Here are 100 books that Lexicon Devil fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’m Alex Behr, a writer and musician. When I was little, I thought the Partridge Family lived in the TV set. I soon joined the Partridge Family Fan Club, entranced with the puppy-dog beauty of David Cassidy. Although he appealed to teenyboppers, he could write dark songs. Check out “I Think I Love You”: “Before I go insane, I hold my pillow to my head / … Screaming out the words I dread.” Eventually, I left David behind but continued being a fangirl of both intense musicians and fictional characters. Reading about obsessions is a vicarious pleasure that crosses genres from rock memoirs to literary fiction.
This memoir is written to the man Terese Marie Mailhot has an affair with, which began “in a small booth at Village Inn.”
He was her fiction teacher, a potent taboo, and she describes his shaking hands and smoke-encrusted hoodie. The book pulses with her desire for him and her resistance, knowing he was ruining her. I found the book addictive.
Mailhot describes her upbringing as a member of the Seabird Island Band in the Pacific Northwest. I learned how she manifests stories to save herself. She is diagnosed with bipolar II disorder and PTSD, leading to hospitalization. Her crafting of this memoir is a love story, ultimately, to her resilience.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Winner of the Whiting Award for Non-Fiction Selected by Emma Watson as an Our Shared Shelf Book Club Pick
'I loved it' Kate Tempest 'Astounding' Roxane Gay 'A sledgehammer' New York Times
Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on an Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalised and facing a dual diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder, Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma.
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…
I’m Alex Behr, a writer and musician. When I was little, I thought the Partridge Family lived in the TV set. I soon joined the Partridge Family Fan Club, entranced with the puppy-dog beauty of David Cassidy. Although he appealed to teenyboppers, he could write dark songs. Check out “I Think I Love You”: “Before I go insane, I hold my pillow to my head / … Screaming out the words I dread.” Eventually, I left David behind but continued being a fangirl of both intense musicians and fictional characters. Reading about obsessions is a vicarious pleasure that crosses genres from rock memoirs to literary fiction.
Startling, quick-witted attention to story pervades this collection, but I’m especially entranced with “Bog Girl: A Romance.”
Tell me another story in which a young man named Cillian falls in love with a girl dug out from peat, a teen who is two thousand years old. Karen Russell makes me root for this love affair and believe completely that Cillian rises “with the Bog Girl in his arms, nuzzling her blue neck.”
The haunting lingers as I read the other compelling stories, too, including a story in which a mother makes a pact with the devil.
'I loved Orange World... a collection of short stories in which demons live in drains, bog women come back from the dead and trees can grow inside the human body' Daisy Johnson, New Statesman BOOK OF THE YEAR
'A rare combination of literary brilliance and unbridled entertainment' Mark Haddon
These exuberant, unforgettable stories showcase Karen Russell's comedic and imaginative talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner lives. In 'The Bad Graft', a couple on a road trip stop in Joshua Tree National Park, where the spirit of a giant tree accidentally infects the young woman, their fates…
I’m Alex Behr, a writer and musician. When I was little, I thought the Partridge Family lived in the TV set. I soon joined the Partridge Family Fan Club, entranced with the puppy-dog beauty of David Cassidy. Although he appealed to teenyboppers, he could write dark songs. Check out “I Think I Love You”: “Before I go insane, I hold my pillow to my head / … Screaming out the words I dread.” Eventually, I left David behind but continued being a fangirl of both intense musicians and fictional characters. Reading about obsessions is a vicarious pleasure that crosses genres from rock memoirs to literary fiction.
The obsession of Isabel, or Isa, revolves at first around possessions in her uncle’s house.
She and her brothers moved there during World War II, but when the story begins, only Isa is left. The objects take on the weight of loss after her mother’s death, and Isa fears the caretaker is stealing from her. When Eva, the girlfriend of Isa’s brother arrives, she disrupts Isa’s static isolation. Objects disappear—or do they? And the pull between Isa and Eva becomes electric.
Yael van der Wouden subtly layers red herrings and shifts my understanding of Isa and her family, ultimately revealing that the house, so carefully maintained, has a dark history rooted in the war. Isa’s paranoia and lust build to a devastating betrayal.
Longlisted for the 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize • A Best Book of 2024: Time, Kirkus Reviews, BookPage, The Sunday Times (London)
“Remarkable…Compelling…Fine and taut…Indelible.” —The New York Times • “Moving, unnerving, and deeply sexy.” —Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl with the Pearl Earring • “A brilliant debut, as multi-faceted as a gem.” —Kirkus Reviews
A “razor-sharp, perfectly plotted” (The Sunday Times, London) tale of desire, suspicion, and obsession between two women staying in the same house in the Dutch countryside during the summer of 1961—a powerful exploration of…
Detective Kate Bowen is out of time—and out of options.
A surveillance operation on the Irish border goes cock-eyed. Detective Kate Bowen is left red-faced when her target vanishes into the mists of the Irish Sea. She must work smart to figure out where he’s headed and what he’s plotting.
