Seven titles that complicate the marriage plot

Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Bucknell University. Formerly the editor in chief of The Rumpus, she has received fellowships from The Kenyon Review and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Their first essay collection, A Fish Growing Lungs, was a finalist for The Believer Book Awards.

Sawchyn's new essay collection is I Have This Thing for Flowers.

At Lit Hub the author tagged seven "favorite titles, both fiction and non-fiction, that complicate and distract from and look askance at the traditional story of two people falling in love and getting married." One title on the list:

This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, Ann Patchett

Surely you’ve seen the cover of Patchett latest novel, Whistler, all over this summer’s Best Of lists. Though she’s probably best known as a novelist, her nonfiction is—I think—equally wonderful. Despite the book’s title, this collection of essays is as much about Patchett’s life as an artist as it is about her romantic relationships.

In an early essay, “The Sacrament of Divorce,” we learn that the dissolution of Patchett’s first marriage “began less than a week before we were married.” For many years afterward, Patchett happily lives her life eschewing marital commitment, in several “wonderful, long relationships with people I deeply enjoyed but would not have wanted to marry for a minute.” This does not change when she meets the man who will eventually become her second husband. They live in separate houses for eleven years before her then-boyfriend’s health emergency and the benefits that legal marriage bestow tip the scales. It’s the story of a happy marriage, but a book about how to live happily without being married.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five creature feature horror novels

K. W. Colyard is the author of the BNW-nominated “Those Who Forget and Those Who Perish,” published by Seize the Press in 2022. Their fiction has also appeared in Clarkesworld and Diabolical Plots.

At Book Riot Colyard tagged five novels in which "the horrors are externalized, even personified, in the shape of the villains." One title on the list:

Whalefall by Daniel Kraus

An unlucky diver has one hour to escape the bowels of a sperm whale in this remarkable novel from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Kraus.

Jay’s father died by suicide in the waters near Monastery Beach. Months later, Jay is determined to bring his father’s remains home. It’s a nearly impossible task, made even more difficult when a sperm whale swallows Jay with its intended meal, a giant squid. With only an hour of oxygen left, Jay will have to muster all his courage and grit to survive.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five thrilling and chilling supernatural mysteries

Carinn Jade is a lawyer, writer, and cohost of the Pop Fiction Women podcast. Her debut novel, The Astrology House, was a 2025 International Thriller Writers’ Awards finalist in the category of Best First Novel.

The Dahlia Suite is her second novel.

At CrimeReads Jade tagged five "favorite books that refuse to stay grounded in the reality we can explain." One title on the list:

Sarah Pekkanen, The Women in White

I am on the edge of my seat waiting for the latest from bestselling author Sarah Pekkanen, not only because she’s a fantastic writer but because this one “goes there.” The Women In White combines a decades-old mystery with paranormal elements guaranteed to make the hair on your arms stand up.

The novel follows four remarkable young women at a prestigious university when they become the subjects of parapsychology experiments in 1964. Do they have extrasensory perception? A sixth sense? Or is it something else entirely? Told in dual timelines, the real story unfolds as old secrets rise to the surface when some would rather than stay down.

Read about the other novels on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

The ten greatest novellas of all time

Luc Haasbroek is a writer and videographer from Durban, South Africa.

At Collider he tagged the ten greatest novellas of all time...and ranked them. Number seven on the list:

The Third Man (1950)

"Death's at the bottom of everything." Once again, we have a novella that served as the basis for an acclaimed film. Set amid the ruins of postwar Vienna, The Third Man follows struggling writer Rollo Martins, who arrives to visit his old friend Harry Lime only to discover that Lime has supposedly died in a suspicious accident. Martins investigates, quickly uncovering a web of deception and black-market crime.

The story was written by English journalist and author Graham Greene, who also penned The End of the Affair and the Vietnam classic The Quiet American. As with those works, The Third Man is very much concerned with the lingering impact of war. Divided among the occupying Allied powers, Vienna reflects a Europe still struggling to emerge from the devastation of World War II. The city itself becomes a kind of character in its own right, something true of the movie as well.

Read about the other titles on the list.

The Third Man ia among Timothy Phillips's top ten books about the iron curtain.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top time loop mysteries and thrillers

Elisa Shoenberger is a freelance writer and journalist. At Book Riot she tagged "six time loop mysteries and thrillers for you to enjoy over and over again." One title on the list:

Who Killed One the Gun? by Gigi Little

This book is for the hard-boiled detective fans out there, even down to the overladen similes and metaphors. Detective One the Gun is on the case to find out who killed Five the No Longer Alive. He’s got a not-so-secret crush on his secretary, Two the True Blue. As he tracks down witnesses and suspects, he realizes something is off about the day. Soon, he realizes that the day is repeating, ending in his own murder. Can he figure out who killed Five the No Longer Alive and himself in time? On top of the time loop aspect, it’s also a satire of the genre.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five titles that inspired Emily Wilson’s translation of the "Odyssey"

Emily Wilson is Department Chair and Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, holding the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities. Wilson attended Oxford University (Balliol College B.A. in Classics and Corpus Christi College M.Phil. in Renaissance English Literature) and Yale University (Ph.D. in Classics and Comparative Literature). She has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. She has published four books on ancient literature, philosophy and translation, an edited volume on tragedy, and many essays and articles, as well as verse translations of Seneca, Sophocles, Euripides and Homer.

