Weird Girl Lit is now a marketing category and reallllly popular one. Which is…weird. But I don’t feel bad about it (mostly because there are Actual Things in the world to feel about it and people finding more books they love isn’t one of them even if it’s intrinsically linked to capitalism).

In case you don’t know what Weird Girl Lit is, loosely I’d say it involves a female (or female-adjacent) narrator (or main character) whose relationship to the world has gone a little awry. Perhaps she’s alienated from her own body, domestic life, her language, or some combination of all that.

The prose tends toward the uncanny rather than the realist, though this isn’t a rule in any way. There’s often an interest in the grotesque, the abject, the hungry, the dissociative. Familiar things will often stop feeling familiar and vice versa. At its best it’s a contemporary inheritor of the Gothic, surrealism, and a specific strain of twentieth-century modernist interiority. At its worst it’s a girl being sad in an apartment, though one can argue that’s more, well, Sad Girl Lit which I wrote about here:

Reader Poll

In any case, if you go online elsewhere you’ll easily find lots of Weird Girl Lit reading lists, so why do I need to put one together? Well, I think a lot of the stuff out there is repetitive and overwhelming of a certain kind/type/culture. It’s also super American and often gender-exclusive. There’s so much fantastic literature out there once we let go of certain bounds, primarily for many of us these are genre and country (when it comes to books and the authors we’ll read).

So this reading guide hopes to be a bit different. Besides novels, I’m also sharing poetry and short story collections that, to me, fall under Weird Girl Lit, as well as hybrid words. Aaand you’ll find some books below that aren’t strictly by female-identifying authors because why should something like Weird Girl Lit be inhibited and encumbered by societal constrictions or even, by the supposed limits found in its own name?

Alright, here we go! And of course, please feel free to add your own in the comments and let me know what you’ve already read, loved, (or even, gulp, disliked!

