100 Books Like Sarahland

I’m always impressed by how Karen Russell pulls the reader into her stories with no warning about what we’re getting into. No easing into strange situations. She places her characters in what we publicly claim can’t be real but privately know to be true.

To make a fabulist story work, images must cling to the reader’s mind like golden treacle. Each one either grounding us in the familiar or firmly establishing the unfamiliar as quotidian. Russel is a master at this. Her stories flow so easily, and her characters’ unforgettable voices hit the reader in the first paragraph.

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.

The eerie forces in Folk’s debut story collection aren’t so much mystical as they are technological.

Each story in this book could be its own episode of Black Mirror, and readers come away understanding how the messiest human impulses are eternal, no matter the advances we make as a society.

Folk’s characters are people trying (and often failing) to find love, meaning, and purpose while their lives are marked by encounters with artificial intelligence and imminent apocalypse. 

These short stories lure you in to a world of fantastical distortions and mythical resonances, which make you look differently at women’s lives.

A young girl with an eating disorder turns into an eel; a group of female friends go hunting for male conquests whom they kill and eat to satisfy their appetites. In a world of anarchic desires and obtuse relationships, strange and inexplicable metamorphoses take place. Violence bridges the gap between human and animal, between desire and carnal action.

In candid language not for the faint-hearted, this book probes the potentially dark recesses of the female psyche against a timeless backdrop of rural folklore and magical possibility. 

The Light From Uncommon Stars is, at its sci-fi core, a story about being human and all of the messiness that comes from that state of being.

Even the aliens share a sweet humanness – a desire to find home, to find love, to find family. Plus, you can never go wrong with a donut-shop setting. This book is queer and gender-expansive, with all the beauty and trauma that comes with each.

I wouldn’t call this book cozy – and it’s worth noting that not all of the queer characters are “good queers”, but it isn’t gritty or dark – it is what it is, and isn’t that the most beautifully human thing it could be?

This queer memoir takes us to New York City to explore the unfolding queer life of a child of Bengali immigrants in her difficult decision to divest from parents, colleagues, and friends’ expectations for her life. After taking up architecture as a career and attending Harvard to the delight of her parents, Anjali realizes that her real interest lies in creating graphic literature. This coincides with another journey away from the expected future marriage and family toward exploring and affirming her sexuality and attraction to women. In often spare and simple settings with clean lines that let readers fill in the gaps – for example, with picture frames containing blank canvasses rather than pictures – Anjali creates her own pictures, both as a graphic artist and in imagining her own life. 

Love lies at the heart of this fictionalized memoir. A full recipe from Anjali’s father’s repertoire, a culinary interest… show more.

I found this book through TikTok after a surge of booktokers started to recommend it.

I was instantly intrigued by the premise: presumed dead at Waterloo, a soldier decides to live as herself—trans woman Viola loses her wealth, her title, and her childhood friend Gracewood. But years later, fate draws them together again, and they must contend with their desires and their past together.

This book! I cried, I laughed, I had so many emotions reading this tale. Against all odds, they find each other, they communicate through the unique challenge of attraction after years and Viola’s new womanhood.

There are some incredibly hot scenes which feel all the more tantalizing for the novel’s historical setting. I’ve lent this book to several friends just hoping they experience the same joy I did. 

There is a dark undertow to this book that I didn’t detect in its early pages. Once I was a third of the way through, I was hooked. It’s the story of Wendy, a trans sex worker living through a bracing Winnipeg winter, but it’s also a uniquely queer examination of trauma and abuse offset by the value of family and community.

Her chosen family is produced by circumstance, but it grows its own unique qualities. Meanwhile, her attempts to have a relationship with her father eschew cliché as she reimagines that connection on her own terms. She’s bright and gloomy at once, humorous, curious, and imperfect. Her story is a visceral one; she stuck with me well after I finished it.

Like a hipster Brooklyn transgender Sex and the City, this novel is a chatty, hilarious, and moving look at queer folks grasping for parenthood and family in a world where all the rules have been thrown out.

The book’s narrator, transwoman Reese, takes us on this ride with such sardonic, poignant insight about the world she lives in that we begin to feel like we live in it, too. When Reese’s ex, Ames—who has detransitioned from his former transwoman identity, Amy—gets his straight female boss pregnant, the three of them begin negotiating how they might raise the child together.

But the novel’s true power lies in how Reese explains her life and her friends to us—bravely refusing to portray trans people as angelic role models and instead offering something deeper and more endearing: showing them as real people.

From the moment I met Carlotta Mercedes, the main character in this book, I was rooting for her. She’s a convicted felon, up for parole for the fifth time, but she’s pretty sure she’ll be denied: “Them sonofabitches said I had bad behavior, but they definition a bad behavior’s if you scream when a CO whupping yo ass like a Betty Crocker fudge cake.” I’m a sucker for books with lively, laugh-out-loud language. 

Carlotta is all dynamic energy and jambalaya metaphor, even though she has spent twenty years in prison for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and has endured rape and physical abuse because she’s a trans woman in a men’s cell block. 

I am cheering for Carlotta when she’s released and begins making her way through our modern world, “like a brain-damaged African elephant trying to jump into a game of double Dutch.” She laughs… show more.