Rachel Cochran’s The Gulf (2023) is set in the fictional town of Parson, Texas, a small town ravaged by a devastating hurricane and the Vietnam War. Murders, Vietnam vets, the long-estranged returning to town and a big dollop of Gulf Coast atmosphere.Read about the other books on the list.
Brandi Wells is an Assistant Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fullerton. They have an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California. They’ve published a novella, This Boring Apocalypse, and a chapbook of stories, Please Don’t Be Upset.
The Wall by Marlen HaushoferRead about the other entries on the list.
The Wall features the last surviving human on earth, or it might as well, because she certainly feels alone. With her cow, bull calf, cat, dog, and a series of kittens, she undertakes the labor of keeping them and herself alive. It’s work that no other human sees or appreciates. She’s responsible for herself and frequently wonders at how well made she is for this kind of work. Perhaps it’s what she was meant for. In these harsh moments of fantasy, it’s easy to understand what it might mean to a woman in the 1960’s, or now, to do things in her own way and own time with no one to oversee or threaten her. Still, it’s lonely work and the book is full of quiet and perfectly rendered heartbreak.
Hester Musson studied at Bristol University and The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. She worked as an actress and autocue operator in London before writing full time and now lives in Scotland.
Beloved by Toni MorrisonRead about the other entries on the list.
Beloved has haunted me since I first read it as a teenager, both for its depiction of slavery and the startling use of the supernatural. It was inspired by the true story of a mother who, desperate for her children to escape the horrorsshe endured when enslaved, does the unthinkable. Giving shape to such waking nightmares is perhaps Gothic’s greatest power, allowing us to cross a line imaginatively which we would ordinarily shrink from approaching.
Sethe is struggling with the furious and spiteful spirit of her baby, dead for eighteen years, which has turned her modest house in Ohio into a gothic setting to rival the most chilling castle. When friends finally exorcise the spirit, the daughter returns (possibly) as a mysterious and beautiful young woman who gradually takes over Sethe’s physical and psychological space. The intrusion of a terrible past into the present is a hallmark of Gothic fiction, and I can’t think of another story that does it so powerfully or eerily as Beloved.
Katie Nolan // A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty SmithRead about the other entries on the list.
In Betty Smith’s 1943 coming of age novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, protagonist Francie’s favorite parent, the parent who seems to get her, isn’t her mother, Katie; it’s her creative, sentimental father, Johnny. But after Johnny’s alcoholism consumes him, making it virtually impossible for him to hold a job, it’s Katie who keeps the family afloat. Katie’s grit and determination that her children should have a better life than she had is the kind of tough love that gives Francie the tools she’ll need to survive.
Vitae Una Marson Award. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Electric Literature, Ms. Magazine, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. She is also the owner of DC Writers Room, a co-working studio for writers based in Washington, DC. Born in Jamaica, she lives in Maryland, and received her undergraduate degree in English and Media Studies from Fordham University and an MFA from American University.
The Island of Forgetting by Jasmine SealyRead about the other entries on the list.
Spanning four generations, this novel begins in 1962 with Iapetus, driven mad by the memory of watching his brother, Cronus, murder their father. Cronus encourages Iapetus to forget and later takes in Iapetus’ son, Atlas. But Iapetus and each generation of his descendants remain tied to Cronus even after Cronus dies. Atlas shelves his dream to leave Barbados to study and instead takes on a role helping his cousin manage the hotel Cronus owned. We also meet Atlas’s teenage daughter, Calypso who falls for and has a child with a much older Canadian real estate developer, who is in business with her uncle. And Calypso’s son, also raised at the hotel, battles with his own sense of identity and his mother’s movement in and out of his life. With echoes of Greek mythology, this novel explores the sometimes impossible task of shedding family legacy and forging one’s own path.
Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber by Susan FowlerRead about the other entries on the list.
Susan Fowler was only 26 when she brought down Uber CEO Travis Kalanick – but her impact was even larger than that. What began as a 3,000-word blog post on the culture of misogyny and harassment within Uber helped fuel the #MeToo reckoning, and Fowler was one of the people pictured as Time’s Person of the Year in 2017. This is her telling of that story.
Elizabeth Gonzalez James is the author of the novels Mona at Sea (2021) and The Bullet Swallower (f2024), as well as the chapbook, Five Conversations About Peter Sellers (2023).
Gabino Iglesias, The Devil Takes You HomeRead about the other entries on the list.
