Literary Fiction

Browse literary fiction recommendations from people with great taste on Rec League — the whisper network for great recs.

Circe (Madeline Miller’s retelling)

The myth of Circe has always fascinated me as someone who feels very at home with nonhuman animals and herbs, less so with bio family. Miller’s rendition is so compassionate and descriptive, especially the witchy island scenes. I do think Pigs deserve a little more dignity across the board in human cultures and languages but that’s a story for another time. Miller’s Song of Achilles is a great (beautifully queer) myth as well.

Steven Weill

Stoner by John Williams (1965)

Arguably the most underrated American novel. Absolute masterpiece that has started picking up steam as a cult favorite over the past 10/15 years. Heartbreaking stuff, so tenderly executed that one man's objectively depressing reality becomes a series of felt universal truths. It feels particularly strong juxtaposed against modern ideology. Also it's almost definitely shorter than anything else that will be recommended, which is huge for me as someone who typically avoids fiction (and everyone who is struggling with a waning attention span).

Lily

A Way of Life, Like Any Other, by Darcy O'Brien

This book has been on my bedside for months (untouched!) after a voracious reader friend called it his favorite book he’s read in years— I saw it pop up in a New Yorker summer roundup this week which reminded me to get to it! Winner of the 1978 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel “The hero of Darcy O'Brien's A Way of Life, Like Any Other is a child of Hollywood, and once his life was a glittery dream. His father starred in Westerns. His mother was a goddess of the silver screen. The family enjoyed the high life on their estate, Casa Fiesta. But his parents' careers have crashed since then, and their marriage has broken up too. Lovesick and sex-crazed, the mother sets out on an intercontinental quest for the right—or wrong—man, while her mild-mannered but manipulative former husband clings to his memories in California. And their teenage son? How he struggles both to keep faith with his family and to get by himself, and what in the end he must do to break free, makes for a classic coming-of-age story—a novel that combines keen insight and devastating wit to hilarious and heartbreaking effect.”

James Kylstra

Endling (Maria Reva)

Best book I read in 2025. Starts off as a sort of heist / caper set in the Ukrainian marriage tourism industry but becomes much stranger and more interesting partway through. Moving, funny, dark.

Francesca McConchie

The Overstory - Richard Powers

“An immense and intense homage to the arboreal world (its biological sophistication, its rich panoply of environmental benefits), the book is alive with riveting data, cogent reasoning and urgent argument. Pages that take you into menaced remnants of primeval forest or contemplate singularly splendid or fascinating trees teem with knowledge and gleam with aesthetic appeal.”

bella

clarice lispector -- the hour of the star

i finished it this morning and i'll begin re-reading tonight. clarice lispector is maybe my favorite writer ever. i could and will write an essay on her, but for now, i'll leave it at a few words. grotesque, sublime, surreal. lispector strikes a pickaxe at the flesh in search of the truest nucleus of human spirit. this ND special edition is a particularly beautiful publication and made reading it all the more special.

Lily

Transcription by Ben Lerner

I listened to Ben Lerner’s new novel in one go today in my studio and can’t recommend it enough. A journalist takes the train from New York to Providence to interview his aging and very famous former-professor and accidentally drops his iPhone in a hotel sink beforehand, then pretends to record the interview on the broken phone to save face. Fatherhood, iPhone addiction, WWII history, the vagaries of memory and haunting of family history, forgiveness, and those ASMR unboxing videos on YouTube. Lerner wrote my favorite new book of the year.

even*cleveland

The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott

Instead of one engrossing summer novel, how about four? (Five, if you count the coda, STAYING ON.) I spent a summer wholly immersed in Scott's books, which capture the unraveling of Britain's morally corrupt rule in India and the ghastly consequences of its ending in intense, unforgettable detail. As soon as I finished book three, I set it down, left the house, got in my car, and drove straight to the bookstore to buy book four (it took visiting a few, but I found it + called off work the next day to read). The publisher's blurb describes it as Tolstoyan, which fits—like WAR AND PEACE, Scott's story attempts to hold a whole, complex, incredibly messy geopolitical moment in time and its impacts on individual lives; I'd throw in Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalets as a comp, too, because like those books, these are utterly propulsive reads (no Tolstoyan digressions on the nature of history or drawing room interludes in French to slow you down, ha).

