A few decades ago, American literature came in limited flavours. There was African-American, Southern, Jewish, and sometimes Italian. Irish was rare. The House on Mango Street helped cement Chicano-American; The Woman Warrior did the same for the Chinese. This didn’t mean literature wasn’t multicultural; it was just that many authors, from Charles Bukowski to Jhumpa Lahiri, were considered plain USA.
These days, the number of “other American” authors is expanding. Below, find 20 titles, a mix of new, old and unjustly forgotten. Left off are writers who need no introduction (such as Lahiri and Viet Thanh Nguyen) to make room for those who are less familiar. There’s mystery, memoir and satire, something to spook you and something to make you sob.
BUtterfield 8
By John O’Hara
Set in Manhattan at the start of the Depression, BUtterfield 8 is as gorgeous and desperate as its main character, party girl Gloria Wandrous. Author John O’Hara was sensitive about his Irish roots. BUtterfield’s Irish-Catholic and the Jewish characters, while never snubbed, are subtly excluded. Says journalist Jimmy Malloy, “I probably could play five-goal polo in two years, but I am a Mick.” Still, when the city comes crashing, it’s the Irish and the Jewish that survive.
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings
By Maya Angelou
Angelou’s flawless memoir alternates racism and violence with moments of bellyaching laughter with a child’s perspective so pure you almost forget how beautifully written it is. It also contains, unsettlingly, some of the most stunning passages about food – a single slice of Dole pineapple for Christmas, the smell of jelly beans and salted peanuts, and a man’s penis looking like raw chicken before he rapes.
A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories
By Flannery O’Connor
Irish-American Flannery O’Connor is one of the finest short story writers, taut gems infused with sluggish Southern heat, carefully calibrated dread and swiftly savage character summations. In A Good Man is Hard to Find, O’Connor’s best-known story, a family takes a road trip with an outcome that will make you shiver. Known for her Catholic motifs, O’Connor’s religion is not a forgiving one; the slightest flaw can result in consequences that no prayer can amend.
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The Young Lions
By Irwin Shaw
Born of Ukrainian-Jewish parents, Shaw, who changed his last name from Shamforoff, began writing screenplays in 1935, when immigrant directors such as Italian Frank Capra and Polish-Jewish Billy Wilder were beginning to shape a vision of Americana that persists today. His novel Young Lions tracks three second World War soldiers – Wasp, Jewish, and German – its richness of dialogue and detail demonstrating the mutual influence between movies and fiction. It’s the warmest of war epics, one for a winter’s evening with a box of tissues in case you cry.
Lolita
By Vladimir Nabokov
Humbert Humbert is a self-styled aesthete who teaches French at a minor prep school. The object of his passion is a 12-year old named Delores. Russian-born Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial Lolita is a fever dream about paedophilia, which Humbert Humbert defends thus: “You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine.” Lolita is also a road-trip novel, a gleeful send-up of 1950s American pop culture, an exercise in literary world building, a masterpiece of unreliable narration and very funny besides.
Woman Warrior
By Maxine Hong Kingston
Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior is memoir mixed with the Chinese fairytales Kingston’s mother told her as child in Berkeley California. Published in 1975, it established Asian American literature as a serious category, but also stereotypes of patriarchy and victimhood, like with the aunt who drowns herself and her baby after an adulterous affair. “Even now,” writes Kingston, “China wraps double binds around my feet.”
The House on Mango Street
By Sandra Cisneros
Mango Street is the Chicago childhood home of Mexican-American Cisneros, a too-small apartment where “street bums” try to get a kiss from little girls for a dollar. The brief, achingly lovely book originally intended for younger readers is a collection of vignettes, told in a child’s voice distilled into poetic cadence. As it progresses, Cisneros’s voice becomes more self-aware as her world darkens and gains menace.
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Joe College
By Tom Perrotta
Perrotta is one of the great chroniclers of American suburbia, a master of the microcosm. In Joe College, Danny, an Italian-American Yale student from New Jersey, pays his tuition by driving his dad Dante’s lunch truck, “The Roach Coach”, over break, while being besieged by girl problems and Staten Island mobsters. It’s an addictive glimpse of a less-than-glamorous sector of the food industry, plus makes a captivating companion read to the current American vice-president’s (admittedly compelling) memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, about another working-class kid at Yale.
Middlesex
By Jeffrey Eugenides
Eugenides’s sprawling, glorious novel about a hermaphrodite who, like the blind prophet Tiresias, turns from Calliope into Cal. Incest, war and silkworms feature in this tale – part immigrant narrative, part Greek mythology – that unfolds against backdrops as ordinary as a diner in Detroit. Inanimate objects breathe with life; a fire “climbs in the window and pauses, as if shocked by its good fortune”. The thread of the story is Cal’s grandmother Desdemona, who marries her brother and carries her silkworms to her new country in an olive-wood box.
