Watching a film in a theater, free of smartphones, sunlight, and other distractions, can be a hypnotic experience. When the lights go down and the smell of popcorn fills your nose; when the sound roars from the back and an imagined universe is literally projected before you; when multiple sensory inputs braid themselves together to create a potent whole, you might lose yourself in the best possible way.
But film isn’t the only medium by which a story can effortlessly enter your consciousness, shutting out reality for precious hours. A great work of literature can feel equally enthralling, be it through vivid characterization, an auteur-like control of the scene, or a particularly vibrant setting. Books that achieve this transcendent state are not necessarily those that make for enthralling film or television; nor do they tend to focus on Hollywood or the filmmaking process. Instead, they produce a parallel kind of phenomenon; they share the thrill of movies by dissolving the physical limitations of the page. Here are six books that can—like a good movie—make the rest of the world fall away.
Pulphead, by John Jeremiah Sullivan
The subjects of Sullivan’s journalism tend to be both profoundly human and slightly surreal, like the type of person you’d hear a story about at a party, or believe existed only on-screen. Yet all the people in Sullivan’s 2011 essay collection, Pulphead, which features his work across magazines and literary journals, are genuine. Some—such as Michael Jackson and Axl Rose—are already familiar to readers; in these cases, Sullivan’s deep dives uncover both the bizarre nature of public-facing celebrity and the real person beneath. The stars of his profiles, though, are lesser-known figures. An essay titled “La • Hwi • Ne • Ski: Career of an Eccentric Naturalist,” focuses on Constantine Rafinesque, a 19th-century French polymath, botanist, philologist, and writer whose time in Kentucky put him in contact with the birder John James Audubon. Rafinesque’s erratic and eccentric behavior, as part heretic and part adventurer, cements him as a figure of forgotten legend. Even more memorable is Marc Livengood, the academic at the center of Sullivan’s “Violence of the Lambs,” whose theory that climate change may force mankind into a war against animals takes truly unfathomable turns that’ll have you questioning everything you know—and what Sullivan tells you.
By John Jeremiah Sullivan
Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu
Yu’s second novel, Interior Chinatown, borrows the format of a screenplay, perhaps benefiting from Yu’s previous gig as a story editor on HBO’s Westworld. But the book is neither a full script nor a conventional novel, existing instead as an exciting hybrid-prose experiment. Its protagonist, Willis Wu, is frustrated with his status as a “Generic Asian Man” in the film industry, as Yu writes, and is stuck playing various background roles on a television police procedural. From there, Yu allows the reader to become something of the director of Willis’s life: You’re asked to envision the settings, the props, and the cadence of the dialogue. Interior Chinatown accomplishes two major feats: It tells a lively tale that feels like inside baseball for those curious about how TV and movies come to life, and it also upends how we think of the procedural as a genre. A television adaptation, on which Yu is one of the writers, is set for this fall; this recursion—a TV show inside a book inside a TV show—adds yet another meta element that the episodes may play with.
Sabrina, by Nick Drnaso
Almost no one is writing like Drnaso, whose second book, Sabrina, became the first graphic novel to be nominated for the Booker Prize, in 2018. The story, which explores the exploitative nature of both true crime and the 24-hour news cycle, focuses on a woman named Sabrina who goes missing, leaving her loved ones to hope, pray, and worry. When a video of her murder goes viral on social media, those close to her get sucked into supporting roles in strangers’ conspiracy theories. Drnaso’s style across all of his works—but especially in Sabrina—is stark and minimal: His illustrations are deceptively simple, yet entrancing. He doesn’t overload the book with dialogue. He knows and trusts his readers to put the pieces together; part of the audience’s job is to conjure how his characters feel as they approach the mystery of Sabrina’s disappearance and death. Drnaso wants to show the reader how, in a society full of misinformation and wild suppositions, the most trustworthy resource might just be your own two eyes.
Jazz, by Toni Morrison
The dreamlike, ephemeral language of Jazz mirrors the styles of its title, and and feature some of Morrison’s most lyrical sentences. It tells the story of a violent love triangle in Harlem in the 1920s, but Jazz resembles, to some degree, the work of Terrence Malick, a filmmaker who investigates the musical and heavenly quality of being alive on Earth. Like his movies, it feels less like a propulsive plot than an immersive textural experience: think of walking through a field, or along a city street rich and humming with people. The novel follows Joe and Violet Trace, whose marriage is upended when Joe murders a much younger woman named Dorcas with whom he was having an affair. Then, at Dorcas’s funeral, Violet attacks the young woman’s dead body. What could descend into relationship melodrama instead explodes into a riveting and melancholy exploration of race and history.
No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood
Consider the author as a director in the tradition of the auteur: Someone who molds the outlook and vision of their story with almost godlike control. In Lockwood’s novel, No One Is Talking About This, she first introduces the reader to what she calls “the portal,” a metaphor for the smartphone that takes her narrator to an ever-glowing internet realm. There, the narrator achieves a modicum of fame for a nonsensical post: “Can a dog be twins?” Lockwood manages to spin up a genuine universe loosely based on a niche subculture known as “weird Twitter,” where the jokes are all abstract phrases and images six steps removed from their original context. The narrator thrives in this environment––until an unexpected family tragedy wrests her away from her fake life and thrusts her into her real one. This sharp turn grants the novel a depth and scope beyond that of a more straightforward book about illness and grief. In mashing these two realities together, Lockwood shows the reader how robust, strange, and beautiful both her narrator’s online and offline worlds can be—worlds that only this particular writer could conjure.
By Patricia Lockwood
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard
“Of all known forms of life, only about ten percent are still living today,” Dillard writes in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. “All other forms—fantastic plants, ordinary plants, living animals with unimaginably various wings, tails, teeth, brains—are utterly and forever gone.” In the early 1970s, Dillard took to the forests of Virginia near the Blue Ridge Mountains for daily walks and excursions. Her wildlife diaries, set across the seasons, make up the memoir, which won a 1975 Pulitzer Prize. Dillard’s prose is colorful and unafraid of the gooey realities of flora and fauna. She tracks the seasons and their incremental shifts in gorgeous detail, and the words feel as though they’re coming to life. There’s a gory, almost horror-like nature to her descriptions of gnats that reproduce asexually, predator cats that eat their young, or a moth that shrinks in the stages of “molting frenzy,” conjuring an alien planet out of a landscape that might be an hour’s drive away. Like some inventive documentaries, Dillard’s nonfiction dispenses with the hallmarks of its genre in order to focus on conveying truth, and her writing gives sticky reality a grandeur all its own.
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