirties. Does it make me an expert? Only one deeply familiar with an exciting decade.
She checks all the boxes that I hunt for in thirties fiction. The Great Depression, family, and the persistent drive of a protagonist (Elsa) to survive in the midst of harsh adversity. I love when an author paints vivid word pictures of this era, and Hannah does a superb job (as usual).
I want to feel the thirties, to actually mentally become a participant in experiencing what the characters experience. Hannah does just that.
"The Bestselling Hardcover Novel of the Year."--Publishers Weekly
From the number-one bestselling author of The Nightingale and The Great Alone comes a powerful American epic about love and heroism and hope, set during the Great Depression, a time when the country was in crisis and at war with itself, when millions were out of work and even the land seemed to have turned against them.
“My land tells its story if you listen. The story of our family.”
Texas, 1921. A time of abundance. The Great War is over, the bounty of the land is plentiful, and America is on…
The 1930s have always fascinated me. It was such a historically difficult time for the entire world. The Great Depression, the rise of Nazi Germany, WWII, and the rise of two of the world’s most notable leaders, FDR and Winston Churchill. I have spent years of study on this period and written three novels that take place during the thirties. Does it make me an expert? Only one deeply familiar with an exciting decade.
I loved this book because it contains everything that attracts me to this time period, the thirties.
There’s Prohibition, a popular mobster who paints himself as a religious member of the community, politically corrupt NYC, and the story of a young man’s journey from rags to riches.
Doctorow’s brilliant pacing kept me awake, provoking me to jealousy of his genius.
'I was living in even greater circles of gangsterdom than I had dreamed, latitudes and longitudes of gangsterdom'
It's 1930's New York and fifteen-year-old streetkid Billy, who can juggle, somersault and run like the wind, has been taken under the wing of notorious gangster Dutch Schultz. As Billy learns the ways of the mob, he becomes like a son to Schultz - his 'good-luck kid' - and is initiated into a world of glamour, death and danger that will consume him, in this vivid, soaring epic of crime and betrayal.
This memoir chronicles the lives of three generations of women with a passion for reading, writing, and travel. The story begins in 1992 in an unfinished attic in Brooklyn as the author reads a notebook written by her grandmother nearly 100 years earlier. This sets her on a 30-year search…
The 1930s have always fascinated me. It was such a historically difficult time for the entire world. The Great Depression, the rise of Nazi Germany, WWII, and the rise of two of the world’s most notable leaders, FDR and Winston Churchill. I have spent years of study on this period and written three novels that take place during the thirties. Does it make me an expert? Only one deeply familiar with an exciting decade.
Towles does an excellent job in weaving a narrative that captures a different side to the Great Depression.
It’s not the poverty, the homeless, the downtrodden, but the elite and how they navigated the thirties. Although the protagonist (Katey) is a working-class woman, Towles creates moral complexities for her that paint a vivid picture of the world of the thirties from the heights of the elite.
It gave me a perspective of the thirties I sometimes ignored because it doesn’t fit the image of the unemployment line, the soup kitchens, and people jumping out of windows after the crash. I was able to view the thirties from a different angle.
From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway and A Gentleman in Moscow, a “sharply stylish” (Boston Globe) book about a young woman in post-Depression era New York who suddenly finds herself thrust into high society—now with over one million readers worldwide
On the last night of 1937, twenty-five-year-old Katey Kontent is in a second-rate Greenwich Village jazz bar when Tinker Grey, a handsome banker, happens to sit down at the neighboring table. This chance encounter and its startling consequences propel Katey on a year-long journey into the upper echelons of New York society—where she will have…
I grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My mother’s family traces their ancestry to the arrival of Spanish settlers in the Southwest, and my family taught me to draw strength from our sense of being deeply rooted in the region. I attended the United World College of the American West, which has an extensive outdoors education program, and I learned there to value the natural world that I had previously taken for granted. I left New Mexico at nineteen and haven’t lived there a full year since. Reading and writing are my salve for my homesickness and my portal to the ever-changing world that is the American Southwest.
At first glance, this book of short stories is about Denver gentrification, but the volume is much more – a series of studies of how Native and Mexican women remember and revisit the “lost territory” of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado when they head to the Rocky Mountain metropolis.
