what novel(s) would you recommend for someone looking to be moved and quite possibly changed forever? <3
fantastic question and thank you for sending it my way..i am staring long and hard into my bookshelves and this is what i've come up with:
season of migration to the north by tayeb salih - this was reading for a class my last year of undergrad, and i think it's one of the best (post?)colonial novels, if not one of the best novels ever written
jack the modernist by robert glück - i read this with a friend earlier this year and it has not left my mind, it exerts a really beautiful/painful tension between legibility and abstraction (in my opinion!)
this is a mainstay of this blog so i have to mention dennis cooper's george miles cycle (closer, frisk, try, guide, period, and i wished) which is in my bloodstream. one of the masters when it comes to prose rendered surgically
don't cry by mary gaitskill, but particularly the story mirrorball. i come back to it every now and then on the topic of just prying yourself open painfully
the late americans by brandon taylor - altered the course of my life in grad school, really beautiful stories/vignettes also about whether or not people can be trusted and allowed into your life
things in nature merely grow by yiyun li - really difficult book that she wrote after her second son committed suicide, but one of the most compassionate books about suicide i've ever read
the tunnel by ernesto sabato - i think i succeeded in getting a couple of my mutuals to read this #myfriends and we all lost our minds..really short but so all-consuming
i feel like this list could go on forever but i'll end by saying septology by jon fosse!!!! beautiful book, felt like i was doing the rosary and exerting an immense effort in a really special way
