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Bonnie Jo Campbell is a former National Book Award finalist and author of the novels "Once Upon a River" and "The Waters." "The Waters," about a girl who grows up off the grid in rural Michigan, has just become available in paperback.
'The Ballad of the Sad Café' by Carson McCullers (1951)
In this modern fairy tale, McCullers creates the perfect love triangle: Miss Amelia the bootlegger, her ex-convict ex-husband, and the trickster Cousin Lymon. McCullers explores how love can liberate a community and how easily that freedom and joy can slip away. Buy it here.
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'Geek Love' by Katherine Dunn (1989)
This is the ultimate dysfunctional family story, about a circus troupe whose members abhor normalcy to such a degree that the parents intentionally breed a family of sideshow freaks. It's a literary version of the superhero universe, in which people's abnormalities make them magnificent. And sometimes terrible. Buy it here.
'Housekeeping' by Marilynne Robinson (1980)
After a mother commits suicide, the care of her daughters eventually falls to Aunt Sylvie, a mysterious vagabond, who tries to give them a conventional upbringing. She fails at this, but succeeds in inspiring the haunted young narrator to live a larger life. It's all set against a brutal, beautiful, watery landscape. Buy it here.
'The Summer Book' by Tove Jansson (1972)
Jansson's best-known novel follows Sophia and her grandmother as they spend the summer on an isolated island in the Gulf of Finland after the death of Sophia's mother. They are immersed in the natural world and in one another's company, but despite their intimacy, the elderly woman and girl remain a mystery to one another. Sweet without a whiff of sentimentality. Buy it here.
'A Room of One's Own' by Virginia Woolf (1929)
These essays are funny, infuriating, resonant, giving us insight into the limitations under which Woolf labored while creating her lyrical novels. We lament how even today the culture can still be suspicious or dismissive of women's creativity, of the heroine's journey as different, separate, from the hero's. Buy it here.
'Memories, Dreams, Reflections' by Carl Jung (1961)
This memoir-like book explores elements of the author's life, many of them small moments or dreams that blossomed with meaning in his old age. Jung shows how the richness of our inner lives is inexhaustible. Buy it here.
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