100 Books Like Nightwood

Samuel R. Delaney’s masterpiece, Dhalgren, is set in a city in the Midwest that has been emptied by an unnamed catastrophe.

A sense of freedom, violence and disaster hang everywhere as the hero – Kidd, Kid, or the kid, a man with no memory and of ambiguous race (he remembers his mother was Native American) – gains entry into the subcultures that remain behind: parties, high-rise poetry readings with older white people, gun fights, gangs, graphic sex.

Time and perspective seem fluxive, inconstant, and looping. 

This is beautiful, destabilized world building. Dhalgren answers no questions yet evokes a time, place, and milieu that shifts as you read.

I first found it when I was working as a librarian in a prison out on the plains. I didn’t last in prison.

I stumbled on this book in a free box outside a bookstore when I was a teenager and the family I had moved across the country to be with had collapsed.

My sisters and stepmother moved out of state, my brother moved to California, and my dad, after borrowing my student loan money for truck driving school, went over the road.

Bloodsport was rain-rippled—with a gigantic, dried fly smashed flat in the middle, sliding like a secret toy over the page.

An entire world opened up. I felt no less alone, but the experience changed my understanding of realism, the mythic, and the surreal: a book of immense oddness about a father and son journey up an apocalyptic river, toward Ratnose, the leader of a motorcycle gang.

Weird AF!

I haven't read it in twenty years, having been introduced to Tutuola's work as part of my undergrad degree. It's a book full of ghosts and the sort of mind that perceives and interacts with them. It basically epitomises the saying, 'Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,' but is the palm-wine drinkard a fool, brave, desperate, or just very, very drunk when he wanders off on his quest through the spirit world? Or is he all of the above?

Read it and find out.

Borges loved this 29-volume “book” and consulted it with near religious fascination.

Through all the volumes flows the colonial mind of the British Empire. Its desire to gather “all knowledge” and present it with an index.

What comes forth now are the fascinating, individual voices of the writers (whose work has been used to build Wikipedia) sounding out of the void.

The thing is, they’re all different. Some are clear and calm, some youthful and manic, others stodgy, snobbish. Maps of the States in 1906 have almost no highways, only topography.

A full-page plate, under “Cats,” where no cats appear, only their skins, showing the different patterns of their stripes.

This is a work of world-building, a terraforming “real” fiction. Repulsive, time-folding, fascinating.

I rarely read books more than once, but this is one of the few that gets an exception based on its sharpness and ability to show its reader the highs and lows of a new, intoxicating, and hidden relationship.

The protagonist, as far as she knows, is straight, that is until she meets Finn. What happens then is what happens when you know that something is bad for you from the very beginning, but you pursue it anyway. So beautifully and painfully written but impossible to put down.

I stumbled upon Milk Fed by accident, and boy am I glad I did. A protagonist after my own heart, Rachel has control issues, which for her manifest in disordered eating, over-exercising, seeking approval and acceptance in the wrong places, and yearning. Ohhh, so much gloriously unhealthy, obsessive yearning. Broder includes a level of grit and physical descriptors that some reviewers deemed “gross,” but to me those details added to the story and made me love it even more. Milk Fed made me laugh, cringe, gasp, and groan.

Anna Birch’s I Kissed Alice is an enemies-to-lovers story about two gifted artists, Rhodes and Iliana, at a school for the arts who despise each other in person but fall hard for each other’s online fanfiction personas. Rhodes’s depression and anxiety consume her in the race to win a prestigious scholarship and navigate a complicated dynamic with her alcoholic mother. I found Rhodes’s on-page therapy sessions incredibly refreshing and relatable, something I don’t see enough of in YA fiction. The characters in this story are unlikeable and flawed—extremely so—but for that reason, my heart clenched often at their actions, assumptions, and reactions. Bonus points for the beautiful fanfiction graphics illustrated by Victoria Ying.

This book, a retelling of “Cinderella,” is widely considered to be a foundational queer retelling, and I wholeheartedly agree with that assessment.

It was the first queer retelling I ever read and continues to be a favorite. It inspired me to write my own queer retellings and is a fine example of a novel that didn’t need sweeping battles and world-ending threats to be compelling.

I found Ash’s journey through grief and her path to love to be strong in their own ways. Quietly powerful stories like Ash are what I most enjoy, though they are a rarity, especially in YA, where things tend to be very high stakes.

I love a first-person narrative that sucks you in, and this compelling coming-of-age story as told by Molly Bolt, is a whopper. Not since the voice of Scout narrating To Kill a Mockingbird has a voice touched generations with its telling of her own story. This was the book that made me want to be a writer. I wanted to be brave like Molly…and brave like Rita Mae.

From childhood to adolescence, and all through college, we follow our hero Molly as she comes into her own about her sexuality with uncompromising strength and flat-out hilarious storytelling. It is remarkable that Rita Mae Brown’s 1973 novel has not yet found its way to the silver screen and it is the single book that made me want to be a writer. It seems that a story with such a strong roadmap, written long before the roads were paved, deserves a film.… show more.

Elle’s had a crush on her elusive classmate Madeline for ages, and when she runs into her at the party she and her bestie crash, she’s ecstatic to finally get the chance to chat Madeline up. Unfortunately, she drinks too much and ends up back at her apartment the next morning with a bad hangover and a bag full of stolen expensive trinkets.

Somehow this accidental theft ends up bringing her and Madeline, who has quite a few secrets of her own, closer together. Reverse heist hijinks, going to too many parties, smooching, and self-discovery ensue.

Lucie Bryon’s art is expressive and lively, and the characters feel like real teens—big crushes, bad decisions, and all.