It’s snowy and frosty and the day is mostly dark. Time for a book, a blanket, and a purring cat. You’ll have to provide the blanket and the cat, but the contributors at Fiction Unbound have plenty of suggestions for the book! We’ve got books for every mood: the wacky, the classic, the heartwarming and the heartbreaking. Warm your heart, and the hearts of those you love, with a good read.
Amanda Baldeneaux recommends: Bunny by Mona Awad
Elevator Pitch: A promising MFA student, Samantha, falls in with a group of Stepford Wife-esque women from her cohort who make “twee” seem edgy and all call each other, inexplicably, “Bunny.” Once welcomed into the Bunny clan, Samantha learns stories aren’t the only things the Bunnies “workshop,” with draft-results that would make Mary Shelly shudder.
Great Gift for: Someone who follows those “Guy in my MFA class” twitter accounts (even if they aren’t in an MFA) or who loves to finish a book and ask “What the eff did I just read?” (but in the best way).
Good paired with: Braised hare with a big glass of blood-red wine.
Price: $26 at Tattered Cover
Thickness rating: Approximately one spiraling rabbit hole.
Corey Dahl likes: Happiness, as Such by Natalia Ginzburg
Elevator Pitch: Natalia Ginzburg’s Happiness, as Such is mostly epistolary and completely absorbing. An Italian family’s only son, Michele, flees Italy for England, leaving behind his lonesome mother, his dying father, his worried sister, and a woman who claims she just had his baby. (No wonder London called.) They take turns writing him--to nag, to question, to complain, to update--revealing their private griefs in the process. Ginzburg’s examination of our struggle to connect with others feels so timely that only the absence of cell phones alerts you to the fact that this was actually written in 1973.
Great gift for: Anyone with an “It’s Complicated” relationship status
Good paired with: An Italian train ticket and bitterness
Price: $15.95 at Tattered Cover
Thickness rating: A stack of returned, unopened letters
Lisa Mahoney suggests: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Elevator Pitch: In an era when so little is funny, everyone you know needs Adams’ witty humorous science fiction travel farce that somehow still tackles the trickiest question in the universe: What is the meaning of life? Arthur Dent is the only human to be rescued when the Earth is destroyed by bureaucratic alien Vogons for a galactic bypass. Equipped with a towel and the eponymous guide, Dent confronts glitterati partiers aboard a stolen ship equipped with improbability drive, a dual-headed President of the Galaxy, and Marvin, the paranoid and mopey android.
Great Gift for: teenagers
Good paired with: a towel
Price: As little as 1 cent at your favorite used book store, free at the library; available as a book, BBC Radio broadcasts, and movie.
Thickness rating: slender as a skewer should be
Theodore McCombs recommends: The Lonesome Bodybuilder, by Yukiko Motoya
Elevator Pitch: In eleven bizarre, funny, and elegant short stories, Motoya uses absurdism to plumb the surreal isolation that her women experience in their one-sided relationships with self-absorbed men, in their unforgiving, capitalism-in-overdrive work lives, and in warped societies that are often literally out to get them. A supernaturally picky shop customer, a cute but sinister pack of dogs, and a husband made of straw appear alongside the brilliant novelette, “An Exotic Marriage,” which won Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize.
Great Gift for: Anyone who, even as adult, finds the most ordinary human interactions unaccountably baffling and misconceived.
Good paired with: A warm cat on your lap.
Price: $17 per indibound.com
Thickness rating: Bantamweight
Danyelle C. Overbow likes: Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente
Elevator Pitch: Catherynne M. Valente’s Space Opera is a blast of supercool awesomeness in the vein of Douglas Adams. My full review of Space Opera is here if you need more gushing. If you really love this person, buy them a Valente combination of books. May I suggest The Refrigerator Monologues and Six-Gun Snow White as well? The trio of stand-alone stories is a perfect dose of holiday cheer!
Great Gift for: Douglas Adams lovers, fierce females, musicians, karaoke lovers, anyone who likes glitter maybe a little too much
Good paired with: Wild nights and bingeing past Eurovision Song Contests
Price: $14.99
Thickness rating: Easy-peasy
C.S. Peterson suggests The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Elevator Pitch: Ta-Nehisi Coates first novel is historical fiction grounded in a wealth of sources: the voices and accounts of people who were enslaved in the United States going back to 1619. The protagonist, Hiram, echoes those voices. Hiram also has the peculiar gift of “conduction.” Memories have the power to take us back to moments of emotional force - but for Hiram the memories can move him in space as well as time.
Great Gift for: Fans of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, and other books that interrogate the past with implications for the present.
Good paired with: A box of old fashioned gingerbread cookies. They’ll take you back in time. An album of family photos would be good to have on hand. Wrap up a box or two of tissues as well. The reader will need them.
Price: Hardcover is $28.00 at indibound.com, or listen to the audible version for $22.50, beautifully read by the talented Joe Morton
Thickness rating: About 400 pages, easy to rush through, but better to read it slowly and ponder. Take time between chapters to hug your dear ones.
Gemma Webster likes: The Good House by Tananarive Due and Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay
Elevator Pitch: I’m recommending a double. Two books about families in nightmare scenarios, maybe it will make you feel grateful for your own or help you develop some coping skills. The first is Tananarive Due’s The Good House. This book was beautiful, magical and terrifying. You get intergenerational family storytelling and a fantastic haunted house. TW for suicide in chapter one. The second family in peril story is Paul Tremblay’s Cabin at the End of the World. Has the apocalypse struck? If so Wen and her parents, Eric and Andrew, haven’t heard about it. Not until their house is beset by a group of armed weirdos who claim they are there to save all of mankind but none of them are going to like what must be done. This book is truly heartbreaking and will make you check that all your doors and windows are locked.
Great Gift for: The horror lover who is feeling family stress this holiday season.
Good paired with: Healing crystals and an ADT home security subscription.
Price: The Good House is $28.99. The Cabin at the End of the World is $15.99
Thickness rating: The Good House is a little longer than the average novel and The Cabin at the End of the World is average novel length.
An one more if you’re still looking: Strange Planet by Nathan W Pyle
Elevator Pitch: This book features alien families facing struggles and joys strangely similar to our families’ but who explain their dilemmas in more scientific jargon. Pyle began publishing these vignettes on Instagram in February 2019 and has about three quarters of a million followers already.
Great Gift for: your tweenaged niece whom you love but no longer know what to get
Good paired with: a vibrating animal on your lap
Price: $14.99
Thickness rating: skinny
Wishing you a cozy winter, inside and out.
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