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Stoner by John Williams. All the rage on /lit/ and grad school message boards, this depicts the depressed son of a farmer who goes into academia and marries a woman who despises him. Not selling it but it’s genuinely one of the most poignant books I’ve read.
Stoner by John Williams. All the rage on /lit/ and grad school message boards, this depicts the depressed son of a farmer who goes into academia and marries a woman who despises him. Not selling it but it’s genuinely one of the most poignant books I’ve read.
Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges. My first Borges collection, this fundamentally changed my brain chemistry, even more so than taking LSD and watching Ridley Scott’s underrated masterpiece Prometheus. Has all my favorite stories.
Cathedral by Raymond Carver. I have an extremely personal relationship to this man’s work, who is objectively the GOAT short story writer (of his genre) of all time, the modern Chekhov, bc in a fiction class we read The Bath/A Small Good Thing right before my dad passed.
I binged Carver’s work the next few weeks. I found comfort in them. I even read his poetry. WWTAWWTAL is maybe a stronger collection—even in this moment I go back and forth. A true genius, and his other collections are worth reading as well. But these everyone should read.
Winsburg, Ohio. Sensing a theme bitch? This book is filled with great and odd stories. I’ve framed pieces of the opener but they’re somewhere in a moving box. Carver always wanted to be an American Chekhov and he kind of is. But really he’s a second American Anderson.
Close Range by Annie Proulx. This collection contains Brokeback Mountain which is more affecting than the film, but it also contains Job History, a fast-paced life story kind of piece that is one of the most perfect stories I’ve ever read. She wastes no words.
Optic Nerve by Adrian Tomine. I’m cheating a bit here since this is essentially where Tomine published all of his work, but all of it is affecting and human. Really literary but tells stories in a way you only could with comics. Tomine is one of my favorite artist-writers.
This has been one of my favorite things on my bookshelf for years. Most of the stories are 1 or 2 pages long so it’s easy to open it up to a random page and find something poignant or at least clever. Break It Down, my favorite, is longer, and online so you should go read that.
Homonculus by Hideo Yamamoto. An extremely strange, moving, psychological manga made even weirder to read since it’s only been translated by fans, this remains a story I think about all the time. The imagery is so odd, the characters just as odd, but all so sad. Really beautiful.
Cold Hand in Mine by Robert Aickman. I found Aickman’s The Hospice in a certain anthology I’ll be forced to list here if people keep faving the OP. It’s my favorite story of his and contained here in his strongest collection. All odd, spooky tales, w a cold human touch.
Woman In The Dunes by Kōbō Abe. A really weird existential novel about a guy trapped w a woman and forced to push back sand encroaching on his captor’s village. I read this in the perfect setting: in one day on the beach, with my in-laws.
god which one am I on. OK. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. Another one popular on message boards, this was my first Bolaño novel read like a decade ago and just about everything about it has stuck with me. I ended up selling my copy when I was Very Broke but I should steal a new one.
My favorite PKD I’ve read so far, this one is Out There, so personal and odd.
My second favorite PKD I just finished rereading this for the first time since high school. Like VALIS this one is an incredibly personal novel, but it has a dark paranoid espionage plot that sneaks up on you, obscured by the hang out tone. Ends up being a deeply sad novel.
You motherfuckers really made me do it you really made me list an anthology on a list of my favorite books. Well at least it happens to be one of the best anthologies of all time, so important for the genre too. A clear work of love by the editors, and a rollicking read.
Seven Stories by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. a personal favorite because this was the first of the man’s books I read, I highly recommend it if a Russian/Soviet Kafka/Borges sounds interesting to you. Really strange, weird stories.
Here’s a second anthology now that that dam is broken, SuperFiction, an apparently rare collection of that certain style of American postmodernism encspsulated by these authors. I found this one in a used books shop in Marion NC of all places. Extremely Cool Book
Cat Town is a nice, small little collection of Sakutarō Hagiwara’s poems as well his strange prose-poem story Cat Town. I bought it for the latter and ended up falling in love with the former
Concrete by the God Paul Chadwick. Some of the coolest, most creatively done pages in comics you will ever see--and some of the most humane writing. Really superb adventure fiction and a series I've returned to often since I was a teen.
I could choose any George Saunders collection for this thread, but I'll choose this one because he happened to name a collection after my birthday. Highly recommended author--look up Sticks for a quick taste of his style.