For Vogue Wilson tagged five books that aided her translation of the Odyssey. One title on her list:

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

I’ve loved this book since I was a child. I’ve reread it many times. It is, like the Odyssey, a book about travel, identity, and a clever man’s journey away from one community and back to another. But primarily, I thought of LeGuin’s style, especially in that book, as one of many guiding lights as I considered and experimented with how to convey the vividness (enargeia in Greek) of Homeric poetry. Of course, LeGuin is writing prose, not metrical poetry, but there’s something both very beautiful, very plain/noble/rapid, and very Homeric about her style in this book. The sentences actually often have a beautiful rhythmicality to them: “This is a tale of the time before his fame, before the songs were made.”

Read about the other books on Wilson's list.

A Wizard of Earthsea is among four books that changed Mardi McConnochie, Maria Turtschaninoff's ten favorite feminist heroes in fiction, BBC.com Culture’s best children’s books ever published in English, five books that changed Gary Corby, and Lev Grossman's top five fantasy novels.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven historical novels set on islands

Connie Pan is a writer from Maui, Hawai‘i. She holds an MFA in fiction from West Virginia University and a BA in creative writing from Grand Valley State University. Her words have appeared in Bamboo Ridge, The Billfold, Carve, HelloGiggles, and Salamander, among other places. An excerpt from her novel-in-progress was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

At Book Riot Pan tagged "seven historical novels unfolding, mostly, on islands around the world and covering almost two hundred years." One novel on the list:

The Bone People by Keri Hulme

Published in 1984 after taking over a decade to write, this Booker Prize-winning novel feels timeless. On Aotearoa’s South Island coast, Kerewin Holmes, an asexual painter sans family contact and distanced from her art, lives in a tower beside the sea, where she discovers a non-speaking six-year-old named Simon stealing from her. This brings him, as well as Joe Gillayley, his temperamental foster father, into her life. Hard on the heart and breathtaking, this doorstopper meditates on trauma, isolation, and Maori mythology. I found myself in awe of the language: “Sometimes, the waves grow hushed, but the sea is always there, touching, caressing, eating the earth….”

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top five missing-persons novels

Ellis Blake is the pseudonym of Ben Sanders, award-winning author of American Blood and other books in the Marshall Grade series. He lives in New Zealand.

His new novel is No Prisoners.

At CrimeReads the author tagged his top five "missing-persons novels that I’ve read in the past twenty years—thrillers and mysteries that in different ways were both a treat, and a lesson in how to write." One entry on the list:

I first discovered Adrian McKinty by way of his outstanding detective novels set during the 1980s in Northern Ireland (the fabulously titled POLICE AT THE STATION AND THEY DON’T LOOK FRIENDLY being a particular highlight). McKinty’s 2019 novel THE CHAIN is a bravura sidestep into contemporary US territory. The premise is darkly ingenious. Rachel Klein receives a phone call from a stranger, who says she has Rachel’s thirteen-year-old daughter captive. The only way to get her back is to pay a ransom, and then kidnap another child.

Thus is Rachel’s induction into the terrifying, self-sustaining crime enterprise known as The Chain. It’s a terrific, exhilarating read, cleverly leveraging a universal parental fear, and it carries thematic heft, too: most obviously in the pseudo-remedy facing victims of The Chain who must pay the suffering forward in order to alleviate their own. McKinty said that the story is “a thriller where economy of storytelling is everything” and that in each successive draft he “cut scenes, beats and ideas until a page turning core remained.” That core is a thing of thriller-writing beauty.

Read about the other novels on the list at CrimeReads.

The Chain is among Haylen Beck's eight thrillers focused on the bonds of parent and child.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five titles that get at the truth of true crime

Claire Fuller is the author most recently of the novel Hunger and Thirst. Her previous novels include Our Endless Numbered Days, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize; Swimming Lessons; Bitter Orange; Unsettled Ground, which won the Costa Novel Award and was a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction; and The Memory of Animals.

[The Page 69 Test: Our Endless Numbered Days]

At Oprah Daily the author tagged five novels "that weave in real crimes and real questions about literature’s most controversial genre." One title on the list:

Night Film by Marisha Pessl

At 640 pages, this whopper of a novel documents a fictional investigation into the death of 24-year-old Ashley Cordova through invented photographs, newspaper articles, typed incident reports, and more. It’s a clever and disconcerting way to blend fiction with what feels like reality, allowing the reader to act like a detective trawling through an archive of old documents.

