Here are 100 books that How to Order the Universe fans have personally recommended if you like
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Writer and essayist Agnes Borinsky called my debut novel The Seep, “A swift shock of a novel that has shifted how I see our world.” Here are five short, urgent novels that continue to live with me in the months and years after reading them. These are some of my most beloved books, all of which happen to be under 200 pages, which ache with the inner mystery of what is hidden, and what is revealed. These books are my teachers, each a precise masterclass in world building, suspense, and purposeful storytelling. Enjoy these ‘swift shocks!’
Argentinian masterpiece written in 1956 and only recently published in English in 2016, Zama is told from the POV of a minor Spanish official colonizing Paraguay. The alienation of Don Diego de Zama reads like a horror story—taut and psychological, he’s both villain and victim of the systems he perpetuates. Zama was adapted brilliantly into a film by Lucrecia Martel in 2017, which is how I learned about the book. I expected the film to have radically adapted its source material, but what I discovered instead was a novel from the 1950s that felt incredibly fresh and modern.
First published in 1956, Zama is now universally recognized as one of the masterpieces of modern Argentine and Spanish-language literature.
Written in a style that is both precise and sumptuous, weirdly archaic and powerfully novel, Zama takes place in the last decade of the eighteenth century and describes the solitary, suspended existence of Don Diego de Zama, a highly placed servant of the Spanish crown who has been posted to Asunción, the capital of remote Paraguay. There, eaten up by pride, lust, petty grudges, and paranoid fantasies, he does as little as he possibly can while…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
Writer and essayist Agnes Borinsky called my debut novel The Seep, “A swift shock of a novel that has shifted how I see our world.” Here are five short, urgent novels that continue to live with me in the months and years after reading them. These are some of my most beloved books, all of which happen to be under 200 pages, which ache with the inner mystery of what is hidden, and what is revealed. These books are my teachers, each a precise masterclass in world building, suspense, and purposeful storytelling. Enjoy these ‘swift shocks!’
Electric, dystopic, magical, queer, Tentacle is the most exciting, genre-bending book I’ve gotten my little hands on in quite some time. Expansive in theme yet swiftly paced, it moves between three different connected time spans including futuristic Santo Domingo. Felt like a fever dream with seriously high stakes, I can’t believe how much world building happens in under 200 pages. Rita Indiana is also a brilliant musician based in the Dominican Republic, I was introduced to her revelatory music after reading her fiction. Her music now haunts all my playlists.
Plucked from her life on the streets of post-apocalyptic Santo Domingo, young maid Acilde Figueroa finds herself at the heart of a voodoo prophecy: only she can travel back in time and save the ocean - and humanity - from disaster. But first she must become the man she always was - with the help of a sacred anemone.Tentacle is an electric novel with a big appetite and a brave vision, plunging headfirst into questions of climate change, technology, Yoruba ritual, queer politics, poverty, sex, colonialism and contemporary art. Bursting with punk energy and lyricism, it's a restless, addictive trip:…
Writer and essayist Agnes Borinsky called my debut novel The Seep, “A swift shock of a novel that has shifted how I see our world.” Here are five short, urgent novels that continue to live with me in the months and years after reading them. These are some of my most beloved books, all of which happen to be under 200 pages, which ache with the inner mystery of what is hidden, and what is revealed. These books are my teachers, each a precise masterclass in world building, suspense, and purposeful storytelling. Enjoy these ‘swift shocks!’
The first in a series of surreal, poetic short novels, set in the fictional city of Ravicka, a “linguist-traveler” arrives during an unspecified state of emergency. Event Factory feels like a travelog of an unsettling yet beautiful dream. I return to this book often and always get something different—the events evaporate, but the details remain. You can easily enjoy Event Factory as a standalone novel. Gladman is a master. Fun fact: Dorothy, the small feminist press which publishes these books, began specifically to launch these singular novels.
“More Kafka than Kafka, Renee Gladman’s achievement ranks alongside many of Borges’ in its creation of a fantastical landscape with deep psychological impact.” —Jeff VanderMeer
A “linguist-traveler” arrives by plane to Ravicka, a city of yellow air in which an undefined crisis is causing the inhabitants to flee. Although fluent in the native language, she quickly finds herself on the outside of every experience. Things happen to her, events transpire, but it is as if the city itself, the performance of life there, eludes her. Setting out to uncover the source of the city’s erosion, she is beset by this…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
Writer and essayist Agnes Borinsky called my debut novel The Seep, “A swift shock of a novel that has shifted how I see our world.” Here are five short, urgent novels that continue to live with me in the months and years after reading them. These are some of my most beloved books, all of which happen to be under 200 pages, which ache with the inner mystery of what is hidden, and what is revealed. These books are my teachers, each a precise masterclass in world building, suspense, and purposeful storytelling. Enjoy these ‘swift shocks!’