Novels

☆ Pre-1950

• The Book of Margery Kempe — Margery Kempe

• Nightwood — Djuna Barnes

• Good Morning, Midnight — Jean Rhys

• Tropisms — Nathalie Sarraute

• Two Serious Ladies — Jane Bowles

• Rebecca — Daphne du Maurier

☆ 1950–1980

• The Naked Woman — Armonía Somers

• The Vet’s Daughter — Barbara Comyns

• Cassandra at the Wedding — Dorothy Baker

• The Woman in the Dunes — Kobo Abe

• The Passion According to G.H. — Clarice Lispector

• Ice — Anna Kavan

• Dark Spring — Unica Zürn

• The Wall — Marlen Haushofer

• Malina — Ingeborg Bachmann

• Sula — Toni Morrison

• The Lesbian Body — Monique Wittig

• The Hearing Trumpet — Leonora Carrington

• Eva’s Man — Gayl Jones

☆ 1980–2000

• Cassandra — Christa Wolf

• The Piano Teacher — Elfriede Jelinek

• Sphinx — Anne Garréta

• The Notebook — Agota Kristof

• Poor Things — Alasdair Gray

• Sexing the Cherry — Jeanette Winterson

• A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There — Krishna Sobti

• Hotel Iris — Yoko Ogawa

• O Caledonia — Elspeth Barker

• I Love Dick — Chris Kraus

• The Virgin Suicides — Jeffrey Eugenides

• The Autobiography of My Mother — Jamaica Kincaid

• Amulet — Roberto Bolaño

  ---

☆ 2000–2021-ish

• Fledgling — Octavia Butler

• My Heart Hemmed In — Marie NDiaye

• The Vegetarian — Han Kang

• The Seas — Samantha Hunt

• Frontier — Can Xue

• The Hunger Angel — Herta Müller

• White is for Witching — Helen Oyeyemi

• Our Lady of the Nile — Scholastique Mukasonga

• The Taiga Syndrome — Cristina Rivera Garza

• Pyre — Perumal Murugan

• Untold Night and Day — Bae Suah

• Annihilation — Jeff Vandermeer

• Fever Dream — Samanta Schweblin

• Memoirs of a Polar Bear — Yoko Tawada

• Little Star — John Ajvide Lindqvist

• Hurricane Season — Fernanda Melchor

• Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl — Andrea Lawlor

• Freshwater — Akwaeke Emezi

• Pink Slime — Fernanda Trías

• Tomb of Sand — Geetanjali Shree

• The Employees — Olga Ravn

• Sorrowland — Rivers Solomon

• Sterling Karat Gold — Isabel Waidner

• Ultramarine — Mariette Navarro

• Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch — Rivka Galchen

• Slewfoot — Brom

  ---

☆ Current

• Lapvona — Odessa Moshfegh

• Bunny — Mona Awad

• When Women Were Dragons — Kelly Barnhill

• Monstrilio — Gerardo Sámano Córdova

• Big Swiss — Jean Beagin

• Hunchback — Saou Ichikawa

• Discontent — Beatriz Serrano

• Mary — Nat Cassidy

• State of Paradise — Laura van den Berg

• Audition — Katie Kitamura

• Thirst — Marina Yuszczuk

• Rejection — Tony Tulathimutte

• Goddess Complex — Sanjena Sathian

• Perfection — Vincenzo Latronico

• Midnight Timetable — Bora Chung

• The Hounding — Xenobe Purvis

• Tetra Nova — Sophia Terazawa

• She Made Herself a Monster — Anna Kovatcheva

• The Lamb — Lucy Rose

• A Good Person — Kirsten King

• Hexes of the Deadwood Forest — Agnieszka Szpila

  ---

Short Story Collections

☆ Pre-1980s

• The Lottery and Other Stories — Shirley Jackson

• The Street of Crocodiles — Bruno Schulz

• Panics — Barbara Molinard

• The Complete Stories — Clarice Lispector

  ---

☆ 1980–2000

• A Kitchen in the Corner of the House — Ambai

• The Bloody Chamber — Angela Carter

• Thus Were Their Faces — Silvina Ocampo

  ---

☆ 2000–2020-ish

• Skin Folk — Nalo Hopkinson

• Magic for Beginners — Kelly Link

• St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves — Karen Russell

• Mouthful of Birds — Samanta Schweblin

• The Complete Stories — Leonora Carrington

• Vertical Motion — Can Xue

• The Visiting Privilege — Joy Williams

• Fen — Daisy Johnson

• Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings — Kuzhali Manickavel

• Apple and Knife — Intan Paramaditha

• The Most of It — Mary Ruefle

• What is Not Yours is Not Yours — Helen Oyeyemi

• Where the Wild Ladies Are — Aoko Matsuda

• Cursed Bunny — Bora Chung

• Daydreams of Angels — Heather O’Neill

• The Doll’s Alphabet — Camilla Grudova

• The Houseguest — Amparo Dávila

• Her Body and Other Parties — Carmen Maria Machado

• What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky — Lesley Nneka Arimah

  ---

☆ Current

• Gods of Want — K-Ming Chang

• Evil Flowers — Gunnhild Øyehaug

• A Kind of Madness — Uche Okonkwo

• Shit Cassandra Saw — Gwen E. Kirby

• Entry Level — Wendy Wimmer

• The Girl Who Cried Diamonds — Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

• White Cat, Black Dog — Kelly Link

• Ghostroots — Pemi Aguda

• Mouth — Puloma Ghosh

• Ninetails — Sally Wen Mao

Poetry Collections

☆ Pre-2000

• Collected Poems — Chika Sagawa

• Ariel — Sylvia Plath

• Extracting the Stone of Madness — Alejandra Pizarnik

• Transformations — Anne Sexton

• The Descent of Alette — Alice Notley

• Autobiography of Red — Anne Carson

☆ 2000-2020-ish

• Alphabet — Inger Christensen

• Dark Matter — Aase Berg

• Ossuaries — Dionne Brand

• Ban en Banlieue — Bhanu Kapil

• Given — Arielle Greenberg

• Flemish — Caroline Knox

• Autobiography of Death — Kim Hyesoon

• Measures of Expatriation — Vahni Capildeo

• Discipline — Dawn Lundy Martin

• Someone Else’s Wedding Vows — Bianca Stone

• Arrow — Sumita Chakraborty

• Sea and Fog — Etel Adnan

• Wound from the Mouth of a Wound — torrin a. greathouse

• God’s Green Earth — Noelle Kocot

☆ Current

• Mirror Nation — Don Mee Choi

• Perverts — Kay Gabriel

• And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight — Lynn Xu

• Villainy — Andrea Abi-Karam

• Judas Goat — Gabrielle Bates

• What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium — Kim Simonsen

• Iguana Iguana — Caylin Capra-Thomas

• Oracular Maladies — Sophia Terazawa

  ---

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I must confess, I don’t use Spotify much. I’m kind of big on self-hosting, so I have my own music (as in, artists and albums I’ve handpicked for myself) on Plex and audiobooks on Audiobook Shelf and that’s where I get my creative auditory stimulation from, so to speak. But another place I do spend a lot of time on is, well, right here—Substack!

For better or worse, a large part of my life is linked to Substack. Through work, personal projects, and the magazines I edit, I sort of live here (or so it feels sometimes). So, I thought I’d try and do a Substack Wrapped for myself, looking back at 2025 to the best of times and the worst of times.

