Here are 100 books that The Girl in the Flammable Skirt fans have personally recommended if you like
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt.
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I’ve always been fascinated by outsiders, people who don’t quite fit into societal expectations and exist on the fringes, just trying to get by or be left alone. I relate deeply to characters who are trapped between their own inner turmoil and the need to navigate a world full of contradictions and absurdities. I suppose one could argue that I’m comparing notes. Despite these books being dark and unsettling, they are also comforting. As a writer of psychological literary fiction, I can say it’s clear that these novels inspire me creatively and resonate deeply with me; they offer a window into the quiet chaos that resides in many of us.
I first read Josef K.'s haunting tale when I was a teenager. I hadn’t read anything by Kafka before and was initially quite frustrated because it wasn’t clear what the hell was going on, which, in retrospect, is rather the point.
I read this book again about five years ago and still found it a disturbing reflection on how society dehumanises the individual, often with no rhyme or reason, one might say Kafkaesque. Interestingly, I found it even more relatable as an adult.
"Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested." From its gripping first sentence onward, this novel exemplifies the term ""Kafkaesque." Its darkly humorous narrative recounts a bank clerk's entrapment — based on an undisclosed charge — in a maze of nonsensical rules and bureaucratic roadblocks. Written in 1914 and published posthumously in 1925, Kafka's engrossing parable about the human condition plunges an isolated individual into an impersonal, illogical system. Josef K.'s ordeals raise provocative, ever-relevant issues related to the role of government and the nature of…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
With more than 6-million Americans living with Alzheimer’s, my story is a shared narrative. Because reading creates empathy, I work to widen the perspective of my writing and include voices different from my own. Thanks to neuroplasticity, healthy brains have the ability to keep changing and learning. Each one of these books offers a helpful nudge in a new direction. My essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications including the Washington Post, Luxe, and Variable West, and are listed as notable in the 2019 Best American Science and Nature Writing. I’m currently at work on a second memoir about motherhood and the way travel cultivates a willing acceptance of uncertainty.
I was a new mother when I read this Alzheimer’s memoir and immediately felt that I’d found a friend. Elizabeth Cohen is funny, lyrical, and sometimes (understandably) frustrated as she takes on the bruising balance of managing a career while simultaneously caring for her aging father and her young daughter. The book is a testimony to the healing power of story and provided a valuable model to me as I sought to make sense of my own family experience by committing my memories to the page.
'Daddy walks around, dropping pieces of language behind him, the baby following, picking them up. He asks for 'the liquid substance from the spigot'. She asks for 'wawa'. He wants a tissue to wipe his 'blowing device'. She says 'Wipe, Mummy' and points to her runny nose. The brain of my father and the brain of my daughter have crossed. On their ways to opposite sides of life, they have made an X-On his way out of life, Daddy has passed her the keys.' Soon after her daughter's first birthday, her husband walked out of their rambling old house in…
With more than 6-million Americans living with Alzheimer’s, my story is a shared narrative. Because reading creates empathy, I work to widen the perspective of my writing and include voices different from my own. Thanks to neuroplasticity, healthy brains have the ability to keep changing and learning. Each one of these books offers a helpful nudge in a new direction. My essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications including the Washington Post, Luxe, and Variable West, and are listed as notable in the 2019 Best American Science and Nature Writing. I’m currently at work on a second memoir about motherhood and the way travel cultivates a willing acceptance of uncertainty.
The title poem in this collection, (made from lines spoken by the poet’s mother,) manages to embody both caregiver and loved one as Constantine gives gentle structure to a string of seemingly disconnected utterances. Each poem in the book explores themes of loss, memory, and family through a different lens, creating an almost kaleidoscopic vision of the world. The collection is a rumination, a celebration, and a beautiful example of how poetry can expand our perspectives and teach us to speak and hear new rhythms.
As with Constantine's previous titles, Dementia, My Darling can be enjoyed at random or in order. However, when taken in sequence, the poems construct a thesis on life as we remember it from moment to moment. What is your first memory of love? How soon will you forget answering that question?
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
With more than 6-million Americans living with Alzheimer’s, my story is a shared narrative. Because reading creates empathy, I work to widen the perspective of my writing and include voices different from my own. Thanks to neuroplasticity, healthy brains have the ability to keep changing and learning. Each one of these books offers a helpful nudge in a new direction. My essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications including the Washington Post, Luxe, and Variable West, and are listed as notable in the 2019 Best American Science and Nature Writing. I’m currently at work on a second memoir about motherhood and the way travel cultivates a willing acceptance of uncertainty.