I’m also a playwright, so I really admire a full story told in propulsive first-person monologue. This novella is a confession of Father Urrutia from his deathbed, beginning with the line “I am dying now, but I still have many things to say.” As he speaks, the priest untangles the twisted, uncomfortable agreements between artists and institutions in Chile under Pinochet. I often recommend this book for people who have not yet read Bolaño and might feel intimated by the length of his major works.
As through a crack in the wall, By Night in Chile's single night-long rant provides a terrifying, clandestine view of the strange bedfellows of Church and State in Chile. This wild, eerily compact novel-Roberto Bolano's first work available in English-recounts the tale of a poor boy who wanted to be a poet, but ends up a half-hearted Jesuit priest and a conservative literary critic, a sort of lap dog to the rich and powerful cultural elite, in whose villas he encounters Pablo Neruda and Ernst Junger. Father Urrutia is offered a tour of Europe by agents of Opus Dei (to…
As a teenager, I began to question the myths my parents told about our family, but when saying so caused trouble, I confided my stories to paper instead. That’s how I became a writer. My first love has always been fiction, but I broke into print writing history—about quirky subjects in which I find deep meaning, like the potato’s revolutionary influence on the Western world, or how the invasion and occupation of Belgium in 1914 foretold Nazi Europe. My fascination with subversion shapes my novels too—my quiet, lonely protagonists would never storm the barricades yet appear radical because of how they live, a circumstance I know well.
I have a soft spot for characters who find strength by dint of superhuman effort, and the way this fifteen-year-old takes charge after the 1906 earthquake—haltingly, uncertainly, as is only plausible—makes me wish I’d met her.
Her path is steeper than the San Francisco hills, yet her refusal to ask for pity wins me over. I also admire how Edgarian uses her protagonist’s coming of age to represent San Francisco’s, a parallel delivered with a light touch.
But above all, the novel explores the fraught relation between women and power; and how Vera walks that tightrope makes compelling fiction.
New York Times bestselling author Carol Edgarian delivers “an all-encompassing and enthralling” (Oprah Daily) novel featuring an unforgettable heroine coming of age in the aftermath of catastrophe, and her quest for love and reinvention.
Meet Vera Johnson, fifteen-year-old illegitimate daughter of Rose, notorious proprietor of San Francisco’s most legendary bordello. Vera has grown up straddling two worlds—the madam’s alluring sphere, replete with tickets to the opera, surly henchmen, and scant morality, and the quiet domestic life of the family paid to raise her.
On the morning of the great quake, Vera’s worlds collide. As the city burns and looters vie…
As a contemporary fiction author, I dig down into and expose the dirty underbelly of my characters’ lives and experiences. As a reader and television viewer, I am drawn to stories that do the same. My fascination with reading and writing gritty stories about queer characters figuring their lives out stems from my own confused upbringing. I have written four full-length contemporary fiction novels that all put the main character’s experiences and choices under a microscope. Additionally, while I didn’t set out to try to destigmatize therapy and friends talking openly about their struggles, reviewers have pointed out that those are themes in my books.
Michelle writes in an authentic voice that draws the reader into her tumultuous, down and dirty story. I love Valencia because as I read the book, it feels like she is sitting next to me on a dirty curb, late at night, regaling me with stories about her youthful adventures (and misadventures) in San Francisco. Valenciawas a touchstone for me as a young author; it taught me that it’s okay to write about gritty, real-life things because, surprise, they are relatable. Valencia also helped me overcome my self-doubt about writing and getting my own unique voice out into the world.
Valencia is the fast-paced account of one girl's search for love and high times in the drama-filled dyke world of San Francisco's Mission District. Michelle Tea records a year lived in a world of girls: there's knife-wielding Marta, who introduces Michelle to a new world of radical sex Willa, Michelle's tormented poet-girlfriend Iris, the beautiful boy-dyke who ran away from the South in a dust cloud of drama and Iris's ex, Magdalena Squalor, to whom Michelle turns when Iris breaks her heart.
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I’ve loved portal fantasies since childhood—after all, who has never imagined being swept away to another world, particularly one in which magic is more than mere illusion? (The trick, of course, is then finding your way back…) Since the wardrobes in my life have thus far refused to open onto snowy forests, however, I write my own stories these days.
