Here are 100 books that I Am an Executioner fans have personally recommended if you like
I Am an Executioner.
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Perhaps because I get bored easily, or maybe because I hear voices, I have found that my writing lends itself to exploration (different points of view, traditions, styles). I write to learn and to play. I distrust writers whose characters all sound like them, live lives like their own. It feels completely unfanciful, completely disinterested in the long literary tradition of make-believe. Writing and reading, at the end of the day, are ways for me to escape boredom meaningfully, and why should I wish to do that with stories that don’t offer up a small amount of the great kaleidoscope that is life?
The first story alone has enough jampacked into it to be more thrilling and entertaining than many novels.
A team of Confederate rejects man a rudimentary submarine on a mission near the end of the Civil War. From there we are taken across eras and across the globe to stories of near-future whaling missions that are hastening climate catastrophe, imperial Russian ships stuck on ice, a camp counselor taking his charges on ever-zanier adventures.
Though largely unified in their explorations of people plugging away in spite of ill-fated circumstances, the range of this author’s characters dazzles. As much as this is a master course on authentically capturing voices of all ages, places, and periods, Rutherford convincingly captures location as well using it as a character as much as setting.
The stories in The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories, a collection from Ethan Rutherford, map the surprising ways in which the world we think we know can unexpectedly reveal its darker contours.
In stories that are alternately funny, persuasive, and compelling, unforgettable characters are confronted with, and battle against, the limitations of their lives.
Rutherford’s work has been selected by Alice Sebold for inclusion in the volume of The Best American Short Stories that she edited, and also published in Ploughshares, One Story, and American Short Fiction.
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
Perhaps because I get bored easily, or maybe because I hear voices, I have found that my writing lends itself to exploration (different points of view, traditions, styles). I write to learn and to play. I distrust writers whose characters all sound like them, live lives like their own. It feels completely unfanciful, completely disinterested in the long literary tradition of make-believe. Writing and reading, at the end of the day, are ways for me to escape boredom meaningfully, and why should I wish to do that with stories that don’t offer up a small amount of the great kaleidoscope that is life?
Whether we are told a story by the collective voice of dying and dead girls after a horrific accident, or one about an Ottoman wrestling champ on a world tour, or even the reflections of the god Apollo on the human affinity for war, Bucak is adept at bringing the reader along as a confidant through some truly bizarre tales (one of my favorites is about the chess-playing robot “the Turk” falling in love).
Whether the story is close to its characters or respectfully removed, the tenderness and care the writer gives to evocatively portraying so many different stories is at the forefront so even if they might not be as tonally different as some others in this list, they make such diverse threads feel unified and, together, satisfying.
In Ayse Papatya Bucak's dreamlike narratives, dead girls recount the effects of an earthquake and a chess-playing automaton falls in love. A student stops eating and no one knows whether her act is personal or political. A Turkish wrestler, a hero in the East, is seen as a brute in the West. The anguish of an Armenian refugee is "performed" at an American fund-raiser. An Ottoman ambassador in Paris amasses a tantalizing collection of erotic art. And in the masterful title story, the Greek god Apollo confronts his personal history and bewails his Homeric reputation as he tries to memorialize,…
Perhaps because I get bored easily, or maybe because I hear voices, I have found that my writing lends itself to exploration (different points of view, traditions, styles). I write to learn and to play. I distrust writers whose characters all sound like them, live lives like their own. It feels completely unfanciful, completely disinterested in the long literary tradition of make-believe. Writing and reading, at the end of the day, are ways for me to escape boredom meaningfully, and why should I wish to do that with stories that don’t offer up a small amount of the great kaleidoscope that is life?
Similar to The Trojan War Museum, these stories are tonally more in synch (after all, with a title like that, it’s hard to overstate the role attitude plays in these), but also like Trojan War Museum, it’s a wonderful collection that shows how absolutely not-repetitive an attitude can feel when its voices are given such specific and niche jargons for each story, such interesting and far-flung locales and, such wacky and hopeless situations for its characters to overcome.
Jim Shepard is a must read for anyone interested in writing against the adage: “write what you know”. Also, the story “Zero Meter Diving Team” is one of my all time favorites.
Following his widely acclaimed Project X and Love and Hydrogen—“Here is the effect of these two books,” wrote the Chicago Tribune: “A reader finishes them buzzing with awe”—Jim Shepard now gives us his first entirely new collection in more than a decade.
Like You’d Understand, Anyway reaches from Chernobyl to Bridgeport, with a host of narrators only Shepard could bring to pitch-perfect life. Among them: a middle-aged Aeschylus taking his place at Marathon, still vying for parental approval. A maddeningly indefatigable Victorian explorer hauling his expedition, whaleboat and all, through the Great Australian Desert in midsummer. The first woman in…
Coyote weather is the feral, hungry season, drought-stricken, and ready to catch fire. It’s 1967, and the American culture is violently remaking itself while the country is forcibly sending its young men to fight in a deeply unpopular war.