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union
By Michael Chabon
Michael Chabon’s novel is Yiddish noir: cops are “latkes,” gangsters are Hasidic. Israel fell in 1948 and many Jews have relocated to a city in Alaska. Detective Meyer Landsman is an alcoholic atheist; he and his half-indigenous, half-Jewish sidekick Burko are investigating the death of chess fanatic from an apparent overdose. Like much classic noir, whodunit matters less than the hard-boiled atmosphere and whether the guy gets the girl, who, in this case, is Landsman’s ex-wife and Chief of Police.
The Last Life
By Claire Messud
Claire Messud’s chronicle of three generations of a displaced French-Algerian family is the stuff of sorrow. Aptly named narrator Sagesse (French for wisdom), whose grandparents and parents relocated to the south of France, reflects on thwarted passions and dashed hopes with the wisdom of the present in the United States where she now resides. The Last Life, though sad, is spun in a prose so incandescent that it begs rereading to experience the lament anew.
Erasure
By Percival Everett
Everett’s Erasure is a Frankenstein novel about language and rage. Furious at the public’s appetite for so-called realist, black fiction, black author Ellison Monk decides to create the worst black novel ever written. On its surface, it’s a skewering of literary pretension and racial stereotypes. But Erasure switches tone entirely when it vacillates to Ellison’s family life, the wounds of which are devastating. However, it’s Erasure’s book within a book, My Pafology, that is its most masterful feat. At once the epitome of awful, it compels you to read all of its 70 pages.
There, There
By Tommy Orange
For Tommy Orange, who is Cheyenne and Arapaho, setting the Native-American novel There, There in his city of Oakland, California, makes perfect sense. He writes, “We know the sound of the freeway better than we do rivers, the howl of distant trains better than wolf howls.” In the manner of classic tragedy, we become more attached to the book’s 12 characters as they hurtle closer towards one climactic day at the Big Oakland Powwow, their fates more reassured.
Intimacies
By Katie Kitamura
The narrator of Japanese-American Kitamura’s novel is a translator for a war criminal on trial. Meanwhile, her lover has disappeared and her father is dead. The narrator’s glacial passivity, as she navigates these menacing waters, is unsettling. However, she remains the perfect interpreter, a conduit for the heinous men who surround her. Reminiscent of Jean Rhys and Kazuo Ishiguro, Intimacies will haunt you.
Behold the Dreamers
By Imbolo Mbue
Jende Jonga, who is from Cameroon, is a chauffeur for a Lehman Brothers’ executive, while his wife Neni studies to be a pharmacist. What begins as archetypal fable of idealistic immigrants and the whites that hire them unfolds into a tender story with characters that make you care. This means that when things take a downturn you plummet right alongside. At its heart, Dreamers is an old-fashioned novel of class and manners, exuberant like Dickens. It’s a loud book, each page a cacophony of clanging kitchen pots, non-stop chatter, and Harlem traffic.
American Fever
By Dur e Aziz Amna
Hira is a Pakistani girl spending her high school exchange year in Oregon. She is prickly and precocious, and her conventional father is a more loving parent than her distant, intellectual mother. Alternately lyrical and delightfully brash, American Fever breaks stereotypes that certain “other-American” authors have helped perpetuate. Also in exploring the dynamics of Hira’s relationship with her blonde, churchgoing host mother, it lends subtlety to the often-risible persona of the well-meaning American.
What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez?
By Claire Jiménez
When 13-year-old Ruthy Ramirez disappears, she leaves her parents and two sisters. Then Nina and her sister Jessica spot their Ruthy on a reality TV show and the book catapults us into working-class Puerto Rican Staten Island. It’s a snap to read; the terse sentences crackle and the world they paint is as vivid as August sunshine.
All This Could Be Different
By Sarah Thankham Mathews
S is an Indian-American college graduate (“Hennessy skin”) who moves to Milwaukee, where her determination to be a slut derails when she meets a dancer called Marina. Bouts of depression and bad housekeeping alternate with giddy moments with friends. All This is a rarity, an effervescent romantic comedy, equipped with heart but not so much that it sags.
The Chosen and the Beautiful
By Nghi Vo
In this hypnotic retelling of Irish-American F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby, Jordan Baker, the golfing girlfriend of Nick Carraway, is now bisexual and Vietnamese. Moreover, the magic that once infused Gatsby is now actual sorcery, its illusions crafted from literal paper. Sometimes we add meanings to the books to make them more relevant to ourselves. While they may not have been the author’s intention, it is one way in which great literature evolves.
A Map of Home
By Randa Jarrar
Frank, sexy and sidesplitting, Randa Jarrar’s Map of Home finds screwball in chaos, like her Palestinian-Egyptian heroine Nidali trying to find a place to make out with her boyfriend in Kuwait when Saddam Hussein invades it in 1990. From Boston and Kuwait to Palestine, Egypt and finally Texas, Map is also about Nidali’s journey towards being a writer, fulfilling her wish, as she puts it, “to translate myself”.