I love that rather than look back East or out West when seeking home, the women of Fajardo-Anstine’s work look northward and southward, to the past and to the future. I was not at all surprised to learn that Fajardo-Anstine consulted with Prof. Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez for her work. Fonseca-Chávez’s Following the Manito Trail oral history project let me keep listening for similar voices.
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • Latinas of Indigenous descent living in the American West take center stage in this haunting debut story collection—a powerful meditation on friendship, mothers and daughters, and the deep-rooted truths of our homelands.
“Here are stories that blaze like wildfires, with characters who made me laugh and broke my heart.”—Sandra Cisneros
WINNER OF THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE STORY PRIZE • FINALIST FOR THE PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE FOR DEBUT SHORT STORY COLLECTION
Kali Fajardo-Anstine's magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in…
I've been writing Spooky Middle Grade for a number of years, and before that, I wrote horror for Hollywood. Living in Sleepy Hollow, spooky is in my blood, and if I didn't write creepy stories, they'd kick me out. I'm also a professional storyteller and have scared the bejeebus out of kids and adults in places like Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Rockefeller State Park Preserve, and Washington Irving's Sunnyside. Halloween is my favorite time of year. It more or less becomes a month-long village-wide celebration in October. Being inundated with all this crazy rubs off on you, and I have been well-steeped.
A story about evil puppets? Sign me up! Oddity is a town only the Addams Family could love, with weird, strange, unusual, and downright wrong things taking place at all hours of the day and night. What I love about this book is the way it manages to give us an entire town of spookiness, and yet still find a plot that is even more spooky. The characters are unforgettable, and the villains are a joyous wonder.
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This book is for kids age
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What is this book about?
Welcome to Oddity, New Mexico, where normal is odd and odd is normal.
Ada Roundtree is no stranger to dodging carnivorous dumpsters, distracting zombie rabbits with marshmallows, and instigating games of alien punkball. But things haven't been the same since her twin sister, Pearl, won the town's yearly Sweepstakes and disappeared. Along with her best friend, Raymond, and new-kid-from-Chicago Cayden, Ada leads a self-given quest to discover Oddity's secrets, even evading the invisible Blurmonster terrorising the outskirts of town.
But one of their missions goes sideways, revealing something hinky with the Sweepstakes . . . and Ada can't let it…
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
I wrestled with big questions as a child, particularly concerning gender inequality. I was aware of the issue as young as 7 years old. I didn’t even feel comfortable challenging the way things were until I was a young adult. Thus began my journey of researching, studying, and embracing women’s rights and gender equality. I feel very passionate about presenting those big questions earlier in the lives of girls, so they start feeling comfortable challenging the places where things don’t make sense, or the areas where inequality still exists. There is a need for more books like these in the market, but I hope you enjoy this list!
Addie Ramirez, the main character of Tumble, is the kind of girl who takes charge of her situation—whether it’s searching for her father or meeting new people or speaking her mind about wrestling.
I felt such a personal connection to Addie; she loves her stepdad, but she still wonders about her father and embarks on a journey to find him and get to know him. And along the way, she meets her wrestling family and learns firsthand how powerful women wrestlers can be.
I loved that readers get to see powerful women in a sport traditionally dominated by men!
Twelve-year-old Adela "Addie" Ramirez has a big decision to make when her stepfather proposes adoption. Addie loves Alex, the only father figure she's ever known, but with a new half brother due in a few months and a big school theater performance on her mind, everything suddenly feels like it's moving too fast. She has a million questions, and the first is about the young man in the photo she found hidden away in her mother's things.
Addie's sleuthing takes her to a New Mexico ranch, and her world expands to include the legendary Bravos: Rosie and Pancho, her…
I’m not an expert in gardening, forestry, or herbal medicine. But like everyone else, I have a growing awareness that our planet Earth is entirely dependent on thriving forests and insects and even weeds. We owe it to our children and future generations to learn about and protect our precious resources. Although I live in the big city of Chicago and have a tiny backyard, last year I turned my little grass lawn into prairie! I have creeping charlie, dandelions, creeping phlox, sedge grass, wild violets, white clover, and who knows what else. (Luckily, my neighbors are on board.) I’ve already seen honeybees and hummingbirds. It’s not much, but it’s something I can do.
