Books like The Factory — picked by fans

Katya Apekina’s debut novel, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, compelled me to do something that I have not done in a very long time: read an entire book, cover to cover, in a single night.

There are certain writers who excel at meting out their prose with deceptive flatness, or muted lucidity (Raymond Carver and Marguerite Duras being two prime examples), and it is this “awesome simplicity,” of which the jazz musician Charles Mingus raved, which Apekina deftly demonstrates in her rendering of a searing family drama and modern American gothic.

Subtly weaving together a tapestry of voices and shifting perspectives, the novel centers on two teenage daughters—Edith, sixteen, and Mae, fourteen—who go to live with their dad in New York, after their mother has been hospitalized for a suicide attempt and breakdown.

Their dad, about whom Mae has no memories and Edith has a scattered scarcity… show more.

I savor and relish stories that play with the dynamics and boundaries of reality and fiction, truth and illusion, and Nicholas Rombes’s Lisa 2 is dissonantly steeped in these hybrid conceptual relations.

Revolving around a snapshot of an idyllic family vacation, that morphs into a portrait of family disintegration, with a Lisa 2 Apple computer (1984 model) enacting the role of devil’s advocate, this novel plays out new-wavishly lo-fi, generating its own glitchy nostalgia in a liminal haunt.

What is not there casts a visceral and auditory spell, or a space in which memory and imagination proliferate like incubi rabbits. There is a line spoken by a character in David Lynch’s film, Lost Highway —a creed that I liken to the unstable calculus of Lisa 2: “I like to remember things my own way…not necessarily the way they happened.”  

One of my favorite contemporary authors is the Ukrainian-born Yelena Moskovich, and her third novel, A Door Behind A Door is crime story in a house of broken and mostly blacked out mirrors.

Centered around brother and sister, Olga and Misha, who relocate to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1991, the jittery contagions of violence, longing, and desire for absolution pepper the spiritual core of the novel, while the phantom ties that bind family—sometimes as breath-damming corset, other times as a cortege of tenderness—serve as lynchpins. 

Moskovich’s multi-layered novel speaks to mercy and salvation, on undisclosed terms, and her architecting of the narrative is rendered in a series of scintillating poetic drive-bys. 

Discovery has its own timeline and date with destiny, and in the case of Meridel Le Sueur’s small masterwork, The Girl, that is unequivocally true.

Written in 1939, it had to wait nearly forty years until it saw the light of publication day (1978), thanks to John Crawford of West End Press, whose mission was “to print works by American writers neglected by publishers in the mainstream."

The Girl is set in St. Paul, Minnesota, during the Depression, with most of its action centered in a speakeasy known as the German Village. This is where the protagonist, a young naif known only as “Girl,” works as waitress and initiates her crash course into a harsh and unsentimental education—an extended blues song chronicling her passage from innocence to experience.

There is a raw and taut musicality, a nerve-strung throb to Le Sueur’s prose, as she wrings hard-boiled lyricism from passages… show more.

I love this book and keep it on my desk because opening it to any page is to be invited to share the humanity of a writer who knows how to deliver a universal tale through a deeply personal story. Thomas is the master of the short form, creating whole chapters in half a page and taking on grief in this slender, transformative volume.  

When my mother died, a friend insisted, “Now you’ll come to know her in ways you never imagined.” I thought the notion was ludicrous. My mother and I were close, our relationship strong. As it turns out my friend was right. In Watch Me Disappear, Janelle Brown explores this idea. When Billie Flanagan disappears, her husband and teenaged daughter Olive find out more than they could have imagined about Billie’s secret life. 

A story with magic and mystery, like my first book, Daughter of the Burning City is unlike any book I have read. The magic system within the book is called “Jynx-work” and the users of the magic often inhabit the traveling city circus of Gomorrah Festival, a place of vice and sin shunned by the more pious world around them. 

Sorina is the first illusion worker in years. She creates tangible illusions, ones with personalities and free will to exist outside of her control. But when they start dying like real people would in a series of gruesome murders, there appears more to Sorina’s magic than meets the eye. I love magic mysteries because they keep readers engaged and wanting to unravel the questions left behind during shocking twists.

More on the wacky side, and far more entertaining, is Terence McKenna’s True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author’s Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil’s Paradise. For those who will never try “heroic doses” of psilocybin mushrooms deep in the Colombian jungle, this is a wild, vicarious ride, an amalgam of science, literature, myth, and exotica from an adventurer whose genuine inquisitiveness in things psychedelic goes hand in hand with mythomania—what an exuberant explosion of literary and philosophical high kitsch! If not persuaded, there follows the endorsement from The New York Times: “The polysyllabic sentences he lards with intellectual references are an attempt to lend credibility to the otherwise debunked subject of drugs.” Yes, a hatchet job from The New York Times could not make for a more valuable endorsement.

This is less a romance novel and more a high fantasy novel with romantic elements, but the romance subplot is exceedingly strong.

(I can highly recommend a mental fan-casting of either Arhys or Ilvin as Pedro Pascal, because he’d absolutely knock one of those roles out of the park if this was ever made into a miniseries).

Ista is over 40, a queen, a new grandmother, a recovered madwoman, and…wait for it…a living saint. Seeking to get away from the suffocating (yet loving) arms of her family, she goes on a pilgrimage (Road Trip!) with a group of younger people and ends up getting into multiple adventures and a more than near miss with outright war. It’s an absolute romp and one of my all-time favorites.

James finds out that he has terminal brain cancer and starts to wind up his affairs, including looking for Andy, his lost love. This book takes place in the reality of James’s diagnosis with family and friends sometimes painful reactions to his illness and in the alternate universe of James’ increasingly real hallucinations of a life that could have been with Andy. This book both devastated and buoyed me with its intense and very real portrayal of someone grieving his own life, but who nonetheless seizes the chance to make give himself a happy resolution.