100 Books Like Everything That Rises Must Converge

In elegant prose, Nien Cheng, a Shell Oil Company in 1966, recounts her life in Shanghai in 1966, when Chairman Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Mao’s Red Guards ransacked Cheng and her husband’s bourgeois home and then delivered her to No. 1 Detention House in Shanghai where she was held in solitary confinement of 7 years until her rehabilitation and release after several struggle trials.

Her work is prescient as the United States in under attack by a radical woke ideology. Many Americans have been cancelled or have been made to attend struggle sessions.  

Nein Chen is a heroic woman, a brilliant writer, and an example of how one courageous woman can stand up to a totalitarian regime. 

As the best introduction to the American Gothic chosen by one of the most prolific modern masters of the genre, this anthology spans two centuries. It offers insightful context and an engaging historical road map to the current site of the genre, the weird and wounded world of the suburbs.

Joyce Carol Oates, who has written some of the most chilling contemporary examples of American Gothic fiction, dissects the shadowy heritage of our national preoccupation with the macabre themes that haunt the American Dream. From Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville through James and Wharton to Anne Rice, Raymond Carver, Stephen King, and several lesser-known writers, Oates provides readers with a provocative selection that probes beneath superficial normality to reach the dangerous psychological abnormalities of our national identity.

There’s a driving intensity to this book's narrative and atmosphere, which remains as compelling and fresh today as when I first read it years ago. Part of its power derives from Eugenides’ use of first-person plural narration through the collective voice of a group of neighborhood boys still haunted, years later in adulthood, by the untimely deaths of five adolescent sisters in 1970s suburban Michigan.

Part-detectives, part-elegists, they piece together their memories of not only the girls but of a particular place and time now vanished. I’m always struck by the book’s deft melding of pathos and humor and by the way that what is essentially a personal suburban tragedy gradually begins to speak to a wider malaise that calls into question the American dream itself.

The possibility of evil. Not only is this the title of the first selection in this collection of classic and newly printed stories by the queen of suburban gothic – it is the essence of her uncanny literary witchcraft, where subtle twists and sudden turns force readers to confront a creeping unease in post-WWII America. No hideous monsters or grotesque horrors here. Instead, sinister insinuation and irrational fears invade the “safe” suburban spaces. A man believes someone is stalking him on his way home from work.  Anonymous poison pen letters threaten a community. A runaway teenager reappears several years later … and seems to be someone else.

The deconstruction of so-called normality is what makes these stories so unsettling. Who knows what evil lurks behind the white picket fences? Shirley Jackson does.

I don’t think I like Ghost World, but it belongs on this list. When I think of Clowes’ work I think of caricature, but the environments in Ghost World pull most of the storytelling weight. You can hear the hum of the fluorescents in the grocery store and the wind between buildings on an empty street.

The Mysteries of Paris was so popular that Alexandre Dumas’ publisher wanted him to write a similar novel. The result was this book (1845), which focuses on Edmond Dantès, who is unjustly imprisoned by his enemies. Upon escaping and finding a great treasure, Dantès disguises himself as the Count of Monte Cristo and begins to exact his revenge.

The novel enters the criminal world of both Marseille and Paris. The count creates mystery by being a master of disguise and manipulating events without his victims knowing his identity or why their lives are crumbling. At the same time, the count is not without compassion and questions the morality of his own actions, thereby raising the novel to the status of true literature.

Every couple of years–or whenever I’m feeling very blue–I pick up Dicken’s novel and reacquaint myself with the beguiling Samuel Pickwick, Esq., the only saint whose company I can bear. Samuel is a retired businessman who now wants to enjoy life with a jolly band of dim misfits like himself, and they set off for adventures across Britain.

Mainly, though, his jolly naïveté gets them into scrapes. Pickwick is a true innocent, ignorant of the ways of men and ignorant of himself. And so, in the end, he must be bailed out by the less deceived. Yes, ignorance can be bliss for beautiful souls–but only if someone else is driving.

John Steinbeck wrote the Working Days... journals while writing The Grapes of Wrath.

The intent of the journal was to establish a schedule, including a completion date for the novel. What he reveals about his self-doubt is tonic for any writer who is haunted by the same malaise.

Here is the entry for June 18, "…I am assailed with my own ignorance and inability. Honesty. If I can keep an honesty to it… If I can do that it will be all my lack of genius can produce. For no one else knows my lack of ability the way I do. I am pushing against it all the time."

Sometimes, I seem to do a good little piece of work, but when it is done it slides into mediocrity…John Steinbeck’s honesty and humility remind me that self-doubt is a part of the creative process.

I sometimes read entries from… show more.

Lassiter presents a nuanced examination of how social and political conflicts in Richmond, Atlanta, and Charlotte during enabled Richard Nixon and other Republicans to resurrect the GOP from its 1964 electoral disaster through reliance, not on a “southern strategy,” as many pundits have long claimed, but rather on a suburban strategy that involved the complex interplay of race, class, and other factors. 

The messages that enabled the GOP to gain traction in the suburban South, Lassiter emphasizes, worked across the nation. The South was not as different as many observers have long claimed. Lassiter also chronicles how these conflicts reshaped the Democratic Party in the South, as by the early 1970s more moderate figures such Jimmy Carter had supplanted the staunch segregationists of decades past.

This book paints a vivid picture of the symbiotic relationship between 19th-century Southern slave masters and the people they enslaved. It also underscores the fact that for oppressed Black people, allies and enemies came in all colors.

The protagonist, Hiram Walker, is a child prodigy whose intellect and ambition make him poorly suited for a life of servitude. Significantly, Coates speaks to the obligation to “reach back” which those who have achieved a measure of physical, spiritual, or intellectual freedom owe to those who are still enslaved.

Harriet Tubman plays an important role in his narrative because she embodies that ideal.