Being a fairly new reader of horror, I was very excited for Iglesias’s latest. Mario has recently lost his young daughter tocancer, and his wife to grief, and so with nothing to live for he becomes a hitman. When a friend offers him the chance to make a huge sum of money doing a job for a narco-cartel, he agrees, and is launched into a nightmare world of violence and cruelty. Fair warning: This book is dark. DARK. But as someone who grew up on the border amid the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s, where, it turns out, cults were actually sacrificing people to the devil, I found Iglesias’s descent into the grim world of drug-fueled violence chillingly rendered and all too real.
Pedro Páramo by Juan RulfoRead about the other entries on the list.
First published in 1955, the slim translated novel is often hailed as a timeless literary masterpiece. Jorge Luis Borges called it one of the best works of Hispanic literature, Susan Sontag described it as one of the 20th century’s most influential books and Gabriel García Márquez described the pages as being as enduring as those of Sophocles.
Jumping between past and present, there’s uncertainty on where the line between the living and dead is drawn as the novel’s central character travels to the fictional ghost town of Comala to find his father upon his dying mother’s wish.
Possession by A.S. ByattRead about the other entries on the list.
Novelist and literary critic A.S. Byatt died last year, and if you haven’t read her Booker-winning Possession yet, now is the time. In the novel, Roland Michell is an American scholar unhappy with his position researching the fictional Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash and unsure whether he will commit to his girlfriend, his academic career, and his life in London. When he finds a stray document in the archive that suggests a relationship between the subject of his research and another fictional Victorian poet Christabel LaMotte, he steals it from the London Library. Roland approaches Dr. Maud Bailey, an expert on LaMotte, and together they search libraries, texts, archives, and even closed-up rooms in a cold, drafty old country house to get to the bottom of the literary mystery. Even better, they fall in love while doing so.
front porch with a good book and a glass of iced tea. She has a love for small towns, ghost stories, and pie. During her childhood, she grew up in a town suspiciously resembling the fictional Pine Bluff, Oregon where she trailed behind her grandmother in the family's hardware store until her grandmother would get fed up and put her to work counting nails. She is a member of Sisters in Crime. Charles lives on a small farm in Southwestern Washington with her husband, two furry dogs, two naughty goats, a handful of cackling chickens, a teeny tiny bunny rabbit, and one adventurous kitty cat.
Hidden Pieces, Mary KeliikoaRead about the other entries on the list.
Let’s take a detour over to the northern Oregon coast in Mary Keliikoa’s Hidden Pieces. Sheriff Jax Turner is at the end of his rope when a call comes in that a fourteen-year-old girl left for the school bus stop one morning, but never made it onto the bus. Her backpack is found in an unregistered sex offender’s car, and as the case begins to echo a cold case from Jax’s early career, he’s bound and determined to rescue the girl and not repeat the mistakes of the past. The setting is impeccable and moody with towering trees and sideways rain. The fact that it transports the reader to my beloved northern Oregon coast doesn’t hurt one little bit.
in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. The Silent Patient was his first novel, debuting at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, and has sold more than 6.5 million copies worldwide. The rights have been sold in a record-breaking 51 countries, and the book has been optioned for film by Plan B. His second novel, The Maidens, was an instant New York Times bestseller and has been optioned for television by Miramax Television and Stone Village.
Read about the other entries on his list.Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
I love this book. It contains the kind of twist that is a visceral, physical punch in the gut, spinning the entire story upside down, forcing you to re-evaluate everything you have taken for granted until that point. Ostensibly it’s about a US Marshall who investigates the disappearance of a psychiatric patient in a prison asylum on a small island. But as his investigation proceeds, something doesn’t feel right – until the twist confirms our suspicion in a way you never anticipate. The imagination and ingenuity in the plotting of this book are simply astonishing.
Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World and Self-Made: Curating Our Image from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. She is currently working on a history of magic and modernity.
about ordinary human beings trying—whether through travel, religion, or political experiment—to transcend the seemingly mundane world they’re living in, and to seek enchantment outside their everyday lives.One of Burton's inspirations:
Read about the other entries on the list.R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries
Equal parts campus novel and cult story, R.O. Kwon’s 2018 The Incendiaries follows Phoebe Lin, a failed piano prodigy coping with the loss of her mother, as she falls under the influence of John Leal, a mysterious half-Korean activist whose equally shadowy organization, Jejah, may in fact be more cult-like than he lets on.
A novel about the close connection between love and violence, and how those who prey upon the world’s lost and loneliest souls use that connection to their advantage, The Incendiaries is currently in development as a limited series.
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