Carmen Maria Machado's Reading List

"Forget the schlocky, sentimental ending of the Netflix series; The Haunting of Hill House is chilling, gorgeous, devastatingly real, and has an utterly fearless relationship with its genre. The perfect novel is one of the rarest beasts around, but here — sentence by sentence, brick by brick — Shirley Jackson built it. (Arguably, she did it twice — We Have Always Lived in the Castle is its own massive achievement — but Hill House is still my favorite.)"

"The only work of nonfiction on this list, and a book that, in a just world, would be assigned in every writing, literature, and art class, and handed to every single high school and college graduate. Here, Joanna Russ clearly and articulately lays out the ways in which culture devalues women’s art and cites generations of women writers along the way. It’s one of the most elegant books of feminist criticism I’ve ever read, and I return to it often. (You can read a longer essay I wrote about th..."

"A teacher handed me a copy of Mama Day when I was a teenager, and — to put it mildly — I was not ready. Some of it tapped into narrative pleasures I already loved: multi-generational stories, dark forces, mysterious illnesses. Some of it created new obsessions: magic, fictional islands, tragic endings. Some of it went right over my head. (Shockingly, at fifteen I didn’t quite have a grasp on the perils and pitfalls of trying to be a modern woman.) But there’s no doubt that Naylor’s witchy and..."

"When I was a baby writer, a friend recommended I check out Kelly Link’s stories, and it changed my life. I don’t mean that hyperbolically: if you are a reader who loves my work, you have Kelly Link’s mind-bending, genre-smashing, so-good-you-want-to-die fiction to thank. An entire generation of female fabulists have been profoundly influenced by her, and she was also my gateway drug into some of my other favorite authors: Angela Carter ( The Bloody Chamber ), Kathryn Davis ( Duplex ), Shirley..."

"2017 might seem like a pretty recent year for a book to have influenced me, but Sofia Samatar has been publishing these stories in magazines for ages, and they haven’t lost an ounce of their magic or eeriness. Samatar is best known for her secondary-world fantasy duology A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, but this collection of short stories occupies a different, more liminal space. Samatar’s keen and nimble mind, gorgeous sentences, and incredible imagination are on full displa..."