James Kylstra

The Safekeep (Yael van der Wouden)

Let me add my voice to the chorus of people recommending this book. A beautiful slow burn. The less said in advance about the plot the better. I read it in about three sittings over the weekend.

Sarah Cooney

Charlotte Sometimes (novel) - Wikipedia

A haunting little book, the third in a series, that I can specifically pinpoint as the book that got me obsessed with boarding school (and one of the reasons I ended up at one). I checked this out probably twenty times.

Paradise by Toni Morrison

Paradise is a book I return to as a way of thinking about how utopia and dystopia are often two sides of the same coin. There are gorgeous, small moments of sanctuary that I want to dwell in; they are swiftly punctured. Toni Morrison's writing is breathtaking. Paradise isn't everyone's favorite in Morrison's oeuvre but it is definitely mine.

even*cleveland

Lote by Shola Von Reinhold / Duke University Press

This tasty bit of literary confectionery centers on the transfixions of Matilda, a Black researcher enraptured by the decadent pleasures of the Bright Young Things, particularly the glimmering traces left behind by Hermia Druitt, a Black woman who was a poet, possible resurrector of a lost cult of luxuries, and seemingly unforgettable, except that she has almost disappeared from the archive. Then Matilda is accepted to a residency of ascetic “thought artists” who seemingly stand in opposition to everything Druitt represents yet are somehow mysteriously and inextricably bound to her (non)existence. It’s heady and gossipy and poppily academic and feels very much in dialogue with the work of Saidiya Hartman in its imaginings of the possibilities of historical gaps in conjuring different ways to exist and of fiction as the necessary net to catch the quicksilver lives the archive cannot hold.

James Kylstra

Aubrey / Maturin novels

Peak dad lit. Dozens of books about an English sea captain and his best bud, a doctor and spy. Charming, pleasant, just the right stakes. You will learn what a mizzenmast is.

Sarah Cooney

brother of the more famous jack

A friend recommended this to me twenty years ago and my GOD, the way I needed this book as a teen and in my twenties and now in my thirties. Women’s literature about REAL things, not the derogatory mess that gets published for women’s interests. Real, meaty, bawdy, funny, heartbreaking, a romp.

Natasha Feldman

My Year of Rest & Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

Probably my favorite book of all time. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect.

even*cleveland

Versailles by Kathryn Davis

Kathryn Davis' Versailles is a history of a person (Marie Antoinette) but also a place, mostly told from Marie Antionette's first-person perspective: "After Léonard took off the curling papers, he frizzed my hair with a hot iron, combed it out with nettle juice, powdered it with bean flour, then mounted a ladder in order to affix the horsehair cushion that would form the armature for the final hairdo. Cypresses and black marigolds and wheat sheaves and fruit-filled cornucopias—a hairdo reminding everyone that while they mourned the loss of one king, they also looked forward to the bounty the next would bring. Or how about the Inoculation hairdo, commemorating the Princes's victory over smallpox? One day Léonard made me Minerva. One day he made me an English garden with lawns, hills, and streams. One day he made me the world. Really, you could put anything on your head .. so long as it didn't (excuse me) snap your neck. Léonard used long steel pins to hold the cushion in place and combed my own hair up over it. Then he matted everything down with pomade, creating a kind of moist hive under which fleas and lice bred, and soon enough there wasn't a fashionable lady alive who wasn't using a long thin stick identical to the one Léonard made for me, complete with a little ivory claw, to scratch away at her scalp like mad." There are also dramatic interludes structured like one acts with chatty lap dogs and ladies-in-waiting; appearances by Bread, personified; discussions of how the grounds are planted; and servants doomed to die from pox. It's like the marvelous eccentric aunt of Danielle Dutton's gemlike and glittery Margaret the First.