I’m Alex Behr, a writer and musician. When I was little, I thought the Partridge Family lived in the TV set. I soon joined the Partridge Family Fan Club, entranced with the puppy-dog beauty of David Cassidy. Although he appealed to teenyboppers, he could write dark songs. Check out “I Think I Love You”: “Before I go insane, I hold my pillow to my head / … Screaming out the words I dread.” Eventually, I left David behind but continued being a fangirl of both intense musicians and fictional characters. Reading about obsessions is a vicarious pleasure that crosses genres from rock memoirs to literary fiction.
I loved how The Use of Photography provides a voyeuristic thrill of pre-coitus images, with the co-authors’ garments creating the mood, a story in strewn tights, knocked over leather boots. These photos alternate with deadpan observations of a doomed love affair.
The affair takes place as Ernaux, in middle age, undergoes invasive cancer treatments. The passion between the couple is girded by the indignities of chemo. Marc Marie writes, “For months we live together as a threesome, death, A., and me.”
I’ve never read a book in which lust cuts through deadpan photography analysis. It’s like the co-authors are balancing on a seesaw of future loss.
The Use of Photography recounts a passionate love affair between Annie Ernaux and the journalist and author Marc Marie, after the two met in January 2003. Ernaux had been receiving intensive chemo for breast cancer during the prior three months, and had lost all her hair from the treatments. At the end of January she had surgery, followed by radiation therapy. The affair took place in different locations and Ernaux describes how, shortly after it began, she found herself entranced each morning by the sight of clothes strewn about, chairs out of place and the remains of their last meal…
I don’t just write stories, I study them. I’ve noticed that nearly every major hero/ine’s journey and epic tale has an adoption component. From Bible stories and Greek myths (adoption worked out well for Moses, not so much for Oedipus) to Star Wars through This Is Us, we humans are obsessed with origin stories. And it’s no wonder: “Where do I come from?” and “Where do I belong?” are questions that confound and comfort us from the time we are tiny until we take our final breath. As an adoptive mother and advocate for continuing contact with birth families, I love stories about adoption, because no two are alike. They give us light and insight into how families are created and what it means to be a family—by blood, by love, and sometimes, the combination of the two.
In this exquisitely written poem of a memoir, Jillian Lauren splays her heart wide open, on every page as she transforms from an addict whose used up most of her luck to a mother whose role requires great stores of grit, determination, and love. We’re right there with her as she and her husband decide to adopt a boy from Ethiopia, and we’re along for the bumpy, often painful, occasionally joyful, ride through the challenges of parenting this tiny person who has already lost so much, but has so much to give. Outside of motherhood, she’s so funny and interesting I kind of want to be best friends with her. Not in a weirdo-stalker way, though.
A Best Memoir of 2015, "This memoir is compulsively readable and full of humor and heart."-AdoptiveFamilies.com
"A punk rock Scheherazade" (Margaret Cho) shares the zigzagging path that took her from harem member to PTA member...
In her younger years, Jillian Lauren was a college dropout, a drug addict, and an international concubine in the Prince of Brunei's harem, an experience she immortalized in in her bestselling memoir, SOME GIRLS. In her thirties, Jillian's most radical act was learning the steadying power of love when she and her rock star husband adopt an Ethiopian child with special needs. After Jillian loses…
After years as a London-based music journalist for publications such as Melody Maker, Q, and The Guardian, I turned to ghostwriting rock autobiographies and discovered how much more satisfying it is to tell someone’s full, unadulterated life story rather than to feed on carefully cultivated scraps gleaned from half-hour interviews. I never imagined anybody would be as lewdly transparent as my first memoir subject, Nikki Sixx, but many others have run him close—not least Judas Priest singer Rob Halford, in 2020’s appositely named Confess. Its follow-up, Biblical, is imminent. Does it go the extra mile? I don’t think it will disappoint…
It’s not an easy task to convey the carnal intensity and animal abandon of a performer whose default mode has always been unadulterated excess, but Paul Trynka’s masterful study of Iggy Pop hit the motherlode. Trynka went the extra mile and then some, tracking down hundreds of key witnesses to, and victims of, Pop’s creative chaos, and even attending his high school reunion (which is more than Iggy did). Jaw-dropping anecdotes were legion (taking a mid-gig dump behind the speakers, anyone?) and Trynka captured the driven essence of this brittle soul, perennially fighting the world while never even knowing why.
“Fellow rock stars, casual members of the public, lords and media magnates, countless thousands of people will talk of their encounters with this driven, talented, indomitable creature, a man who has plumbed the depths of depravity, yet emerged with an indisputable nobility. Each of them will share an admiration and appreciation of the contradictions and ironies of his incredible life. Even so, they are unlikely to fully comprehend both the heights and the depths of his experience, for the extremes are simply beyond the realms of most people’s understanding.”
A charming cozy mystery with a delightful twist: The detectives are three kittens with magical powers, determined to solve a most purr-plexing case.
