Books like The Electric Michelangelo — picked by fans

Oh, Was, how I love your relentlessly bleak, depressing sadness.

This is a strangely inventive novel that twines reality and fantasy into a brutal, desolate, yet gorgeous story of pain and survival. Told from the points of view of numerous characters, each story is tethered in some way to The Wizard of Oz, that venerable fable about good versus evil in the search for home.

Ryman introduces us to a main trio of characters whose lives are all equally harrowing–Dorothy Gael (the imagined inspiration for The Wizard of Oz heroine and the victim of familial sexual abuse), Frances Gumm (who becomes the tragic Judy Garland), and Jonathan (an actor experiencing AIDS-related dementia)–whose stories he intricately weaves together like a master craftsman. And while the novel is not a “happy” read by any stretch of the imagination, what has stayed with me throughout the past thirty years is its… show more.

I was introduced to the beguiling novels of Jonathan Carroll by the owner of a bookstore where I worked when I was young. Thirty years on and I still greatly anticipate a new novel by this unclassifiable author. 

It follows the efforts of a teacher and his girlfriend to write the biography of a deceased children’s author whom they idolize. I love that Carroll’s books begin with familiar scenarios but soon take off into a very unique kind of magical realism.

Carroll always writes with a sure, sweet touch; his dialogue is whip-smart, his characters larger than life, and his stories always zip along with an easy conversational tone. You can start anywhere with his books, but there’s a special place in my heart for this one.

Tom Reamy’s first novel was also to be his last. Its carnival sideshow setting is reminiscent of Geek Love, Nightmare Alley, and much of Ray Bradbury, but with a poignancy and sense of place that set it apart. I can guarantee that you’ll never forget Angel, the mute, blind flying boy. Reamy was an active genre critic, editor, and convention organiser for at least two decades before he began submitting the fiction he’d been working on in private. Its impact was immediate but he saw little of its success, struck by a heart attack while working on a story at the age of 42. For me his legacy—this novel, and the collection San Diego Lightfoot Sue and Other Stories—equal that of many a more prolific author.

This book arrived in the avalanche of volumes that descended on my house the year I agreed to join the judging panel for the World Fantasy Awards, and for me it shone out. The story’s told by Hans Schneider, who kills a fellow student when a duel goes wrong and ends up working in a low-rent asylum. There he meets the mysterious Dr. Lavenza and joins him in a mission to locate Victor Frankenstein’s formula for eternal life. It’s written with style and wit and a great sense of period. I felt so strongly about the lack of a paperback edition that I later offered to create one for the Brooligan Press. And for the avoidance of doubt, I don’t make a penny from its sales!

This coming-of-age novel set in the Great Depression and World War II Brooklyn has it all: girlhood, poverty, and cultural conflict between Barbadian immigrants and black Americans. The voice of the narrator, a young first-generation immigrant girl, is captivating. Although published in 1959, it is timeless and fresh today, you’ll ask yourself, “why isn’t this story going to became a major motion picture?”.

All I can say is the pigeon scene. You will have to read the novel to find out what I am referencing, but oh my God, this novel is so good. Dominicans and Dominican-Americans in 1960s New York City? Fierce female protagonists? Writing that makes me stop and want to copy down sentences on a Post-It? Yes, please. I was cracking up, teary-eyed, and satisfied when reading this gem of a novel. I would read anything Angie Cruz writes.

Early on David Levinsky, the immigrant Yeshiva boy, the budding intellectual, learns that America is the land of winners and losers, and if he is to be the former, he has to abandon his old self like the ear-locks he left on a barbershop floor in his first days in this new world. To be an alrightnik he must learn to dance the American dance. And dance he does, but his fabulous success as a garment manufacturer has left something unresolved in himself. His search for love at a Jewish resort in the Poconos is a chapter better than anything Philip Roth ever wrote.

Ruth Behar writes for both adults and children and is a multi-award-winning writer and a Cuban-American Anthropologist. She’s also Jewish with Ashkenazi and Sephardic roots. Based on the author’s real experiences, we follow ten-year-old Ruthie and her family who are recent Jewish-Cuban immigrants trying to make a new home in 1960s Queens, NY after Castro comes to power. Just as Ruthie is adjusting to school and making new friends, a devastating car accident puts her in a body cast for a year. It’s a beautiful, heartbreaking, and inspiring story. I particularly loved her friendship with recent Indian immigrant, Ramu, who has to endure a terrible family tragedy as well. There are some heavy themes here, but Ruthie’s innocent, bright, and brave voice brings the reader along in a hopeful way. There’s some great food (like guava pastries, flan, and samosas) mentioned here, too. 

This book takes something so in-your-face yet so often ignored about New York and other 21st-century global metropolises—their polyglot nature—and makes it the focus. I know when I arrive in a major city, the cacophony of myriad languages stands out on that first subway, bus, and tram ride. But soon enough, it all becomes background noise.

By foregrounding this phenomenon, arguing that it’s peaking today as global migration swells, and telling the stories of several tenacious language communities in New York’s outer boroughs, Perlin reads NYC through the alphabets that cover its bodega awnings.

This book helped me to understand the cultural complexity of my family—my father is a Jamaican immigrant, and my mother is a native-born African American—and the cultural richness of my neighborhood, Harlem, in New York City.

Like Lacy, Clerge centers her research in suburbia, not in a city. And Clerge explains how cultural distinctions across Caribbean and African American communities offer a rich tapestry of expression, and ways of being and belonging.

She reveals how cultural differentiation shapes and is shaped by class variation and strategies for navigating White domination and anti-Black racism. Clerge also discusses the implications for solidaristic behaviors across people of African descent in the United States.