Well, a note on the worst. I don’t like ripping on other folks’ work…ahem…publicly. If we hang out in person and pass some tea and snacks around, I promise you’ll get my entertaining oft-cynical ass to fess up and drop a bunch of hot takes, but let’s just say I believe in some type of old-school class and a sense of grace and just plain old social decorum. Plus, why spend time riffing on what you hate when you can glorify what you love! (Okay, sometimes the former’s more fun, but you get what I mean).

Still, as far as the “worst” goes, I’ll say this: it’s been increasingly difficult to find work that feels genuinely exploratory, that takes real risks, that exists outside the algorithm’s preference for easily digestible takeaways.

I know a lot of folks also hate Notes on here, but I do understand why Substack implemented them. And yet, the obviously AI-gen’d Notes that masquerade as human thought on here are just…ubiquitous and annoying. Don’t get me started on the generic “great post!” comments and the clawing-at-the-metrics-ladder nature of some of the interactions.

Then again, so much of this just comes with being on a social platform, and though many of us might have forgotten, it also just comes with coexisting…on a planet…with other individuals. Some of us are weird, some of us are stupid, some of us are annoying, some of us are all three or some combination of the three plus any number of other descriptors at some time or another. So…I guess I wish more of us could adapt (adopt??) a more balanced, “middle-way” type approach when it comes to such things. And then, you know, move on to the good.

Let’s do that, then. Move on to the good.

Total posts read ✦ 339

This one’s easy to calculate for me, and I’ll explain why. Last year, I jam-packed my saved posts folder for Substack app, utterly overwhelming myself. So, at the beginning of 2025, I decided I’d read one at least Substack post everyday. Just this morning, I finally got around to reading this lovely piece:

SubMakk

You're Writing a Book. So Stop Writing a Movie.

We’re in a golden age of TV (if not quite a golden age of full-blown cinema), so I don’t blame anyone for consuming a vast proportion of their narratives on screens. But so many issues I address with my writing students stem, I suspect, from subconsciously internalizing what works on the screen and trying to make it work on the page…

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9 months ago · 1233 likes · 24 comments · Rebecca Makkai

5 Favorite Substacks

I’m a bit of a sucker for rankings but I feel like they ultimately play to our lower desires (not meaning sexual here haha, talking in a more spiritual sense I suppose). So, while these are the five Substacks I definitely read the most this year and thereby one can reasonably say they are my “favorite” Substacks on here, please know I’m not ranking them from best to least or whatever. Each of these is phenomenal and you should spend time with these writers words!

Dear Head of Mine

An editor's weekly newsletter about books and other things

By Sean deLone

I’ve said it before and I'll say it again, how doesn’t have thousands upon thousands of readers is beyond me. Well, I guess I can surmise why — he doesn’t pander or speak down to you and he definitely doesn’t try to be flashy and trendy. His Substack is deeply valuable to any writer at any stage of their career, and yet it isn’t just teeming with useless AI-gen’d advice posts and hacks. Honestly, I wish more of Substack was like this!

How to Glow in the Dark

Book publishing advice and community for authors of fiction and nonfiction, written by the agents at Neon Literary.

By Anna Sproul-Latimer

has got such a stirring and charming voice that I’d probably read a the recipe for making gray rocks from her. Alongside that, she delivers no-bullshit posts full of useful information for authors with insights into the publishing world (something I’m actively researching myself, as some of you already know).

Counter Craft

fiction craft, publishing demystification, weird books, other things

By Lincoln Michel

For all the conceit of Substack being a home for writers, it’s actually been quite difficult for me to find writers on here whose Substacks aren’t…sigh…boring? ’s Substack is the opposite of whatever kind of boring Substack you can conjure in your head. With each post, one thing is shiningly evident: he really gives a fuck about literature. And I like that. I like when people don’t just come on here to bitch and snitch…when they genuinely, deeply fucking care.

Footnotes and Tangents

Slow reads of great books. Book guides and a reading community to help you get more from the best stories.

By Simon Haisell

I’ve never met in person, but I feel like I know him for some reason. And I sense he might be one of the nicest British dudes around. Plus, it makes me super psyched to see him as one of the top 10 Literature Bestsellers here on Substack because what he’s offering is something very close to my own heart: a way to read beautiful literature slowly and thoughtfully.

ONLY POEMS DAILY

Wake up to a poem every day & slip into a slower, sweeter life.

I can’t help it if the newsletter of the lit mag I created is also one of the best ones on this platform, okay? Every single day, we send out a beautiful poem into the world…and I feel like that’s one of the noblest ways to start a day…open your eyes, take a breath, read a poem and enter the world.

