100 Books Like The Palm-Wine Drinkard

A brilliant science fictional idea changes everything about the world, and in Tade Thompson’s Arthur C Clarke Award-winning Rosewater, where an alien dome has appeared in Nigeria and opens once a year to heal the sick, the world has been thrown dangerously off-kilter.

The murder-mystery is not a conventional one as our hero Kaaro, a human sensitive created by this alien intrusion and now government agent, is trying to figure out why those like him are suddenly dying. There are many strange science-fictional ideas driving this book, but it is Kaaro – a former thief trying his best to do good in difficult circumstances – that gives this book its wonderful heart.

I believed in and rooted for him even though he doesn’t ever seem to believe in himself.

Samuel R. Delaney’s masterpiece, Dhalgren, is set in a city in the Midwest that has been emptied by an unnamed catastrophe.

A sense of freedom, violence and disaster hang everywhere as the hero – Kidd, Kid, or the kid, a man with no memory and of ambiguous race (he remembers his mother was Native American) – gains entry into the subcultures that remain behind: parties, high-rise poetry readings with older white people, gun fights, gangs, graphic sex.

Time and perspective seem fluxive, inconstant, and looping. 

This is beautiful, destabilized world building. Dhalgren answers no questions yet evokes a time, place, and milieu that shifts as you read.

I first found it when I was working as a librarian in a prison out on the plains. I didn’t last in prison.

I can’t name what so destroyed me about this book; it speaks to a level of pain for which there’s no language.

I believe a book’s hidden subject will chase a writer down: a fear, a state of mind. Barnes had to write it in order to survive her experience.

A loose group of outcasts appears in Nightwood: a gay doctor, logorrheic, poetic, desperate, witty, alone. A woman obsessed with another woman whom has left her and whom she’ll never reach, never understand.

Dancers and circus performers all in the baroque shimmer of a prose so fascinating it becomes clear almost by virtue of its density. What comes through is the tragedy of what it is to be alive.

I stumbled on this book in a free box outside a bookstore when I was a teenager and the family I had moved across the country to be with had collapsed.

My sisters and stepmother moved out of state, my brother moved to California, and my dad, after borrowing my student loan money for truck driving school, went over the road.

Bloodsport was rain-rippled—with a gigantic, dried fly smashed flat in the middle, sliding like a secret toy over the page.

An entire world opened up. I felt no less alone, but the experience changed my understanding of realism, the mythic, and the surreal: a book of immense oddness about a father and son journey up an apocalyptic river, toward Ratnose, the leader of a motorcycle gang.

Borges loved this 29-volume “book” and consulted it with near religious fascination.

Through all the volumes flows the colonial mind of the British Empire. Its desire to gather “all knowledge” and present it with an index.

What comes forth now are the fascinating, individual voices of the writers (whose work has been used to build Wikipedia) sounding out of the void.

The thing is, they’re all different. Some are clear and calm, some youthful and manic, others stodgy, snobbish. Maps of the States in 1906 have almost no highways, only topography.

A full-page plate, under “Cats,” where no cats appear, only their skins, showing the different patterns of their stripes.

This is a work of world-building, a terraforming “real” fiction. Repulsive, time-folding, fascinating.

I am in love with Lesley’s writing, and everyone should be. Period. I will recommend this book a thousand times. The first time I read it, I was left feeling hopeful–hopeful that stories are soft, intentional, deliberate, magical things that can shift people and places enough to make a difference or change minds. With each story in this collection, Lesley peels away the layers (sometimes softly, sometimes jarring) of lives, relationships, and women.

Smutty ghost sex. I had no business reading this book at nine or whatever, but I had an appetite and the aptitude, and my parents were either too trusting or indifferent because SMUTTY GHOST SEX.

I can't remember much else about it, nor can I get a copy, but for nine-year-old me, it was forbidden and titillating. 

Don't tell my mother. 

I grew up reading fairy tales from other lands and taking our own oral stories back home for granted. At the very least, our stories belonged to dark, scary places.

This book changed all that. It was magical! It showed me new Igbo mythology and made my culture appealing and heroic. What's not to love? 

This is a classic by the late folklorist, Harold Courlander. If you want to get a basic understanding of the stories that make up the Orishas of Yoruba mythological tradition, this is the go-to book. Here is the story of how the Orishas come to earth, and the powers and power struggles of the Yoruba pantheon. Appendices give a quick overview of Orishas in Cuba and the Americas.

So often, booze history has not been carefully written down, and Simonson wanted to ensure that would not be the case when it came to the cocktail renaissance that kicked off in the early 21st century.

Chapter by chapter, he introduces us to the players—bartenders, bar owners, producers, and reps—along with the bars that reinvigorated a nearly-dead American tradition of Martinis, Manhattans, Margaritas, and many more drinks that are now, thanks to them, ubiquitous everywhere on the globe.