If you find the world overwhelming, if sometimes you feel compelled to make the wrong decision on purpose, if you can't stop yourself from spending hours doomscrolling — have we got some recommendations for you. Please enjoy the first-ever Powell's superlatives; the characters in these books truly deserve an award for doing the most.
On this list, you'll find women swapping out personas like outfits, getting into cars with strangers, pursuing disastrous affairs, starting questionable friendships with their lovers' partners (both former and current), performing poorly at work, lying to their loved ones, drunk texting, stalking social media, and getting into any number of inadvisable messes.
This list is filled with fiction for the disenchanted and the disaffected; sometimes it's nice to know we're not alone.
most likely to post about her snail mucus skin care routine
No One Is Talking About This
by Patricia Lockwood
It was a mistake to believe that other people were not living as deeply as you were. Besides, you were not even living that deeply.
Despite the title, or perhaps because of it, I cannot stop telling people about this book. No One Is Talking About This is so deeply affecting and speaks so immersively to “now” — being both a love letter to and an indictment of our digital lives — that I can't decide if I want all fiction to be like this from now on or nothing to be like it ever again. I spent the first half laughing aloud. At times, I felt like I was reading a modern Debord — The Society of the Spectacle with a Twitter account. Be forewarned however, the transition from delightfully weird experiments with form into a second half that quietly and intimately details family tragedy may leave you openly weeping. I am deeply grateful that such writing exists. — Sarah R.
most likely to one-up your scandal with one of her own
Vladimir
by Julia May Jonas
For our lives were, as writers, essentially little by nature. Writers have to lead little lives, otherwise you can't find time for writing.
There's nothing soft about Vladimir (or Vladimir). The unnamed narrator is a 58-year-old English professor whose husband was recently shamed for a series of affairs he'd had with students in the past. The narrator had known about the affairs, though, and is more upset at the women for coming forward and relitigating what had been consensual encounters. She focuses her energy on feeding her obsession with a fellow, younger professor, Vladimir. As her infatuation toward him grows, so does her recklessness, her sense of self, and her new writing project. Morality is deeply gray in this sexy, strange book. Make yourself a martini, throw your phone across the room, and settle in. You won't want to be interrupted while reading this one. — Kelsey F.
most likely to tweet “hot girls have ibs”
Luster
by Raven Leilani
“I’m an open book,” I say, thinking of all the men who have found it illegible.
A dark, literary, funny, impossible-to-put-down book, Luster is centered on 23-year-old Edie. The novel covers a period of her life intersecting with a much older lover, his wife, and their adopted teenage daughter. In phenomenal prose (Edie's descriptions and observations about the world are impeccable), Raven Leilani has captured complex, intimate ways that people help and hurt each other, the drudgery of modern workplaces and the gig economy, twisting paths of finding creative passions, the pains of IBS, and so much more. — Michelle C.
most likely to ghost her own grief
New Animal
by Ella Baxter
I'll burn this body to the ground, and then bury myself deeper than her.
After Amelia, a mortuary artist, loses her mother in a freak accident, the weight of that loss seems to infiltrate her bones. To escape her family's grief Olympics, she flees to her father's home in Tasmania and finds relief from her fresh “mother-shaped wound” in a BDSM community there. Ella Baxter just gets how grief burrows into a body and weighs it down. I wish I could quote the entirety of New Animal. It's so sharp and affecting, riveting and sexy and filled with hurt. Be sure to remember to breathe while reading this one; I kept forgetting. — Kelsey F.
most likely to accidentally spend years researching a poet she doesn't care about
Disorientation
by Elaine Hsieh Chou
None of this is new; most of it is predictable; is it still interesting? When something true is repeated too often, it risks sounding untrue.
Disorientation is a thrilling exploration of self and Asian-American identity; a pitch-perfect satire of academia, institutions, and power; a literary mystery propelled by slightly bumbling sleuths; and (somehow) uproariously unhinged while being painfully familiar. No one is quite who they seem, as Chou expertly reveals the hidden depths and deceptions of every character in this knockout of a novel. — Michelle C.
most likely to post to r/relationships about a toxic situation they've created
A Novel Obsession
by Caitlin Barasch
I control the trajectory until I can write the perfect ending we all deserve.
We all know at least one person like the narrator in this novel, a 20-something woman who spends more time describing herself as a writer than actually writing, a problem she decides is solved when she fixates on her new boyfriend's ex-girlfriend: she'll write her book about an ex-girlfriend who becomes obsessed with her ex's new girlfriend. A Novel Obsession is one of those meta-projects you read with horror and fascination. I kept thinking “oh honey, no,” whenever the narrator came up with another idea. It's a disaster, but at least it's a fun (relatable) disaster. — Kelsey F.
most likely to walk the plank for a paycheck
Temporary
by Hilary Leichter
She noted the fallacy of permanence in a world where everything ends and desired that kind of permanence all the same.
Hilary Leichter turns the current state of our dystopic gig economy on its head in Temporary, a strange delight that follows a young woman as she takes increasingly bizarre temp spots as a chairman, as a pirate, as a rock in the middle of the ocean, as a ghost, as a mannequin, as an assassin’s assistant (the list goes on). Everything about the way she lives her life is temporary, down to the roster of boyfriends she refuses to commit to (or name). Leichter is such a sharp, witty writer; I never knew where the book was headed, but was locked in from the first page, when the narrator described her temp agency as “an uptown pleasure dome of powder-scented women in sensible shoes.” So good. — Kelsey F.
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