Everyone feels lost like Jayden at one time or another: His family has moved from the excitement and color of New York City to the vast, empty desert of New Mexico, where at first all Jayden sees and hears are shadows and silence. How can this ever be home?
But very quickly the desert reveals its glorious sounds and colors. Nikki Grimes’s spare, quiet text does a beautiful job of reminding us that nature is everywhere if we only take the time to look, and that finding comfort and joy in the beauty around us can help make any place a home.
From Children's Literature Legacy Award winner Nikki Grimes and highly-acclaimed illustrator Wendell Minor comes a stunning picture book about the beauty of the natural world and finding a new place to call home.
The beauty of the natural world is just waiting to be discovered . . .
When Jayden touches down in New Mexico, he's uncertain how this place could ever be home. But if he takes a walk outside, he just might find something glorious.
Flowers in bright shades . . . Birds and lizards and turtles, all with a story to tell . . . Red rock…
When I make a snarky remark during a party, chances are one person will catch my eye with the amused look that says, “I saw what you did there.” Everyone else will keep right on talking. But in a book, the reader is right there in the character’s head, which lets your audience catch those subtle humorous comments. In my mystery series, The Accidental Detective, Kate shares witty observations about life with the reader – making Kate funnier than I am. I don’t do as much slapstick and joking (in life or in fiction), but I enjoy writers who pull off those forms of humor well. Humor makes life’s challenges bearable
Matilda moves to the small New Mexico town of Goodnight after inheriting a house, a small newspaper, and two dogs. She learns just how odd the town is when she starts investigating the murder of a reporter. The town of Goodnight is pretty bizarre, but speaking as someone who lives in a small town in New Mexico, Goodnight is more believable than it might seem to an outsider. I prefer books where weirdness is something to celebrate, and here the characters embrace their crazy with enthusiastic joy. This story is part screwball comedy and part mystery, and both work.
Matilda Dare can’t sleep. Her insomnia is one more reason to move to the quirky small town of Goodnight, New Mexico after she inherits a house, a small newspaper, and two old dogs there. But despite the Goodnight name, Matilda still spends hers wide awake, and she has good reason after a reporter is murdered. With a mystery to solve, she begins to investigate the town and uncovers more suspects than she knows what to do with.
Meanwhile, the hottie cowboy sheriff is doing his own investigation into Matilda, and the mysterious, handsome stranger, who just happens to live with…
Ferry to Cooperation Island
by
Carol Newman Cronin,
James Malloy is a ferry captain--or used to be, until he was unceremoniously fired and replaced by a "girl" named Courtney Farris. Now, instead of piloting Brenton Island’s daily lifeline to the glitzy docks of Newport, Rhode Island, James spends his days beached, bitter, and bored.
As a college instructor and a student of Western American Literature for many, many years I have read a great number of western novels for my classes and for my literary studies. In addition to my doctoral dissertation on the topic, I have written and published numerous articles and reviews on western writers, and I have given many public presentations as well. I have a long-standing interest in what makes good works good. As a fiction writer, I have published more than thirty traditional western novels with major publishers, and have won several national awards for my western novels and short stories.
The Sea of Grass is a short novel, standard in length for the time in which it was published (1936), close in time to other short classics such asThe Grapes of Wrath and The Postman Always Rings Twice. It is written in first person, and in some respects, it suggests the influence ofThe Great Gatsby, another short masterpiece some ten years earlier, with an observer narrator, an elegiac tone, an evocative prose style, and interesting figurative language. This novel, like many, draws upon the range war (nesters versus the cattle empire) for its premise, but it becomes a very interesting exploration of human nature and the inevitable passing of time.
Published in 1936, this novel presents in epic scope the conflicts in the settling of the American Southwest. Set in New Mexico in the late 19th century, The Sea of Grass concerns the often violent clashes between the pioneering ranchers, whose cattle range freely through the vast sea of grass, and the farmers, or "nesters," who build fences and turn the sod. Against this background is set the triangle of rancher Colonel Jim Brewton, his unstable Eastern wife Lutie, and the ambitious Brice Chamberlain. Richter casts the story in Homeric terms, with the children caught up in the conflicts of…