Jerry has stubbornly made no plans for the future because he…
Perhaps because I get bored easily, or maybe because I hear voices, I have found that my writing lends itself to exploration (different points of view, traditions, styles). I write to learn and to play. I distrust writers whose characters all sound like them, live lives like their own. It feels completely unfanciful, completely disinterested in the long literary tradition of make-believe. Writing and reading, at the end of the day, are ways for me to escape boredom meaningfully, and why should I wish to do that with stories that don’t offer up a small amount of the great kaleidoscope that is life?
Though these stories are actually linked, told over a century and a half through many generations of one family, the characters are so different that what acts as the unifying thread for this book more than anything is its exploration of imperialism’s traumas, perpetrated, experienced, and inherited.
Like my own work that seeks to explore a country’s identity through many different members and eras, Serizawa paints a portrait of Japan before and after the Second World War in breathtaking scope to remind us that events in history have much longer roots and much greater reaches than we recognize.
Winner of the PEN/Open Book Award Winner of The Story Prize Spotlight Award
A kaleidoscopic portrait of five generations scattered across Asia and the United States, Inheritors is a heartbreakingly beautiful and brutal exploration of a Japanese family fragmented by the Pacific side of World War II. A retired doctor is forced to confront the moral consequences of his wartime actions. His brother’s wife, compelled to speak of a fifty-year-old murder, reveals the shattering realities of life in Occupied Japan. Half a century later, her estranged American granddaughter winds her way back East, pursuing her absent father’s secrets. Decades into…
Absurdity gets a bad rap in fiction and storytelling, I think. “It’s too silly,” they say. But for those who can take a step back and appreciate how absurd our own world is—our everyday life—there’s nothing more real than absurdity. (I’m saying “absurd” an absurd amount of times. Let’s just say it’s purposeful.) It might be played for laughs at times, but if it’s done right, it gives you perspective. Sometimes we all need to look through a funhouse mirror to realize that we’re only human. These five books share that spirit and have made me laugh, think, and occasionally reevaluate my entire life in a spiral of existential dread—with a smile on my face.
For those who don’t know Raphael Bob-Waksberg, he created Bojack Horseman. For those who don’t know Bojack Horseman, watch it immediately—it might be the best-written television show ever.
Bob-Waksberg has an unmatched talent for creating an absolutely nonsensical world and then breaking your heart with the characters living in it. In this collection, he does it again and again, story after story, all about love.
It made me chuckle, then broke me, then somehow put me back together again.
Written with all the scathing dark humor that is a hallmark of BoJack Horseman, Raphael Bob-Waksberg delivers a fabulously off-beat collection of short stories about love—the best and worst thing in the universe.
Featuring:
• A young engaged couple forced to deal with interfering relatives dictating the appropriate number of ritual goat sacrifices for their wedding.
• A pair of lonely commuters who ride the subway in silence, forever, eternally failing to make that longed-for contact.
• A struggling employee at a theme park of U.S. presidents who discovers that love can’t be genetically modified.
I love Aotearoa New Zealand books! Our writers are brave, feisty, original - and living in ‘the land of the long white cloud’ at the bottom of the globe gives us a unique take on the world that permeates through everything we write. But we struggle to get our voices heard internationally, so far from the rest of you! This is your chance to push out your boundaries and explore stories that derive from a culture very different from your own, while sharing the same human emotions that bring us all together. As one of these writers, I challenge you to check us out – you won’t be disappointed!
Perhaps our greatest writer for children and young adult fiction, two-time Carnegie Medal winner Margaret Mahy, this book won the 2005 Phoenix Award from the Children's Literature Association. Essentially it’s a love story, but not as you’ve ever experienced it before. It’s brainy, surprising, endearing, and really, really worth a read!
Determined to satisfy her curiosity about her unknown father, eighteen-year-old Angela May embarks on an emotional journey that shapes and forever alters the way she looks at herself, her unconventional mother, and her devoted friend Tycho. Reprint.
Homeless following the death of his adoptive parents in a car crash and the subsequent loss of their farm tenancy, Seb decides to enrol as a residential student at the Asklepios Foundation, a College of Natural Medicine, boasting a sanctuary modelled on an ancient Greek healing temple. Spending a night…
When I started writing children’s stories in 2018, I never would've guessed that my first book would be about rainbow babies. I hadn’t even heard of the term until I miscarried the following year. As I grieved the baby we would never hold, I used writing to work through the mess of emotions I felt: pain, disappointment, sorrow… until the words “Dear Rainbow Baby” appeared. My husband and I didn’t know if we could or would have a rainbow baby, yet, writing a letter filled me with hope that one day she would come. We recently celebrated our daughter’s second birthday, and the publication of my first picture book Dear Rainbow Baby.
