1. we have always lived in the castle - shirley jackson

Merricat is a young girl who lives in a manor on the outskirts of their village with her agoraphobic sister and their crippled uncle. She is an unreliable narrator, fiercely devoted to her sister and hostile towards outsiders. This was supposed to be a psychological horror, but I felt genuinely soothed by merricat’s pov which probably speaks to my own hermit-like tendencies LOL. It also made me want to write a main character who uses sympathetic magic. The book is relatively short so it would be a great place to start with shirley jackson.

(honourable mention for the haunting of hill house, which I read after this essay in the new yorker by shirley jackson (https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/garlic-in-fiction) where she writes about the literary devices she used to transport the reader from a foundation of reality to a destabilized mindset where the horrors of a haunted house could be believably introduced. I love peeking behind the curtains and learning about the technical process of different authors. [girl who loves information voice] I just love information.

in that vein I’ve also been reading some of the art of fiction interviews in the paris review. the yu hua one is my favourite, maybe because he’s so irreverent, but also because he’s from the same generation as my parents (who are also chinese.) I read a translated version of his short story and got to discuss it with my mom, who I almost never have any media overlap with, so that was cool.)

1. o caledonia - elspeth barker

speaking of stories about wretched young girls, this is about an unloved teenage girl name Janet. she has her shortcomings, but is also simply shackled by the curse of being a girl in 1950s scotland. it’s a tragedy (her death is literally described on the first page) but it’s also funny and poetic. this book made me realize I love gothic novels as it combines my two favourite things, morbidity and perversion.

1. the lives of girls and women - alice munro

I was fully an alice munro hater for a while but I’m so glad I stuck it out and gave her a second chance. this book is devastating in its plainness and the honesty with which munro documents what it’s like to grow up as a young girl. which even as I type out I can acknowledge how boring that sounds lmao but I promise it is a worthwhile read. her prose is so fucking precise and when that imagery hits it hits hard. her work is also making me realize it’s okay to write autobiographic fiction because she literally wrote about the same 3 things over her entire career and it was awesome and different every time.

I’m also 80% of the way through the trees by percival everett, a whodunnit horror-comedy about the history of lynching in america. I picked it up after reading james last year, which I also loved. everett’s writing is incisive and witty and unapologetic and returns so much dignity to black people in a media landscape where that has not always been the case.

thanks for asking <3