11 New Substacks I’ve Discovered

Perhaps like any other art-obsessed writing and reading fiend on here, I do a silly dance in my head whenever I find a particularly striking, new (to-me) writer on here. So, below (and again in no particular order), are some of the posts I came across on here that led me to discover more wonderful Substacks:

Tumse Na Ho Paayega

How to live an intellectually rich life

Go to the main page of Wikipedia…

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a year ago · 8676 likes · 279 comments · Utsav Mamoria

Lurker

A Folk Horror Crash Course

What could Yellowjackets, Florence + The Machine’s upcoming album Everybody Scream, and the Christmas special of Detectorists possibly have in common? Beyond release dates within the last five years, each seems to indicate something of folk horror’s trickle down into more mainstream media. No longer, it seems, is the genre confined to art house producti…

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10 months ago · 629 likes · 38 comments · Lizzie Bickerstaff

Derek Thompson

Everything Is Television

A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television. Three examples…

Read more

10 months ago · 2254 likes · 36 comments · Derek Thompson

Story Notes!

How Hayao Miyazaki builds a story

Hayao Miyazaki tells stories like no other director. Each element of the story is a direct representation of Miyazaki’s thoughts put to paper, unbridled by words or structure. In this way, his films offer a rare window into his inner world, and the entirety of production takes on the spirit of its director…

Read more

2 years ago · 2548 likes · 26 comments · Wren Petkov

Delivery & Acceptance

Merchants of Culture: A Conversation With S&S Editor Yahdon Israel

I wanted to chat with Simon and Schuster editor Yahdon Israel after reading his refreshingly frank interview with Merve Emre for her excellent (and I’m not just saying that because she’s a client) series “The Art of Editing.” I particularly loved how Yahdon reframes how we should think about …

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10 months ago · 218 likes · 39 comments · Alia Hanna Habib

Final Ghoul

Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein and the Death of Ambiguity

When speaking to Waterstone’s about his latest feature film, Frankenstein, Guillermo del Toro stated: “there’s a teenage Protestant girl inside this Mexican, Catholic boy”. He meant it, I think, as a gesture of reverence. An admission that beneath his baroque monsters and gothic tenderness lies a streak of moral earnestness. For years, del Toro has clea…

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9 months ago · 993 likes · 93 comments · Neave Glennon

Craft by Vera Kurian

What if things are happening but your story is still boring?

CRAFT is a reader-supported email newsletter about the nuts and bolts of fiction writing and the world of publishing…

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9 months ago · 28 likes · 7 comments · Vera Kurian

Past the Dragon

The Most Disappointing Fantasy Novel to Ever Break the Genre

What do readers want from a good Fantasy book…

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2 years ago · 440 likes · 86 comments · Clifford Stumme

Beyond the Bookshelf

To preserve depth and freshness in our lives, we need privacy

Navigating the passages between books and being…

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9 months ago · 35 likes · 9 comments · Matthew Long 📚⚓ and Esha Rana

Adam Walker

The Fall of the English Department

The mid-twentieth century was the golden age of the university English department in the U.S. Up until the 1990s, the average English major would have studied nearly every major work from the medieval period to modernism, from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. Today, most English majors can graduate without a sense of literary history. Many programs don’t requ…

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9 months ago · 343 likes · 44 comments · Adam Walker

weird medieval guys

The coolest medieval woman you've never heard of

Christine de Pizan (and her dog)weird medieval guys is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber…

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3 years ago · 4866 likes · 64 comments · weird medieval guys

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Stop trying to squeeze your writing into current trends, and for fuck sake stop trying to predict the next ones. Maybe you were meant for fame—moderate to grand, or maybe you were meant for obscurity, or any of the valences in between. It really doesn’t matter. Write because you can’t help it, because it’s a haunted house you keep volunteering to go back into. On a long enough timeline, we all fade away. Trust that your words will find their readers.

If you’re waiting to feel inspired, you’ll be waiting for a long time.

Write in the notes app while crying. Scribble in a physical book. Bang away on your poor keyboard. Write on the fucking walls, literally (there’s a reason all kids feel the compulsion to do this). Write in a meeting. Write when you’re tired, bored, deeply unlovable. Write sentences you don’t understand yet.

Drafts aren’t precious. Your neuroses are not sacred. No one cares about your perfection. They’ll care though about what if anything you made them feel.

Why do you think you need to get published by a certain date or age or arbitrary deadline? Time is obsolete in the face of art. When it comes to literary ambition, at the core of it, all that should matter to you is your craft. The rest, as they say, goes with god.

All your favourites wrote absolute trash at some point. You’re not special, nor above revision.

Write badly. Read good books. Write a little better. Read better books. Keep going.

What the hell are you doing reading so much writing about writing (yes, including this right here)? Go engage with some real literature, enter the worlds, stop trying to decode what works and reverse-engineer it or some such, just live inside those books for a while, and then get to work.

You’ll never write like anyone else, thank God.

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