Books like Orange World and Other Stories

Every time I read something by George Saunders, I’m in awe of what, for me, is his trifecta of powers: hilarious writing, fantastically creative situations, and deep compassion for his characters and their choices. This book is no exception, and I was particularly struck by The Semplica Girl Diaries, which shows what lengths a suburban dad goes to—it involves unusual, morally questionable human lawn ornaments—in order to support his daughters’ happiness.

While reading these stories, I found my sympathies shifting and unfolding from character to character, each a person whose beating heart lies just below the surface of their unusual circumstances.

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. 

Before I began to write my own cycle of flash fiction and microfiction, I decided to study virtuosos of the form. Bender’s book was my first encounter with fast fiction. Her surreal, emotionally raw flashes and short-shorts walk a tightrope between the absurd and the profound. Her characters often exist in dreamlike states—wearing prosthetic arms, dating monsters, or grieving through magical realism. These compact stories don’t just surprise; they haunt.

As a novelist who leans towards conventional storytelling, I found this book foundational for taking risks to be weird and brief.

Machado is a master storyteller, a writer who plays with form and structure and our narrative expectations to create entirely new ways of telling tales. This collection was her groundbreaking debut.

I’ve always loved fairy tales and folklore for the ways they play with character archetypes, repetition, and deceptively simple story shapes. Machado does the same thing here, upending our ideas about wives, lovers, and monsters with these tales that might trick you into thinking you know what’s coming next—until she flips you over and turns you around. She’s a new Brother Grimm, a fairy-tale writer for the modern age.

Short story collections are funny things: some are strong from start to finish, and some… read as if the author wrote all the other stories over the course of a weekend after one of their stories garnered public attention. No, I will not name names.

Peynado’s The Rock Eaters is a glowing example of the former. The collection spans genres: realist, science fiction, magical realist. What all the stories have in common is Peynado’s controlled hand and breadth of imagination, not to mention her keen insights into what it’s like to exist in the real world, a world fraught with gun violence, racism, and xenophobia.

You finish the collection feeling like you’ve traversed worlds and, in the process, learned something new about the world we live in.  

Full disclosure: Anne is a dear friend and was an MFA workshop-mate of mine.

But even if she wasn’t, I’m confident this would still be one of my favorite collections. There is so much magic in Valente’s writing, in the gorgeous prose but also in the content of the stories: ghosts, pink dolphins, tiny librarians, Northern Lights.

Much of the magic is not supernatural, but just the magic of the natural world, and Valente is a master of place; I’ve always admired her use of setting. Many of the stories deal with loss, grief, and pain, but the magic acts as a way to transcend these things, which is what I aim to do in my stories as well.

Most of the books I read with my kids have animals as the main characters, but few books aimed at adults do, so I was thrilled to find these stories where wolves, vultures, and tigers provide nuanced, complex perspectives on a threatened world. I learned about love and deep ocean noise from a young whale and felt the loneliness of a polar bear who is parted from his mother, his twin, and others of his kind.

Through these mythic stories, I realized the deep strangeness that comes from losing my connection to other animals and the true pleasure of returning to my place as a creature of the world—something I felt when I became a mother and again as I read these stories.

I keep returning to this collection of stories when I want to get closer to the feeling that flickers between grief and love, which I’ve felt in both large ways and in the small losses that I feel as my kids get older.

Many of the mothers in Romm’s book are dying, but her unwavering attention and humor make these stories feel like a balm, not a wound. There are stories about a man who carries an egg around to test out fatherhood and about a woman planting a crop of mothers in her garden while she grieves her own.

In my own life, plenty of eggs get broken, and the garden has a mind of its own—so these stories also feel familiar, personal, and comforting.

I want to end with a book that showed me that parenting was perfect material for leaning into the surreal. Around the time I read it, the regular rhythm of my life included morning dropoffs at daycare and evening lice checks while my kids watched Power Rangers.

Opening up this story collection, I immediately found stories that took these experiences to fantastical places—like Spells, where a lice lady does her steady work for ashamed mothers as a strange spell takes over her own sons, or Wild Milk, where a mom’s experience with her son’s daycare provider becomes increasingly bizarre.

The entire collection gave me the confidence to surrender to the strangeness, both in my writing and with my kids.

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.