LitQueuelitqueue

After

The Submission

Amy Waldman2011

6 of 6 directions open

More like it

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  • Trust Exercise

    Susan Choi2019

    Students at a performing arts high school navigate a manipulative acting teacher. The narrative shifts perspective to reframe the first half.

    Same tense register, still literary fiction

    pace0·prose0·bleak0

Denser prose

3 more ↓

  • Translated Accounts

    James Kelman2001

    Anonymous witnesses describe life under a military regime. The prose uses broken, bureaucratic syntax to mimic a literal translation.

    tense → bleak, still political fiction

    pace-1·prose+1·bleak+1

  • To the Lighthouse

    Virginia Woolf1927

    A family and their guests visit a house in the Hebrides. The narrative follows their internal thoughts over two days separated by ten years.

    tense → elegiac, still literary fiction

    pace-1·prose+1·bleak0

  • The Sea

    John Banville2005

    A widower returns to a coastal resort to reflect on a childhood summer and his wife's death. The narrator's memory is fluid and dense.

    tense → elegiac, still literary fiction

    pace-1·prose+1·bleak0

To recover

3 more ↓

  • To Sir Phillip, With Love

    Julia Quinn2003

    Eloise Bridgerton travels to meet a widowed baronet she has only known through letters. They consider a marriage of convenience.

    tense → warm

    pace+1·prose-2·bleak-2

  • All Rhodes Lead Here

    Mariana Zapata2021

    A woman moves back to her Colorado hometown after a breakup and rents a garage apartment from a grumpy single father.

    tense → warm

    pace0·prose-2·bleak-2

  • Hannah's List

    Debbie Macomber2010

    A widower receives a letter from his late wife suggesting three women he should date. He begins to interact with each woman over the following year.

    tense → warm

    pace0·prose-2·bleak-2

Faster

3 more ↓

  • Candide

    Voltaire

    A naive young man travels the world while his tutor insists that everything is for the best. He encounters a series of global catastrophes.

    tense → sardonic

    pace+2·prose-1·bleak-1

  • The Da Vinci Code

    Dan Brown2003

    A symbologist and a cryptologist flee the police while solving puzzles hidden in art. They search for a secret regarding the Holy Grail.

    tense → propulsive

    pace+2·prose-2·bleak-2

  • The Martian

    Andy Weir2011

    A man does arithmetic to stay alive on Mars. Problem, attempt, result, repeat.

    tense → wry

    pace+2·prose-2·bleak-2

Slower

3 more ↓

  • Blackouts

    Justin Torres2023

    A young man cares for a dying elder in a medical facility. They use a 1930s study on homosexuality to reconstruct their personal histories.

    tense → elegiac, still literary fiction

    pace-1·prose0·bleak0

  • The English Patient

    Michael Ondaatje1992

    Four people shelter in a ruined Italian villa at the end of WWII. They care for a burned, anonymous man who recounts his past in the desert.

    tense → elegiac, still literary fiction

    pace-1·prose0·bleak0

  • Moby Dick

    Herman Melville1851

    A sailor joins a whaling voyage led by a captain seeking revenge on a specific whale. Large sections digress into the mechanics of 1850s whaling.

    tense → meditative, still literary fiction

    pace-1·prose+1·bleak0

Heavier

Same tense register, still political fiction

3 more ↓

  • A Bend in the River

    V. S. Naipaul1979

    An Indian shopkeeper moves to a newly independent African nation. He observes the town's slow descent into chaos under a cult-of-personality leader.

    tense → cold, still political fiction

    pace0·prose0·bleak+1

  • Girls Burn Brighter

    Shobha Rao2018

    Two girls in India are separated by a brutal act of violence. They endure trafficking and labor across continents to find each other.

    tense → bleak, still literary fiction

    pace+1·prose0·bleak+1

  • The story of a brief marriage

    Anuk Arudpragasam2016

    Two refugees enter an arranged marriage in a Sri Lankan camp during the final days of the civil war. It focuses on the physical details of survival.

    tense → meditative, still literary fiction

    pace-1·prose0·bleak+1