Precocious kittens Bippity, Boppity, and Boop are exceedingly loyal to their human, the twenty-eight-year-old up-and-coming magician Mila. She saved them from starving to death in a dingy…
As the Director of the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University, I’m excited to stay on top of all that’s being done in the field of Texas Music and let me assure you that it is a great way to spend one’s days. Texas music and culture reflect the state’s diverse and contested past, and every month, it seems that there is not only a new artist appearing on the stage to sing her or his truth but a writer helping us to understand how those truths fit into the larger narratives of Texas history.
Tara Lopez suggests something new, prioritizing punk’s diverse expression over its tired origin myths. By turning our attention to the 1990s El Paso scene that produced bands like At the Drive-In, Lopez gives us a granular, expressive take on all the things that draw us to punk: its liberatory potential, DIY ethos, and ability to impact individual lives.
Through accessible oral histories, we get a sense of how vital punk rock could be against the backdrop of border politics and in a scene off the beaten path where DIY takes on new meanings. As a punk-curious 90s adolescent myself who listened in on El Paso from Austin, Dallas, and South Texas, this account resonated deeply—there was much that was familiar, but even more to learn.
An immersive study of the influential and predominantly Chicanx punk rock scene in El Paso, Texas.
Punk rock is known for its daring subversion, and so is the West Texas city of El Paso. In Chuco Punk, Tara Lopez dives into the rebellious sonic history of the city, drawing on more than seventy interviews with punks, as well as unarchived flyers, photos, and other punk memorabilia. Connecting the scene to El Paso's own history as a borderland, a site of segregation, and a city with a long lineage of cultural and musical resistance, Lopez throws readers into the heat of…
My two passions in life are music (especially punk rock) and history, so obviously books about music history really hit the spot for me. As both a fan and a writer / performer, learning about the history of the music I love is very important (not to mention entertaining) for me. Here are some of my favourites.
Tells the story of the further development of punk in Washington DC, and the birth of a thousand subgenres, from emo to post-hardcore and beyond, and punk's embracing of a more aware political consciousness, as well as a broader musical spectrum.
The nation's capital gave birth to the most influential punk underground of the '80s and '90s. Dance of Days recounts the rise of trailblazing artists such as Bad Brains, Henry Rollins, Minor Threat, Rites of Spring, Fugazi, and Bikini Kill.
I was a participant in the D.C. punk scene during the 1980s and helped start an organization known as Positive Force. I remember hearing about the group “Parents of Punkers,” the head of which compared punk to a violent cult. They would go on television and scare watchers about what their kids might be doing. I remember at the time that this missed the realities of my own experiences and made me want to protest this moral panic. But I knew this required some distance from the “punk rock world” I had inhabited. I kept thinking about writing this book and the timing was right.
From Martin’s expansive look at things, let’s move onto a more granular approach – Fournier’s Double Nickels. Fournier focuses on just one band and an album (albeit a double record album and one of the best to come out of punk in the 1980s). The Minutemen played a fast, discordant music that sounded like jazz as much as hardcore thrash music. Fournier’s examination turns up something few people consider, that punk wasn’t all about blistering music but rather sophisticated in its nature. Fournier documents how the bassist in the band, Mike Watt, had extended conversations with one of the most important artists associated with 1980s punk – Raymond Pettibon (who as of now has made his way into accomplished art museums and galleries). They talked about everything from Ludwig Wittgenstein to James Joyce. Band members supposedly got into heated debates about history and would stop at public libraries while…
In recent years, the Minutemen have enjoyed something of a revival, due to both a chapter in Michael Azerrad's book "Our Band Could Be Your Life", and a feature length documentary film, "We Jam Econo", showcasing the band's legacy. (And having a song serve as the theme for MTV's "Jackass" show doesn't hurt, either.) To date, though, the band's actual work hasn't been the subject of much attention - everything has focused on either the interpersonal relationships that made the Minutemen so distinctive or the sudden and tragic death of guitarist/singer D. Boon. This book shines a light on the…
PI David Randall is not a fan of singer Sherry White, but when he learns she has received threatening letters, he agrees to help with security for her concerts in Parkland.
When Sherry’s personal psychic quits, Randall enlists Camden to help Sherry deal with her stage fright. Randall’s investigation is…
I’ve published eleven classic-style space opera novels, a novella, and many short stories. Before becoming a writer, I spent twenty years in US Air Force in space operations; even though my books are light on science, I really was a rocket scientist! Plus, I’ve read science fiction since I was barely a teen, starting with Heinlein and McCaffery, and am always looking for my next favorite author!
Clair Johnson is determined to prove herself and find out what really happened to her mother. Neither of those things happen the way she expects.
This is an easy read, with interesting world building, and a realistic set of characters. I enjoyed the setting, the friend group, and the intrigue a lot!
In a world of music videos on television, punk rock, and roller derby, the race for space is finally on in this young adult SF adventure!
The United Federation has set a goal of sending a manned rocket to the moon; but rival countries will stop at nothing to plant their flags first—no matter the cost.
For Claire Johnson, that cost might be her life.
The seventeen-year-old spunky waitress wants nothing more than to honor her mother's memory by gaining entrance to the United Federation Space Program and doing her part for the mission. Yet her father wants Claire as…
