100 books like The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

To learn about the Holocaust, I read personal remembrances, eyewitness accounts, and detailed descriptions of ghettos, camps, and transports, but this graphic novel based on Spiegelman’s father captured me like none of the others. Its words tell its terrible story masterfully and its drawings fill in what words can’t say, both as his father lived it and as his son learns about it. Banning it from U.S. schools would be completely wrongheaded. It should be required reading.

Markson had early success writing traditional novels (one was even made into a movie starring Frank Sinatra) but his real body of work came after when he started writing novels that were criticized for not being novels. The first of these, This is Not a Novel, is narrated by a writer who asks whether it is possible to have a novel with no plot, no main character etc. In a form that visually resembles about 150 pages of tweets (but written before Twitter existed), Markson takes a spirited, enjoyable romp through the history of art, literature, and philosophy, with a sharp eye focused on how various creative people lived and loved, but especially on how they died. 

I love I Love Dick! This is a hilarious, shocking, keenly intelligent interrogative adventure into the art world and ideas about stalking a muse and being female. The book was published in 1997 but I didn’t discover it until a decade later, so I was late to the game. In her forward, Eileen Myles describes Chris Kraus as “marching boldly into self-abasement and self-advertisement,” which is a perfect way of putting it. Shredding the veil between reality and fiction, in her relentless pursuit of Dick (a real person), Chris Kraus embraces the world, no holds barred. If you’re curious about being female, being an artist, being a failure (whatever that means), chasing your desires, and fighting your way out of limitations both within and without, this riveting, lacerating, revealing, surprising book is for you.

Bluets is a work of fragmentary nonfiction so overwrought, and so filled with tears and heartbreak, that I return to it for solace whenever I’m wrought with such feelings.

It begins with the claim that the narrator has fallen in love with the color blue.

She writes of different encounters with the color’s pigments and presentations, as well as Joni Mitchell’s Blue, the biology of color, philosophy of perception, and more like this, all while she is blue: lonely, heartbroken, sad.

Bluets is beautiful, intelligent, heartbreaking, consoling; it is not afraid of to weep.

Just like Nelson describes wishing to ingest the color blue, not knowing what else to do with its beauty and the longing it produces in her, I sometimes wish I could ingest this book. 

This is slightly outside the boundaries of a wartime novel, as it takes place in the Old West, but it’s a fantastic book for this list, and shouldn’t be overlooked if you love this trope. Jess Harney makes a name for herself as a notorious male sharpshooter and outlaw. Her first-person voice is one of the most interesting I’ve read, and I loved how she fit in as one of the guys while never sacrificing who she was. She barely even thinks about her gender as she so naturally considers herself male. Books like this really highlight the blurred lines between cross-dressing out of necessity or desire, and I’m excited to see more authors addressing this trope with the nuance of queerness which is often part of it.

Estleman has taken a well-known story—the chase, capture, and assassination of Billy the Kid—and given it new life by exploring the occult and its effect on Sheriff Pat Garrett as he stumbles toward his destiny as the killer of the Kid.

This novel is a perfect example of how fiction can sometimes offer a richer probe into history by exposing the inner workings of the characters. 

Most people with even a casual familiarity with Billy the Kid know at least three things about the young outlaw:

1) Billy was captured and found guilty of murder.

2) Before he could be hanged, he affected a spectacular escape.

3) He was hunted down and killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett. Because of the high drama of that last point (a shooting in a dark room at midnight near the bedroom of Billy’s paramour) and because of the machinations of the sheriff’s ghostwriter and publicist, Garrett has received all the glory for the Kid being brought to justice.

But there was another lawman who deserves just as much credit—Frank Stewart, lead detective for a Texas cattleman’s association. Stewart played an equal role in Billy’s capture, but his name was suppressed by those who did not want to divvy up fame. This new information is the subject of this book.

This book taught me how to hear birds. 

We all see birds to some degree. But most people completely miss their sounds. That’s where this book comes in, as a guide to the vocalization of all the western birds (there is an eastern version, too) with transliterations, spectrograms, and curated online recordings. 

Here’s what I recommend you do to instantly enrich your life: sit outside, wait until a bird sings or calls, then look it up in this book. Read the description, look at the spectrogram, and play the recording if needed. Now you know a bird by ear. Now, whenever it calls, you will know what bird is present, just by the subtle patterns or qualities of tone that most people ignore. 

When we think of the West, we so often think about people moving and traveling, but rarely do women come to mind, except as pioneers in covered wagons. But ever since Sacagawea walked with the Lewis and Clark expedition, women have not only traveled West, they often led the way, both physically and metaphorically. Scharff’s book is a fascinating look at how hard it was for women to actually move through the region, whether stumping for suffrage or civil rights. Scharff’s book is especially valuable because she includes so many women of color, and you can feel their pain and their exhilaration on the page.

Guthie’s autobiography describes the wild, western United States from his perspective as a 64-year-old westerner. Born in 1901, Guthrie provides a compelling account of the rugged beauty of the West. Guthrie’s writing is lucid and compelling. I had read most of his books by the time I turned 30.