The Namesake

How to Pronounce Knife

Souvankham Thammavongsa2019

Short stories follow Lao immigrants navigating labor and family in North America. Characters work in nail salons, factories, and worm farms.

Same tender register, still domestic fiction

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Briefing for a Descent into Hell

Doris Lessing1971

A man is found wandering London and placed in a psychiatric ward. The narrative shifts between the hospital and his internal cosmic hallucinations.

tender → dreamlike

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Don Quixote

Kathy Acker1986

A woman undergoes an abortion and adopts the persona of Don Quixote to pursue a quest in a fragmented, postmodern landscape.

tender → sardonic

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Gravity's Rainbow

Thomas Pynchon1973

During the end of WWII, an American lieutenant's sexual encounters seem to predict where German V-2 rockets will fall. The narrative is fragmented.

tender → sardonic

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My Roommate Is a Vampire

Jenna Levine2023

An artist moves in with a man who sleeps all day and speaks in an archaic style. She eventually discovers he is a vampire from the 1800s.

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It Happened One Summer

Tessa Bailey2021

A socialite is sent to a small fishing town to run a dive bar. She enters a relationship with a local sea captain who doubts her competence.

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Truly, Madly

Heather Webber2010

A woman with the psychic ability to find lost objects takes over her family's matchmaking business. She teams up with a cynical private investigator.

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Candide

Voltaire

A naive young man travels the world while his tutor insists that everything is for the best. He encounters a series of global catastrophes.

tender → sardonic

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The Da Vinci Code

Dan Brown2003

A symbologist and a cryptologist flee the police while solving puzzles hidden in art. They search for a secret regarding the Holy Grail.

tender → propulsive

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The Martian

Andy Weir2011

A man does arithmetic to stay alive on Mars. Problem, attempt, result, repeat.

tender → wry

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The English Patient

Michael Ondaatje1992

Four people shelter in a ruined Italian villa at the end of WWII. They care for a burned, anonymous man who recounts his past in the desert.

tender → elegiac, still literary fiction

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Moby Dick

Herman Melville1851

A sailor joins a whaling voyage led by a captain seeking revenge on a specific whale. Large sections digress into the mechanics of 1850s whaling.

tender → meditative, still literary fiction

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To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf1927

A family and their guests visit a house in the Hebrides. The narrative follows their internal thoughts over two days separated by ten years.

tender → elegiac, still literary fiction

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The story of a brief marriage

Anuk Arudpragasam2016

Two refugees enter an arranged marriage in a Sri Lankan camp during the final days of the civil war. It focuses on the physical details of survival.

tender → meditative, still literary fiction

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A Distant Shore

Caryl Phillips2003

A retired teacher and an African refugee form a quiet bond in a xenophobic English village. Their past traumas emerge through alternating stories.

tender → bleak, still literary fiction

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A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara2015

Four friends in New York over thirty years. One of them is being destroyed, and the book does not look away.

tender → bleak, still literary fiction

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