When 68 year-old Gregory Tate is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, his family members reckon with the past and try to move toward an unexpected future with love and honesty. This beautifully written novel offers readers a chance to see the crisis from varying points of view and encourages empathy for every member of the family. In addition, Golden works to raise awareness of the way Alzheimer’s disproportionately affects Black and Latino communities. African Americans are more than twice as likely as whites to develop the disease, and yet, are gravely underrepresented in research and clinical trials. Part of a diverse chorus represented by #AlzAuthors, Golden is a vital voice to follow.
A 2018 NAACP Image Award nominee and an NPR Best Book of 2017, a moving African-American family drama of love, devotion, and Alzheimer's disease.
Diane Tate never expected to slowly lose her talented husband to the debilitating effects of early-onset Alzheimer's disease. As a respected family court judge, she's spent her life making tough calls, but when her sixty-eight-year-old husband's health worsens and Diane is forced to move him into an assisted living facility, it seems her world is spinning out of control.
As Gregory's memory wavers and fades, Diane and her children must reexamine their connection to the man…
With more than 6-million Americans living with Alzheimer’s, my story is a shared narrative. Because reading creates empathy, I work to widen the perspective of my writing and include voices different from my own. Thanks to neuroplasticity, healthy brains have the ability to keep changing and learning. Each one of these books offers a helpful nudge in a new direction. My essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications including the Washington Post, Luxe, and Variable West, and are listed as notable in the 2019 Best American Science and Nature Writing. I’m currently at work on a second memoir about motherhood and the way travel cultivates a willing acceptance of uncertainty.
Akin to peering into the pages of a private journal, The Authenticity Experiment, is an unvarnished reaction to a series of heartbreaking losses. Tired of the way social media has forced us to create a relentlessly curated and cheerful version of ourselves, de Gutes presents a museum of true emotion. The consecutive deaths of her mother, a dear friend, and a beloved mentor move de Gutes to map her own identity around the absence of three critical landmarks. Musing on perfectionism, guilt, joy, love, and success, de Gutes finds the route to self-compassion is a long and winding one. We readers are lucky enough to be able to walk beside her.
* * * Winner of the Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) BRONZE MEDAL in LGBT Non-Fiction! * * *
The Authenticity Experiment: Lessons from the Best and Worst Year of My Life is the new collection of essays from award-winning writer Kate Carroll de Gutes.
In 2012, Kate Carroll de Gutes found herself at a rest stop “ruined with anxiety. And when I say ruined, I mean in a car, in hundred-degree weather, with all the windows rolled up, sobbing and crouched in the passenger’s seat rocking and waiting for the Ativan to take effect. I posted on Facebook, ‘Hello,…
You thought I was going to list travel guides, didn’t you? Heck no! When I’m planning an adventure, I like to read literature from authors who live there. I wish I had read more Japanese fiction before I moved to Japan for a semester of law school. I studied the language and culture in college and spent an entire spring semester of law school in Japan. I plan to visit my old school in 2025, but even if I don’t, I will continue to read books by Japanese authors because I find the cultural and societal demands of being Japanese fascinating. I wrote a book about my time in Japan.
Haruki Murakami is probably the most famous Japanese author in the world and the father of Japanese magical realism. I have read a large portion of his work, and I have enjoyed many of his books (even with his weird ear fetish).
This one, however, is one of my favorites. It’s two stories in one, and although others sometimes criticize it for not being a good blend between the two stories, it is that separation that actually makes this book a gem for me. It captures your imagination as you follow a human computer down into a psychological miasma of perception and thought.
If that seems confusing, I’m sorry, but I don’t want to spoil for you one of my all-time favorite Murakami books. Also, if you want to know what I mean by human-computer, I guess you’ll just have to pick up the book.
A narrative particle accelerator that zooms between Wild Turkey Whiskey and Bob Dylan, unicorn skulls and voracious librarians, John Coltrane and Lord Jim. Science fiction, detective story and post-modern manifesto all rolled into one rip-roaring novel, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is the tour de force that expanded Haruki Murakami's international following.
Tracking one man's descent into the Kafkaesque underworld of contemporary Tokyo, Murakami unites East and West, tragedy and farce, compassion and detachment, slang and philosophy.
A fake date, romance, and a conniving co-worker you'd love to shut down. Fun summer reading!
Liza loves helping people and creating designer shoes that feel as good as they look. Financially overextended and recovering from a divorce, her last-ditch opportunity to pitch her firm for investment falls flat. Then…
I’m a human being who struggles with feeling human. When I was 17, I got my brain pretty shaken up after a traumatic event, causing a swathe of memory loss and mental health problems. How do you regain a sense of yourself when chunks of your childhood memories, your skills, and your sense of self have disappeared? Here are some books that grapple with that question, and others.
