Fiction Essentials
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Slaughterhouse-Five: The Graphic Novel
It’s brilliant. One of the best Father’s Day gifts my kid could have come up with
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Collected Stories
These characters are lonely, despondent, often spiralling, and nobody writes them as well as McCullers.
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The Trees
What if Mel Brooks and Jordan Peele wrote an Elmore Leonard novel? This is unbelievably good.
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Martyr!
“An alphabet, like a life, is a finite set of shapes. With it, one can produce almost anything.”
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The Age of Innocence
Beautifully written, impossible to put down, with an ending full of shocking twists. Probably perfect. You should read it.
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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
McCullers writes about misfits, loneliness and the need for human connection in a way that fully overwhelmed me.
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
A bunch of short stories that you’ll want to re-read as soon as you finish.
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James
Everett’s interpretation of the slave character from Huckleberry Finn is subversive, funny, thrilling and thought-provoking.
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A Love Affair
An overlooked classic. The 1963 story of an older Italian man becoming obsessed with a younger woman. It’s well-traveled ground but I’ve never read anything like this.
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Skippy Dies
The book that put Murray on the map is funny, sad and addictive, and maybe even better than his high-profile follow up The Bee Sting.
