100 Books Like All Other Nights

McCarthy’s second novel is an underappreciated masterpiece, one that combines the author’s distinct style and notoriously difficult subject matter with a genuinely sublime vision of the world. Simultaneously a horror novel, a historical fiction, a Gnostic heresy, a cosmic joke, and act of spiritual seeking, I cannot recommend it enough.  

There is one very excellent reason to read this book: It’s hilarious. Ms. King delivers her memoir of a 1950s-60s Southern childhood with searing, laugh-til-you-cry wit as she turns classic Southern tropes on their eccentric heads. Everything from the ubiquitous obsession with lineage (“Who are your people?”) to a mother’s nickname for a wayward child (“Mama Tried”) receives its due. It’s a must-read if you want to understand Southern culture or if only to make acquaintance with Ms. King’s most famous one-liner, an admission of the indelible effects of Southern training even in failed ladies: “No matter what sex I slept with, I never smoked on the street.” 

As a fiction author who investigates the Southern Jewish Experience as it transects with the African American one, I’ve found the work of Eli Evans indispensible. This collection of essays highlights Evans’ Civil Rights Era bona fides, his work in the LBJ administration as speech writer, his trip with Henry Kissinger to the Middle East. But it is also a book at its most personal and insightful when it celebrates small-town Southern life and the Southern Jew’s place in it. In the title essay Christian neighbors, both Black and white, are at church or enjoying Sunday supper after church, which leaves the often isolated Jewish children with little to do. An experimental fishing trip with his father on one such Sunday warms the heart and brings a smile. It’s worth the price of the book entire.

For my money, Stern is the South’s premiere literary comic writer. In this one, he is a Southern Philip Roth with an I.B. Singer twist. A teenage boy discovers a frozen rabbi in the Kelvinator inside his parent’s Memphis basement. The rabbi’s been frozen for one hundred years. Bernie thaws him and what ensues covers a universe of incident: teenage hope and angst, Talmudic wisdom, kabbalistic film-flammery, the seduction of all of Memphis, from lowlifes to elite, by a rabbi (who can fly) selling himself as the font of all magic and knowledge. Stern obviously loves his Memphis and his Jews. At the same time he skewers them with the sleekest wit. Even Israel gets a gratuitous knock. It was the only thing I did not like in the book but it was fleeting, so I got over it. Such is the power of genius.

This one has no magic, but I threw it in because the setup is so close to reality with such a big twist that, for me, it fits.

The world changes completely for a family, and so suddenly, it’s as if they were transported somewhere else. The story left me thinking for a long time about identity and what happens when it is stripped away and we have to get up, rebuild, and survive anyway. Can we be kind? Will we still be honest? Are we brave? Can there still be any kind of joy? 

At sixteen years old, Darin Strauss had just received his first driver’s license and was on his first unsupervised drive, when a classmate, on a bicycle, swerved in front of his car.  She was killed instantly.  There was never a question of actual culpability: bystanders described the girl on the bike as literally driving in front of his vehicle, as though intentionally (a theory corroborated by suicidal thoughts recorded in her last diary entry the night before the accident). But this did not alleviate the trauma of killing someone, and the anguish and guilt that Darin Strauss carried forward for many, many years into his adult life, and probably always will. “Half a Life” refers to how he lived thereafter; halfway in his own existence, and the other half in constant preoccupation with the girl whose life was no more. This book will fill you with such empathy and compassion… show more.

This book… Wow! I read it in one night. No joke. Could not put it down. Colleen Hoover has hit the mark with many #1 selling novels, but this particular novel was a favorite for me. Not many YA romances are this thrilling but Hoover’s writing and story building have a way of drawing you in. The flashback memories give you snapshots of why Sky Davis never feels anything for a guy, without giving away the BIG reveal. When she meets Dean Holder, her attraction to him is jarring because she’s used to feeling nothing. The reason why she’s drawn to him was such a thrill ride of suspense, drama, pain, and real love. If you’ve never read a Colleen Hoover novel, start with this book.

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. 

A wry tale of financial desperation, conceptual art, insanity, infertility, seagulls, marital crisis, jellyfish, organized crime, and the plight of a plastic-filled ocean, JoeAnn Hart’s novel takes a smart, satirical look at family, the environment, and life in a hardscrabble seaside town in Maine. I am proud that Ashland Creek Press (which Midge Raymond and I founded in 2011) published this amazing novel.

Joan abandons her life and moves across the country on a quest to find a stranger from her past, convinced it will help her find peace.

In a savagely honest style, Animal recounts Joan’s affairs, family history, a traumatic incident from her youth, and a gaping emptiness within herself that she’s desperate to understand. “If someone asked me to describe myself in a single word, depraved is the one I would use.”

Depraved, sure. Maybe. But it’s impossible to be angry at her because she’s so candid about what she’s doing and why. The prose itself is fresh and stark and haunting.