Recs if you like Good Morning, Midnight...

Based on the list/book published in 2006, general editor Peter Boxall.

For when you need to wallow in melancholy and misery: a collection of pessimistic, cynical, downbeat, depressing, doom and gloom fiction for my disillusioned friends.

More to come!

Got the holiday blues? Check out my list Christmas with the Cranks!

These are books that dissolve the edges of reality...quiet, uncanny, and often profound. You’ll find yourself suspended in dream logic, where time is slippery, identity flickers, and language floats like fog. Perfect for when you crave something liminal, lyrical, or just plain weird in the softest way. Read them when the world feels too loud and you want to disappear...but beautifully.

These books feel a bit like the moment in the filming of the Herb Ertlinger ad when Moira realizes everything has gone horribly wrong for her to find herself doing a commercial for atrocious fruit wine and, frankly, beefing it. (Exemplary gif in pinned comment)

They are slow / slippery descents into madness, psychosis, horror, etc., lubricated by alcohol. They might feel a bit like a fever dream.

CW: addiction, postpartum psychosis, intergenerational trauma, colonial violence, drunk driving

Originating in the late 1800s and continuing until the end of World War II, works of the modernism movement feature new and innovative styles, a break from traditional writing, and attempts to recontextualize literature in response to both the devastation of the series of global conflicts between 1900-1950 and the emergence of new technology, ideas, and world order. Subgenres of modernism include absurdism, surrealism, dadaism, and stream of consciousness.

Just a list of books I've read from around the world, hoping others will find it useful.

Books set in France

Open to recs!

Books that were featured on an episode of Backlisted.

The books written by female American authors during the infamous Lost Generation literary movement in the 1920s (-ish, we may veer a little bit to 1910s and 1930s) Europe. Mostly Paris centred, but again, I think some other works ar worth while too and might be written somewhere else. Some works will be written during the lost generations and others are more reflective of the time and written later. A companion and new perspectives on the Hemingways and Fitzgeralds.

For my soulless sparkler. You would LOVE these books.

Books which document women’s lives throughout a century of change