Samantha Culp

The Names (Don Delillo)

Don Delillo’s philosophical thriller The Names - which I described to somebody as “The Secret History with disillusioned grownups and more post Cold War geopolitics”

James Kylstra

Flesh (David Szalay)

I spoke too soon when I said that Endling was the best book I read this year. This is an astonishingly good book, though dark. An engrossing portrait of a person with the kind of internal life that we don’t often see portrayed in fiction. So glad I read it; I’ll be thinking about it for a while.

Mia

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Thank you Louise Buckley, for being the person to finally get me to read East of Eden. This book will be etched in my mind forever. Totally cinematic and poignant. Love!

Sarah Cooney

the light years

The first four are the only you need to read—I have been captivated by the Cazalets for two decades now and I reread the series every year.

Spines, Flicks, and Wax

Nights at the Circus (Angela Carter)

My favorite novel of all time. The whimsy and style of this novel was such a treat and such a journey! One moment, I'm in London, feeling if I'd been dropped into the glitzy world of Baz Luhrman's Moulin Rouge! then the next, I'm in a blizzard at the site of a derailed train in Siberia. The story begins in London, where journalist Jack Walser interviews a famous circus aerialist, Sophie Fevvers, who claims to have been born with wings that help her fly. As Jack gets to know Sophie, he slowly moves away from his journalist role and joins Sophie's troupe, determined to find out if she indeed has wings. From London to Petersburg to Siberia, Carter takes you on an enchanting and sometimes perilous journey of circus life during the turn of the 20th century.

even*cleveland

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

A story about numbers creating a pathway to something incalculable. The housekeeper and her ten-year-old son are drawn to the housekeeper’s latest client—a mathematics professor whose short-term memory lasts only 80 minutes. His love of numbers illuminates the world in ways the housekeeper and her son unexpectedly find irresistible, as they are beguiled by primes and the elegance of factorials, and the deep kindness and courtesy of the professor himself. (Charmingly, the Professor calls the boy “Root” because his square head reminds him of the square root symbol.) This is a beautiful, beautiful idiosyncratic book, a pure pleasure to read, even if the kid-level math problems sometimes tripped me up. Ogawa’s interest in memory fascinates me; another book of hers I’ve read, THE MEMORY POLICE, is even more intensely focused on the ways memory, and its loss, make and unmake the world. (It was one of the three books that seemed to me to capture how I experienced the pandemic, along with Susanna Clarke’s PIRANESI and Marlen Haushofer’s THE WALL.) "I looked at the Professor’s note again. A number that cycled on forever and another vague figure that never revealed its true nature now traced a short and elegant trajectory to a single point. Though there was no circle in evidence, π had descended from somewhere to join hands with e. There they rested, slumped against each other, and it only remained for a human being to add 1, and the world suddenly changed. Everything resolved into nothing, zero. Euler’s formula shone like a shooting star in the night sky, or like a line of poetry carved on the wall of a dark cave. I slipped the Professor’s note into my wallet, strangely moved by the beauty of those few symbols."

Lena Dunham

Mating

The first time I read this book, I felt like someone had taken all my naive college fantasies and fed them back to me as nightmares. I had questions about every aspect of human existence, except for one: yes, you can get horny reading opaque literature about sociology. The story of a nameless anthropologist doing graduate work in Botswana who ends up in a polyamorous matriarchal village before that was a thing, Mating's title says it all. In recent years, Mating has achieved something of a cult status (back in my day, this was one of those books you felt cool for knowing about and oddly protective of- so it’s the book equivalent of an indie band from your neighborhood whose music is suddenly in Hyundai Elantra ads.) If Norman's work interests you, check out this lovely article about his long term collaboration with his wife- the rare male genius who DOES give his better half her flowers. Yes King.

Analisa Burns

True West by Sam Shepard

classic- cover to cover

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