The Definitive Weird Girl Lit Reading Guide
150 Novels, Short Story Collections & Poetry + Thoughts on the trend & a Reader Poll
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!
DISCLAIMER: I know “definitive” technically means “final” but literature never ends so, for me this list isn’t a be-all-end-all in any way, but a living artifact, so to speak, of all things Weird Girl Lit. You’ll also notice that there are way more novels on here than poetry or short story collections and that’s because I’ve just read more of one kind of literature over my life. As I read and research more, I’ll update this definitive guide!
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
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
Wow. This post is so beautiful. Good job designing it. I've saved it for future me to refer back to when I need books to read.
I guess memoirs would not make sense to fit into the weird girl lit category? Such as perhaps, say, a true memoir about a woman whose life has fallen off kilter because of a mental illness such as schizoaffective disorder, for example?