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Recommendations based on The Story of My Teethby Valeria Luiselli
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We Have Always Lived in the Castle
by Shirley Jackson
A family isolated from society, struggling to cope with prejudice and tragedy.
My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two ... (Goodreads)
Lincoln in the Bardo
by George Saunders
A spiritual exploration of death, exploring the afterlife through the eyes of President Lincoln.
In his long-awaited first novel, American master George Saunders delivers his most original, transcendent, and moving work yet. Unfolding in a graveyard over the course of a single night, narrated by ... (Goodreads)
No One Belongs Here More Than You
by Miranda July
Short stories of everyday people struggling to find their place in the world.
Screenwriter, director, and star of the acclaimed film Me and You and Everyone We Know, Miranda July brings her extraordinary talents to the page in a startling, sexy, and tender collection. ... (Goodreads)
Americanah
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
An exploration of race, identity, and belonging as two Nigerian immigrants experience life in America and beyond.
Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to ... (Goodreads)
Shotgun Lovesongs
by Nickolas Butler
Interwoven tales of four lifelong friends in rural Wisconsin, exploring love, loss and loyalty.
Hank, Leland, Kip and Ronny were all born and raised in the same Wisconsin town — Little Wing — and are now coming into their own (or not) as husbands and fathers. One of them never left, still ... (Goodreads)
Another Brooklyn
by Jacqueline Woodson
A poetic story of four teenage girls growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s.
The story starts with August, an adult anthropologist, returning to New York to bury her father. On the subway, she encounters an old friend, and begins to reminisce. She remembers being an 8 year ... (Wikipedia)
Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino
A fantastical exploration of the cities of the imagination and the possibilities of life.
"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young ... (Goodreads)
Bartleby the Scrivener
by Herman Melville
A story of a mysterious scrivener whose refusal to comply with workplace demands leads to tragedy.
The narrator is an unnamed Manhattan lawyer, aged around his late 50s, with a business in legal documents. He already employs two scriveners , Nippers and Turkey, to copy legal documents by hand, but ... (Wikipedia)
How to Be Both
by Ali Smith
Exploring duality and interconnectedness through the life of a girl and a Renaissance artist.
Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith’s novels are like nothing else. A true original, she is a one-of-a-kind literary sensation. Her novels consistently ... (Goodreads)
The Idiot
by Elif Batuman
A young woman's journey of self-discovery, learning to navigate the complexities of life.
Selin Karadağ is a freshman studying linguistics at Harvard University . She meets an older Hungarian mathematics student, Ivan, in a Russian language class and the two begin corresponding over ... (Wikipedia)
The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
A family drama exploring the complexities of relationships, aging and life’s choices.
The novel shifts back and forth through the late 20th century, intermittently following spouses Alfred and Enid Lambert as they raise their children Gary, Chip, and Denise in the traditional ... (Wikipedia)
Oblivion: Stories
by David Foster Wallace
A collection of short stories exploring the human condition, often through the lens of modern society's obsession with entertainment and technology.
In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness—a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. ... (Goodreads)
Outline
by Rachel Cusk
A woman's journey of self-reflection, exploring relationships and the complexities of life.
An English woman writer flies to Athens to teach a summer writing workshop. On the plane, she meets an older Greek bachelor , who tells her about his two failed marriages. The next day she meets with ... (Wikipedia)
Wolf in White Van
by John Darnielle
A mysterious, psychological journey of a reclusive man, linked to a game he created.
Sean Phillips lives with a caretaker after shooting himself in the head at age 17, causing facial disfigurement. The circumstances of the shooting are initially left ambiguous. Sean's relationship ... (Wikipedia)
Grief is the Thing with Feathers
by Max Porter
A family's journey of dealing with the death of a loved one, discovering hope and comfort along the way.
In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother's sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and ... (Goodreads)
A Brief History of Seven Killings
by Marlon James
A fictionalized account of the attempted assassination of Bob Marley, exploring the history of Jamaica.
On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert, gunmen stormed his house, machine guns blazing. The attack nearly ... (Goodreads)
The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
An escaped slave's daring escape to freedom, fighting against the brutality of slavery.
The story is told in the third person, focusing mainly on Cora. Scattered single chapters also focus on Cora's mother Mabel, the slavecatcher Ridgeway, a reluctant slave sympathizer named Ethel, and ... (Wikipedia)
The Invention of Morel
by Adolfo Bioy Casares
An escaped convict finds refuge on a deserted island, where he discovers a strange and mysterious phenomenon.
The fugitive starts a diary after tourists arrive on the desert island where he is hiding. , Although he considers their presence a miracle, he is afraid they will turn him in to the authorities. He ... (Wikipedia)
Dept. of Speculation
by Jenny Offill
A woman's exploration of relationships, marriage, and motherhood amidst personal and familial struggles.
Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all. ... (Goodreads)
A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories
by Lucia Berlin
An exploration of female experience, weaving together stories of love, loss, and resilience.
A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all ... (Barnes & Noble)
The Secret History
by Donna Tartt
A small group of misfit college students uncover a sinister secret and their lives become entangled with dangerous consequences.
Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the ... (Goodreads)
Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
by Carmen Maria Machado
Collection of surreal stories exploring the complexities of gender, sexuality and identity.
In Her Body and Other Parties , Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her ... (Goodreads)
This Is How You Lose Her
by Junot Díaz
A collection of stories about young love, heartache, and the struggle to find one's place in the world.
On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a doomed relationship flounders. In the heat of a hospital laundry room in New Jersey, a woman does her lover’s washing and thinks about his wife. In Boston, a ... (Goodreads)
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
by Jonathan Safran Foer
A young boy's quest to find the lock that matches a mysterious key his father left behind.
Nine-year-old Oskar Schell is an inventor, amateur entomologist, Francophile, letter writer, pacifist, natural historian, percussionist, romantic, Great Explorer, jeweller, detective, vegan, and ... (Goodreads)
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
by Mohsin Hamid
A Pakistani man's journey of identity and belonging, in a post-9/11 world.
At a café table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an uneasy American stranger. As dusk deepens to night, he begins the tale that has brought them to this fateful encounter… Changez is ... (Goodreads)
Cathedral
by Raymond Carver
An unexpected encounter changes a man's outlook on life and his relationships.
Raymond Carver’s third collection of stories, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, including the canonical titular story about blindness and learning to enter the very different world of another. These ... (Goodreads)
There There
by Tommy Orange
A powerful novel that follows the lives of twelve Native Americans living in Oakland, California, as they prepare for a powwow.
The book begins with an essay by Orange, detailing "brief and jarring vignettes revealing the violence and genocide that Indigenous people have endured, and how it has been sanitized over the ... (Wikipedia)
Pastoralia
by George Saunders
Short stories exploring the complexities of modern life, through characters struggling to survive in an ever-changing world.
With this new collection, George Saunders takes us even further into the shocking, uproarious and oddly familiar landscape of his imagination. The stories in Pastoralia are set in a slightly skewed ... (Goodreads)
The Bone Clocks
by David Mitchell
A time-spanning saga of a war between two powerful supernatural forces.
Following a scalding row with her mother, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: a sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew ... (Goodreads)
Play It As It Lays
by Joan Didion
A woman's search for identity amidst the glamour and emptiness of 1960s Hollywood.
The novel begins with an internal monologue by the 31-year-old Maria Wyeth, followed by short reminiscences of her friend Helene, and ex-husband, film producer Carter Lang. The further narration is ... (Wikipedia)