The first thing I noticed about this book was its simple black, white, and red illustrations. They are simple and clean and add so much to the book’s message. While the text doesn’t explicitly mention rainbow babies, parents who have endured previous losses will resonate with its beautiful refrain: it had to be you.
This sweet and playful board book features bold, high-contrast black-and-white illustrations that babies can actually see!
In simple, beautiful verse, bestselling Feminist Baby creator and two-time Emmy Award winner Loryn Brantz narrates the journey that parents take to have their perfect little one.
New York magazine's The Strategist chose It Had to Be You as one of the "Best (Nonobvious) Baby Books to Bring to a Shower." As The Strategist stated: "Because of its high-contrast color scheme (with red accents), it's easy for babies to see the illustrations. Plus, the lyrical text is a love poem to the child that's…
Over my past 87 years, I have experienced a multitude of intimate relationships, including “falling in lust,” infidelity, “one-night stands,” one-week trysts to 40-year companionships, two marriages, and fatherhood, but the one that was most lasting and important to me was one of unconditional love.
Anne Carson is a Canadian poet who wonderfully expresses the trauma associated with loving another person, the angst of a failing relationship, and the bittersweet emotions once the relationship has ended.
Most everyone who has fallen in love and lost cannot help but relate to the words in her poems.
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time
A book about romantic love, Eros the Bittersweet is Anne Carson's exploration of the concept of "eros" in both classical philosophy and literature. Beginning with, "It was Sappho who first called eros 'bittersweet.' No one who has been in love disputes her," Carson examines her subject from numerous points of view, creating a lyrical meditation in the tradition of William Carlos Williams's Spring and All and William H. Gass's On Being Blue.
Epigrammatic, witty, ironic, and endlessly entertaining, Eros is an utterly original book.
From when I first learned to read, books opened a whole new world, which has given me vast pleasure ever since. I think it’s made me wiser, too. But it wasn’t until the sudden death of my younger son in 2020 that I began to read about the edges of the known world, and to discover that by opening my mind I could re-learn what I instinctively knew as a young child: that we come from somewhere else. Even before encountering tragedy, I’d been fascinated by the dividing line between what science can prove, and what still remains conjecture: it’s a theme I have returned to again and again in my fiction.
The moment Mira’s father dies, Mira experiences an epiphany and becomes transformed into a being that can be anything and go anywhere. Inhabiting this metaphysical space in the form of a leaf on a tree, the grieving but “awakened” Mira contemplates consciousness, the divine, and the nature of the afterlife. Heti is always an intriguing, left-field kind of writer and this slim novel is a quirky, deceptively simple exploration of some of life's most intriguing paradoxes.
Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS
by
Amy Carney,
When I was writing this book, several of my friends jokingly called it the Nazi baby book, with one insisting it would make a great title. Nazi Babies – admittedly, that is a catchy title, but that’s not exactly what my book is about. SS babies would be slightly more…
Marcia Naomi Berger's passion is to help people create lasting, fulfilling marriages. An experienced clinical social worker, psychotherapist, and medical school clinical faculty member, Berger has held senior-level positions in child welfare, alcoholism treatment, and psychiatry. She says, "I stayed single for a long time because of my parent's divorce. Now happily married for over thirty-four years, I fill my books with the hard-earned wisdom I've gained professionally and personally."
This book can help many communication-challenged couples. It offers specific guidance on how to talk about topics for partners to address to foster long-term happiness. Couples who are dating and not yet committed will learn if deal-breakers exist by having conversations about whether they want children, what fidelity means to them, whether they're likely to support each other's goals and dreams, and more.
I strongly agree with the authors' ideas about addressing conflict with the goal of understanding rather than winning, making your relationship your top priority to succeed in marriage, and having fun together.
Many happily married people implement the ideas naturally without following the Eight Dates formula. However, as a couples therapist, I know that many will benefit from having the kinds of conversations the authors prescribe. I'm recommending this book to couples in my practice.
Happily Ever After is not by chance - it's By Choice.
John and Julie Gottman are cofounders of the Gottman Institute, bestselling authors, and award-winning researchers. Together, they have a deep understanding of what makes relationships work. Now, they bring that lifetime's worth of knowledge, research, and wisdom to bear in Eight Dates, a program of how, why, and when to have eight basic conversations with your partner that can result in a lifetime of love. Eight Dates is written for any serious couple, and its dates are structured around the concepts of trust, dealing with conflict, sex and intimacy,…