The story itself centers around disgraced investigative journalist Scott McGrath, who sets out to discover what happened to Ashley and restore his reputation in the process—which has been decimated by Ashley’s famous film director father. Night Film is perfect if you like a hard-boiled, seedy-underworld style.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Night Film is among Lindsay Kent's five great novels that read like bad trips, fever dreams, or reality warps, Jenny Elder Moke's five mystery novels with unique settings, Lauren Acampora's nine top novels of art and seduction, Kate Reed Petty's seven thrillers about filmmakers & subversive art, and Jeff Somers's ten creepy Halloween books and four huge books that will hurt your brain—but in a good way.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six of the most polarizing mystery and crime books ever written

Jeffrey Davies is a professional introvert and writer with imposter syndrome whose work spans the worlds of pop culture, books, music, feminism, and mental health. His work has appeared on HuffPost, CBC Arts, Collider, Slant Magazine, PopMatters, and other places.

At Book Riot Davis tagged six of the most polarizing mystery and crime books. One title on the list:

Child of God by Cormac McCarthy

As an author, Cormac McCarthy was known for his graphic descriptions of violence, and as far as crime fiction goes, this one is pretty twisted. Set in the Appalachian hills, Child of God follows Lester Ballard, a man falsely accused of rape, as he is released from jail. Ballard is, however, a serial killer and necrophiliac, and the reader is invited into his mind to understand how it works, as townspeople’s perspectives on how he grew up offer insight into how he might’ve ended up this way.

Child of God was polarizing, to say the least, immediately upon its original publication in 1973. Readers found it deeply troubling, yet it has continued to be the subject of both literary and academic analysis, with scholars describing it as an early entry into the late-20th century obsession with serial killers and how they operate. The most notable controversy associated with Child of God, however, came in 2007 when a ninth-grader in Texas chose the book for an assigned book report. The student’s mother objected to the material to the point where the teacher was under investigation for providing harmful material to a minor. So, just how twisted is Child of God? Once again, maybe you’ll have to read it for yourself to find out.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Child of God is among Kaytie Norman's seven top books about Appalachia, Laura Benedict's nine "unlikeable" protagonists in literature, and Glenn Skwerer's ten top real-life monsters in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five mysteries set at literary events, conferences, and retreats

Carol Goodman’s rich and prolific career includes novels such as The Widow’s House and The Night Visitor, winners of the 2018 and 2020 Mary Higgins Clark Award. Her books have been translated into sixteen languages. She lives in the Hudson Valley, NY.

Goodman’s new novel is Our Marriage Is Murder.

At CrimeReads the author tagged five "mysteries set in the cut-throat world of literary gatherings." One title on the list:

Julia Bartz, The Writing Retreat

For a more intimate setting, The Writing Retreat by Julia Bartz offers up every writer’s dream of getting to go away to a secluded estate to focus on the work, all while being fed, cosseted, and mentored by a famous writer. That’s what blocked writer Alex hopes for when she gets an invitation from her favorite writer Roza Vallo to her upstate (did I mention secluded?), possibly haunted mansion.

The only hitch is that her frenemy, Wren, is also invited. Oh, and instead of getting time to bond with the other writers and work on their craft, the writers are pitted against one another when Roza announces a competition to complete an entire manuscript that will be instantly published with support from the superstar author. Things go spectacularly and gothically wrong, but at least it’s all grist for the mill—as long as you don’t end up ground in it.

Read about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Three must-read books about colonialism

Edna Bonhomme is a critic, journalist, and historian of science. She is the author of A History of the World in Six Plagues (shortlisted for Best Science Book in Austria) and co-editor of After Sex. Her latest book is Tending To Our Wounds: A Diasporic Memoir. Bonhomme is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, from the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, the Max Planck Institute, the Robert Silvers Foundation, and more. Most recently, she was a 2026 finalist for the 2026 Nona Balakian Award from the National Book Critics Circle. Her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, Scientific American, and elsewhere. She has been based in Berlin since 2017.

At Book Riot Bonhomme tagged three books on colonialism that "are not only case studies of the psychological cost of colonialism but also testaments that the colonized are not passive victims." One title on the list:

Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent by Priyamvada Gopal

In this vivid, committed, and empathetic historical analysis, Gopal illuminates how anti-colonial critique was born from critics’ direct or indirect witnessing of rebellions in the colonies, from the Caribbean to India. Gopal shows how intellectuals and elites from the British colonies used their language of freedom to advocate for their own self-determination. It is an essential read for those interested in the agency of the colonized and in how some tried to use the master’s tools against the empire.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue