100 books like Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

Fun home is what the author and her family call the funeral home they were raised in. I was drawn into this graphic memoir of the author’s relationship with her father, with disturbing themes of suicide, unaccepted gender identities, and domestic abuse.

The story manages to stay buoyant despite it all, and the observations are funny. The author’s ability to capture her most painful memories in bright light and intricate detail catapulted this read to the top for me. 

Before reaching middle school, I pretty much believed that my friends—who they were and how many I had—determined my value. But my circle could be fickle; girls were ostracized for minor infractions (you bought the same coat as me!) I lived with daily fear of being dropped.

So Cat’s Eye captivated me with its lack of sentimentality in depicting (some) girls’ friendships. Elaine, a middle-aged artist, returns alone to Toronto, the city where she grew up,  for a retrospective of her work. The trip gives Elaine space to reflect on her life in that city, and Cordelia, her childhood “friend”, is central to her memories.

Cordelia tormented and humiliated Elaine, even putting her life in danger, yet Elaine remained loyal to her for years. It felt very real to me that this toxic relationship would continue to preoccupy Elaine into her functional adulthood. Girlhood friendships are often fraught, and Atwood… show more.

My novel shares a kinship with this book, also set in a Florida theme park—although one less Noah’s ark and a lot more alligators.

The myth of the Bigtree family is a roadside attraction: the family matriarch Hilola Bigtree’s daredevil dive into a pit of gators. The novel begins after Hilola’s death from cancer, and grapples with the dissolution of the family and their loss of purpose with the closure of the park. Ava, Kiwi, and Osceola are all on their own paths through the void their parents left behind.

Russell’s world-building is always top-notch, and here, the siblings must navigate a Bird Man, the World of Darkness, and ghost boyfriends.

I read this book in graduate school at the University of Washington, where Robinson had also been a graduate student. What struck me so forcefully was how the father is killed off in a train wreck at the beginning of the novel to usher in the exploration of the female life of generations of women.

No work before made me see how a male character and tradition can marginalize female life. This novel encouraged me to focus on my mother and sisters in my own writing.

This book is quietly hilarious. I loved being “inside” Patricia Lockwood’s mind. As a fellow lapsed Catholic, I resonated with her upbringing and living in the strange shadow of religion. Lockwood weaves a contradictory coming-of-age story with profound wit and lyricism.

She also explores the complexities of what she calls “The Portal”—the internet of things that boggle the mind even as they bring solace. I loved how Lockwood used “the portal” to understand her conservative upbringing and eventually find her own irreverent path in the world.

The book led me to follow her online presence too, and helped me learn new ways to “be” online. As Lockwood writes in Priestdaddy: “Part of what you have to figure out in this life is, who would I be if I hadn’t been frightened? What hurt me, and what would I be if it hadn’t?” 

Just to get this out of the way: Adam is one of my closest friends. We both started our second novels New Year’s week of 2014 on a trip we took for the explicit purpose of starting new novels. I spent the next ten years trying to write my book, but Adam finished Sensation Machines in a more reasonable time frame. It was published in the summer of 2020, a basically impossible time to promote a book because we were all in lockdown. (Yes, I know, it wasn’t the worst thing that happened that summer, but still.)

It is a marriage story, a murder mystery, a cultural satire, a tech farce, and a reckoning with all the lessons we failed to learn from the last financial crisis. And it’s a great Brooklyn novel, in the tradition of Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man (also a second novel!) and Jonathan Lethem’s The… show more.

I know I have those lost friendships I still wonder about—we worked together, lived together, traveled to beach towns together, drank tequila together! We went to very bad bars and made very bad decisions together! How’d we lose touch?—and thank God these brilliant writers do too.

Schappell and Offill gather a cocktail party’s worth of lost platonic loves, reminding me that I’m not alone and giving meaningful thought to the monumental importance of friendship and the pain of losing it.

I’m a little obsessed with the sheer ferocity with which Elisa Albert writes the world, and when I this short, sharp novel the phrase that stuck in my head was, “This is all teeth.” And boy, do I mean that in a good way.

Ari Walker is still trying to get her footing after the birth of her baby when Mina, a former cult musician, moves to town and the two bond hard. I still think about Albert’s description of Mina, her round cheeks and her messy hair and the jarring realization that this woman is not affecting carelessness with standard beauty norms, but truly does not give a good goddamn. It’s about those people who are both alien and intimate and who make you more yourself. 

What’s more fraught and intimate than friends? Sisters.   

Munro’s title story is about a relationship of extremes: sisters Char and Et can laugh over the darkest shit imaginable, and yet they also have certain psychic rooms they’ll never let the other into. Is this love or hostility? More happens in here than I can say, except that Char is the beautiful sister and Et the sharp-tongued, practical one, and an old flame returns and wreaks havoc.

It’s Munro, so there is sex, death, and betrayal, but delivered so obliquely you aren’t always sure what the characters deliberately did. Maybe that’s why this story enraptures me: it’s about the things you’ll never get to know, and I always think I'll figure it out this time.

I think Jamaica Kincaid’s novel is one of the great books of the 20th century. Though it barely breaks 160 pages, it is packed with more voice, personal and national history, political critique, style, humor, and heart than many novels five times its size.

I am a fan of all of Kincaid’s books, but there’s something truly special about this one. It’s a quantum leap forward from her (also very good!) debut novel, Annie John. In addition to re-reading for pleasure, I also reread Lucy every time I teach it, and it never fails to delight and surprise and inspire me as much as it did the first time.