Books like Too Much Flesh and Jabez

Jemisin combines geological apocalypse, complex magic, and generational trauma with raw power.

That’s something I explore in my own work, so this trilogy was a strong—if abstract—indirect influence. Few books have stayed with me so viscerally.

The writing is sharp, emotionally devastating, and fearless. It doesn’t just tell a story—it tears through it with tectonic force. It made me want to write braver and more honestly about pain, survival, and what breaks beneath the surface.

As a fellow genderqueer/non-binary Asian writer, I’m happy to champion the first in Neon Yang’s Tensorate series. A YA novella set in a non-Western fantasy landscape, this book tackles issues of gender identity and choice head-on, introducing us to a society where children are referred to individually using they/them pronouns, and can select one of the binary genders when they come of age or chose to remain non-binary. We see the world through the eyes of twins Mokoya and Akeha as they come into their gender expressions and their powers in a feudal, monastic society largely reminiscent of those found in Asian history.

Risk-taking writers are my heroes, and Katherine Dunn is at the top of my list.

Her astonishing book Geek Love, a cult classic, defiantly celebrates the freakish and bizarre, tearing to shreds the subjective and culturally determined definitions of normality, intelligence, and beauty. Dive into Geek Love, and you’ll be traveling with the Binewski family, owners of the “Carnival Fabulon,” whose “special” offspring are prized for their money-making monstrous endowments.

In creating Oly, an albino hunchback, or her brother Arty, born with flippers, or Chick, with telekinetic powers, Dunn risks alienating readers by turning her characters into stereotypes, comic or horrid. Instead, she has written a haunting, humorous, and existentially relevant novel about Otherness, about the afflictions of family life—alternatively claustrophobic and competitive or caring and dear.

In the matrix of family, we learn who we are and how to love. I, too, am a writer driven to explore… show more.

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.

A man I was working with recommended this book to me, when he heard about my novel, while it was in the making. I got hold of this book and already after the first chapter I understood why. Janice Radway investigates how Harlequin novels have such a large audience. In essence it is because romance novels always end well, as opposed to life, that keeps being complicated. It taught me that I’m a very romantic person. This was something I had never regarded as a positive trait so of course I failed to see just how important romance was and is to me. By identifying with millions of women who read these romance novels, I gained a respect that I still feel is lacking in our culture: A respect for our emotions and the big role they play in our sense of satisfaction with life.  

This unexpected discovery—the story of Meg of St. Michael’s Mead in the 14th century—exemplifies the best of what draws readers to historical fiction. First, there's the heroine, Meg, a young woman coming of age and marked by a facial disfigurement. Immediately, we understand her outsider status, her alienation, and her inevitable struggle against others' scapegoating.

This scapegoating stems not only from typical ignorance but also from the very real fears of the time that she might be a child of the Devil. Meg's life and journey are populated with memorable allies and enemies, but it's her determination to cultivate her talents in women's health—despite the opposition of the male medical elite—that lends her story contemporary relevance.

Right from the start, I was rooting for Ayana, who lives in this riverboat community in Arkansas. Her only support is her grandmother and brother, Lyle, while all the other men in her story are abusive and cruel. Sadly, no one seems to question their authority, and against this background, illiterate Ayana makes her play.

What I like about this story is the way it is written. At first, Ayana’s voice is presented in dialect, but as the story evolves and her mind clears, so does the text. This is a great structure that accurately represents Ayana’s blossoming personality. 

This book came to me when I had survived so much up until that point and really began to realize the need to liberate myself and release social conditioning. I was like, “Goodness, this is the book I need to hold up anytime someone shames me using tropes about a ‘woman’s place’ in the world.”

I enjoyed how it invites you to question why powerful figures in traditional religious institutions have been rendered as men. She pushes us to go farther back in history, before Abrahamic religions, to trace the spread of disinformation about women as leaders, goddesses, and powerful beings. 

I love this book because it is useful at any step of your journey to reclaiming personal power.

This book is full of petty rivalries and hierarchies that seem high stakes in the moment but, with time and distance, seem absurd. Competition between employees at the LA television station where the novel takes place is cutthroat. There’s no trust, no downtime, and something as simple as taking a day off with the flu can destroy your standing.

This book is chaotic and challenging and somehow perfectly captures the feel of an office in a fast-paced office that takes itself too seriously. I’ve been there, and I felt every moment of this book. Kaplan finds ways to point out how ridiculous our workplaces are while still honouring the experiences of the women who work there. It is highly relatable and wrenching. 

While other scholars have focused on how various definitions of womanhood influenced the formation of the United States’ political and legal systems, Mark Kann pays closer attention to how perceptions of manhood shaped the creation of the U.S. during the early republic. In A Republic of Men, Kann contends that the U.S.’s founders sought to establish a republic based on male authority and female subordination. During the early years of the republic, as Kann describes it, political and legal authorities connected white men to productivity and reason while linking all women to inherent weakness and dependency. I found Kann’s book especially helpful for understanding how American political and legal authorities sought to institutionalize rights and privilege for white men only.