By this point in term, everyone’s brains are fairly frazzled. For students who don’t have the time or energy to crack open a Dickens novel or try their hand at War And Peace, Epigram have compiled a selection of short, contemporary reads that are accessible and quick, but no less thought provoking and immersive than any longer read. Picking up one of these books, you can feel joyous satisfaction in starting and finishing a story in one sitting. These reads will leave you struck with the feeling that maybe, less really is more.
1. Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. by Eve Babitz
Slow Days, Fast Company (1974) is a sumptuous picture of Southern California that envelops the reader in its luscious haze – a far cry from the drizzly Bristol April showers. In just 200 pages, Babitz whirls through ten visions of a sun-baked Los Angeles and delves into the glamourous lives within, from film-stars consumed by fame, to haughty socialites consumed by drugs, to deadly Italian femme fatales. This book is a love letter to the bygone Los Angeles of the 1960s and 70s, and Babitz’s seductive wit will make you long to join her on those slow, romantic days.
2. Assembly by Natasha Brown
Described by The Guardian as ‘A modern Mrs Dalloway’, Assembly (2021) is a dive into the psyche of a woman who is unsure of her place in the worlds she finds herself in. Navigating the world of work, family and relationships, Brown depicts the experience of assimilation by laying bare the consciousness of an upper-class Black British woman and the constant sense of alienation she feels in modern Britain. In a scarce 104 pages set into vignettes, Assembly lets the reader piece together the narrative for themselves, confronted by a narrator exerting her own disintegration under the weight of the pressures of the societies she must conform to for acceptance.
3. A Cook’s Tour by Anthony Bourdain
After the huge success of Kitchen Confidential (2000), Bourdain breaks from the kitchens of New York and comes back swinging with A Cook’s Tour (2002), which details his adventures as he sets off to eat his way around the world. It’s 288 pages fly by as Bourdain travels across the globe and records his culinary experiences with his signature wry humour and machismo – this, alongside his eagerness to try absolutely anything, paints Bourdain as a stylish chef- pirate hybrid. From glugging vodka in Moscow with Russian mobsters, to engaging in ritualistic pig slaughter in rural Portugal, Bourdain’s ability to fit in anywhere and get stuck in is awe inspiring and endlessly entertaining.
4. Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto.
Sharing a love for the sacred act of cooking, Kitchen (1988) is a quiet, cosy counterpart to Bourdain’s tales of swashbuckling culinary adventure. Originally written in Japanese, this story follows Mikage’s life in a haze of grief after the death of her grandmother, as she moves in with an old school friend and his mother, a trans woman. With delicate, dreamlike prose and moments that border on lucid magical realism, Kitchen emotively conveys themes of love, loss, identity and motherhood in just 160 pages. In this novel, the setting of the kitchen appears deeply intimate, as Yoshimoto invites the reader in and envelopes them in this sensitive tale of hope in the face of sadness.
5. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
If understated musings on love, loss, and human connection are what you are looking for, Carver’s short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) is sure to strike a chord, even in a brief, 144 page collection. Considered a figure head of American short story writers and defined by Granta as a founder of the ‘Dirty Realism’ school, Carver’s stories are matter of fact in their description and contrived in rhythm, making them all the more accurate as representations of the American working class as they work, drink and communicate. Minimalist, precise, and often unexpectedly humorous, Carver captures the conversations had and connections shared between the everyday American, and the wide array of emotions this can inspire. Often, Carver’s characters experience a moment of clarity or shift in consciousness, and it feels Carver has seen directly into the American psyche. The effect is unnerving, stirring, and deeply memorable.