The Magicians is what happens when a kid who’s obsessed with a series like The Chronicles of Narnia grows up, is accepted into a magical university, and discovers along the way that the fantasy world he so loved reading about is real…but not quitewhat he imagined. This novel, the first in a trilogy, offers a more jaded look at some of the beloved aspects of children’s fantasy and how they might play out with young adults discovering themselves and seeking purpose.
I grew up in a woman-centered household, the youngest with two older sisters. I was the only child of my mother’s second marriage, and a space of ten and twelve years separated me from my sisters. My sisters and mother always felt like an intense unit that didn’t include me, and that yearning and outsider status defined my life and made me a lover of books about mothers and daughters and the female world.
Kincaid’s voice and style, bracing and autobiographical, almost obsessive, rocked my world.
Hearing the insistence of her voice helped me discover my own voice and to embrace it. I love the compulsive presence in her work and the "I," whose power of personality, sensibility, and voice rushes through me.
An adored only child, Annie has until recently lived a peaceful and content life. She is inseparable from her beautiful mother, a powerful and influential presence, who sits at the very centre of the little girl's existence. Loved and cherished, Annie grows and thrives within her mother's shadow.
When she turns twelve, however, Annie's life changes, in ways that are often mysterious to her. She begins to question the cultural assumptions of her island world; at school she makes rebellious friends and frequently challenges authority; and most frighteningly, her mother, seeing Annie as a 'young lady', ceases to be the…
After finding out a close friend of mine had what was once called Multiple Personality Disorder, I set out looking for stories, only to find that, according to most fictional representations, my friend was likely to be a violent, amnesiac murderer. Fortunately, this is wildly inaccurate. Unfortunately, it's socially prominent, and enormously destructive. This has sparked a decade-long obsession (and close friendship), the result of which is my debut novel, When Fire Splits the Sky, which was released in November of 2022 by Unsolicited Press. My other writing has been nominated for the Rhysling and Best of the Net, and has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction and F(r)iction, among others.
Paul Lynch was recently announced as the (very deserving) winner of the Booker Prize, but I’ve been a fan of his ever since his spectacular novel about the Ireland’s Great Famine, Grace.
How do you capture trauma on a national level? Of course, you embody it in the personal, and I was in constant awe of Lynch’s immediate, visceral sentences, and their ability to force me to embody Grace’s experience living through absolutely unimaginable history.
One memorable section is made up of four entirely blacked-out pages, a brilliant nod to the way trauma overwhelms and erases.
From the Booker Prize-winning author of Prophet Song, a sweeping, Dickensian story of a young girl on a life-changing journey across nineteenth-century Ireland on the eve of the Great Famine.
Early one October morning, Grace's mother snatches her from sleep and brutally cuts off her hair, declaring, "You are the strong one now." With winter close at hand and Ireland already suffering, Grace is no longer safe at home. And so her mother outfits her in men's clothing and casts her out.
When her younger brother Colly follows after her, the two set off on a remarkable odyssey in the…
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…
A native of New York’s Long Island, I’ve always been obsessed with the shoreline. My best early memories are of traveling with my family to the eastern edge of Long Island for our two-week summer vacation. My parents didn’t earn a lot of money, and we didn’t vacation often, so those two weeks in August were heavenly. As an adult, I gravitate to coastlines and islands. I’ve always been a fan of books with a strong sense of place, especially when that place is the shore. And I loved setting my current book on an island in the Mediterranean, delving into the qualities and characteristics that make a coastline so evocative and so appealing.
Who doesn’t love a good coming-of-age story—especially one set on the beautiful, summery, and storied beaches of Cape Cod?
It’s the type of location I find irresistible. Set in the 1980s, the book centers on a young, aspiring novelist named Eve who crosses path with a literary power couple at their Cape Cod home. She lands a job as a research assistant, falls in love with their intriguing son, and scores an invitation to their famous book party.
This novel made me nostalgic for the time I was Eve’s age, full of dreams and waiting for the world to open its arms to me! So atmospheric and evocative!
I was transported back to a time that I don’t often think about, a time that was magical while it lasted. I didn’t want the book to end!
*A July 2019 Indie Next List Great Read* *One of Parade's Most Anticipated Books of Summer 2019* *An O Magazine Best Beach Read of 2019* *A New York Post Best Beach Read of 2019*
“The Last Book Party is a delight. Reading this story of a young woman trying to find herself while surrounded by the bohemian literary scene during a summer on the Cape in the late '80s, I found myself nodding along in so many moments and dreading the last page. Karen Dukess has rendered a wonderful world to spend time in.” ―Taylor Jenkins Reid, New York Times…