I grew up with and write horror stories, so it’s very difficult for a book to unnerve me; this is one of the only books I can think of that earns the honor. It is half an ecological text and half a horror story, with its romantic prose balanced by intense natural research to create a surreal, unnerving description of the natural world.
This book made me hyper-aware of everything from the grass outside my window to the cells that make up my body, and I love how it uses both existential horror and the real, biological horror of being a living creature to leave a lasting unease. Are you aware you’re breathing? Can you feel your tongue in your mouth? Your heart’s nonstop beating? You can, now.
THE FIRST VOLUME OF THE EXTRAORDINARY SOUTHERN REACH TRILOGY - NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ALEX GARLAND (EX MACHINA) AND STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAAC
For thirty years, Area X has remained mysterious and remote behind its intangible border - an environmental disaster zone, though to all appearances an abundant wilderness.
The Southern Reach, a secretive government agency, has sent eleven expeditions to investigate Area X. One has ended in mass suicide, another in a hail of gunfire, the eleventh in a fatal cancer epidemic.
These days, I’m an author, but that was long predated by being a reader. I’ve loved fairy tales all my life and spent most of my childhood lugging around a thick paperback copy of the Brothers Grimm's stories. My nationally bestselling second novel, Bear, is a reimagining of my favorite tale: “Snow-White and Rose-Red. " It is about two sisters who live in a cottage with their mother and whose lives are upended when a bear shows up at their door.
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.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FICTION PRIZE 2017 SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 2018
'Brilliantly inventive and blazingly smart' Garth Greenwell
'Impossible, imperfect, unforgettable' Roxane Gay
'A wild thing ... covered in sequins and scales, blazing with the influence of fabulists from Angela Carter to Kelly Link and Helen Oyeyemi' New York Times
In her provocative debut, Carmen Maria Machado demolishes the borders between magical realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. Startling narratives map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited on their bodies, both in myth and in practice.
Throughout my life, I’ve moved around quite a bit, and in the process, members of my family and I have encountered many wildly strange people and things. The universe itself is a wild place when you delve into the more exotic aspects: black holes, quantum physics, and measurable differences in subjective realities. It’s hard to say what the real boundaries are, and so I look for stories that stretch my ability to conceive what could be–and that help me find wonder in all the darkness and strangeness around me.
Yoko Ogawa’s dystopian, magical realist novel delves into the darkness underneath our pursuit of—if not the normal—the routine. We witness a protagonist’s world shrink day by day through legally enforced forgetting. As the situation on the isolated island in which the protagonist lives deteriorates, perhaps the most terrifying part is that she finds herself complicit in her own isolation and near-total lack of agency.
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020, an enthralling Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance from one of Japan's greatest writers.
'Beautiful... Haunting' Sunday Times 'A dreamlike story of dystopia' Jia Tolentino __________
Hat, ribbon, bird rose.
To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed.
When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately…
“Rowdy” Randy Cox, a woman staring down the barrel of retirement, is a curmudgeonly blue-collar butch lesbian who has been single for twenty years and is trying to date again.
At the end of a long, exhausting shift, Randy finds her supervisor, Bryant, pinned and near death at the warehouse…
I’m the author of the short story collection How to Capture Carbon, which explores how people’s lives change when touched by a bit of magic. Writing these stories helped me try to make sense of the early years of parenting when a dream-like blend of sleep deprivation, worry, and overpowering love made my life feel like a Dalí painting. I love stories and books that continue to make me feel less alone in that struggle. For me, stories that make the leap into surrealism give me both a dose of delight and highlight the real magic found in connecting with the people and places I love.
Any time I see a new story by Russell, I drop everything to step into the funny, quirky, and insightful worlds she creates. When I first read the title story of Orange World, about a woman who has made a bargain with a devil to protect her own baby, I wanted to press this book into the hands of any mother struggling with breastfeeding.
I could think of no better way to explain my experience than Russell’s description of trying to nurse a clawed, fanged, insatiable monster—along with the mix of posturing and solidarity I found within new mom’s groups and the way that loving my children connected me with my own parents.
'I loved Orange World... a collection of short stories in which demons live in drains, bog women come back from the dead and trees can grow inside the human body' Daisy Johnson, New Statesman BOOK OF THE YEAR
'A rare combination of literary brilliance and unbridled entertainment' Mark Haddon
These exuberant, unforgettable stories showcase Karen Russell's comedic and imaginative talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner lives. In 'The Bad Graft', a couple on a road trip stop in Joshua Tree National Park, where the spirit of a giant tree accidentally infects the young woman, their fates…
