I Wish I Had Written These: Favorite Contemporary Novels
Discover a curated list of favorite contemporary novels that captivate and inspire. Explore must-read books that leave a lasting impact, perfect for your next literary adventure.
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The Magic Toyshop
by Angela Carter
From the master of the literary supernatural and author of The Bloody Chamber, a startling tale of the redemptive power of physical and emotional love One night Melanie walks through the garden in her mother's wedding dress. The next morning her world is shattered. Forced to leave the comfortable home of her childhood, she is sent to London to live with relatives she has never met: Aunt Margaret, beautiful and speechless, and her brothers, Francie, whose graceful music belies his clumsy nature, and the volatile Finn, who kisses Melanie in the ruins of the pleasure gardens. And brooding Uncle Philip loves only the life-sized wooden puppets he creates in his toyshop. This classic gothic novel established Angela Carter as one of our most imaginative writers and augurs the themes of her later creative work.
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Human Croquet
by Kate Atkinson
Once part of a vast expanse where a wealthy Elizabethan family settled and built Fairfax Manor, by the mid-1960s the village of Lythe has become a disintegrated forest where the destroyed, dysfunctional Fairfax family continues to crumble.
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IN LAND WINTER
by Grant R.
Losing custody of her daughter after she is attacked by right-winged gossips, self-proclaimed witch Pippa finds herself homeless, jobless, and friendless and begins a journey to reclaim her power and transform her life. 25,000 first printing.
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Tex and Molly in the Afterlife
by Richard Grant
Two middle-aged hippies from Maine are given a chance to remake their own reality, commune with history's forsaken deities, and meet the Great Devourer of All Things Manifest. By the author of Rumors of Spring.
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Life and Loves of a She Devil
by Fay Weldon
This is not a book for everyone, but its admirers are vigorously enthusiastic. For example: Rhoda Koenig in New York Magazine, who calls it ". . . a novel of blazingly hot revenge, one that amply illustrates the saying about heaven having no rage like love turned to hate, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned." Or Rosalyn Drexler, who said on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, "It affords a scintillating, mindboggling, vicarious thrill for any reader who has ever fantasized dishing out retribution for one wrong or another." Or Carol E. Rinzler, who wrote on The Washington Post Book World's front page, ". . . what makes this a powerfully funny and oddly powerful book is the energy of the language and of the intellect that conceived it, an energy that vibrates off the pages and that makes SHE-DEVIL as exceptional a book in the remembering as in the reading . . . . a small, mad masterpiece."
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Lady Oracle
by Margaret Atwood
From the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments—the "brilliant and funny" story (Joan Didion, bestselling author of Let Me Tell You What I Mean) of a woman whose attempts to escape herself become instead an occasion for confronting the self-deception that has driven her since childhood Joan Foster is a woman with numerous identities and a talent for shedding them at will. She has written trashy gothic romances, had affairs with a Polish count and an absurd avant-garde artist, and played at being a politically engaged partner to her activist husband. After a volume of her poetry becomes an unexpected literary sensation, her new fame attracts a blackmailer threatening to reveal her secrets. Joan’s response is to fake her own death and flee to a hill town in Italy. Studded with hair-raising comic escapades and piercing psychological insights, Lady Oracle is both hilarious and profound.
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Skinny Legs and All
by Tom Robbins
An Arab and a Jew open a restaurant together across the street from the United Nations.... It sounds like the beginning of an ethnic joke, but it's the axis around which spins this gutsy, fun-loving, and alarmingly provocative novel, in which a bean can philosophizes, a dessert spoon mystifies, a young waitress takes on the New York art world, and a rowdy redneck welder discovers the lost god of Palestine--while the illusions that obscure humanity's view of the true universe fall away, one by one, like Salome's veils. Skinny Legs and All deals with today's most sensitive issues: race, politics, marriage, art, religion, money, and lust. It weaves lyrically through what some call the "end days" of our planet. Refusing to avert its gaze from the horrors of the apocalypse, it also refuses to let the alleged end of the world spoil its mood. And its mood is defiantly upbeat. In the gloriously inventive Tom Robbins style, here are characters, phrases, stories, and ideas that dance together on the page, wild and sexy, like Salome herself. Or was it Jezebel?
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A Year in Van Nuys
by Sandra Tsing Loh
Shares the anti-Hollywood life of Sandra Tsing Loh, self-described neurotic and public radio commentator.
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The Saskiad
by Brian Hall
A 13-year-old, enriched by her knowledge of Golden Age mythologies but burdened with the pressures of family history and contemporary life, comes of age in this engaging novel.