I genuinely love the classics. Not all of them, perhaps, but enough that a hefty portion of my home library bears that black-white-and-orange Penguin Classic spine. Still, it’s hardly revolutionary to say that the canon of classic literature could use some refreshing to be…well, less old, white, and straight. That’s in part why I wrote my novel Fagin the Thief: to explore that messy middle ground between loving an old text and seeing it for what it is.
I wouldn’t have spent years mentally living alongside the characters of Dickens’s Oliver Twist if they weren’t deeply meaningful to me. Even the original character of Fagin, antisemitic as it is, fascinates me. He steals a scene as easily as a wallet, and there’s a captivating energy to his portrayal. But Dickens wasn’t interested in writing Fagin as a human being. Dickens wrote a stock figure: a type, to fulfill a plot point and satisfy the expectations of his audience. My novel deviates from the original by imagining how the familiar story would unfold if it were populated not by types, but by individuals.
I’m not saying we should take Oliver Twist off of English literature syllabi because it’s “problematic.” The opposite, in fact. I would love to see more literature courses used to bring canonical books into conversation with other authors, taking another writer’s point of view to expand and critique the lens offered by the canon. The nine books that follow are personal favorites I see as being in conversation with (or at least rhyming with) the classic texts so many of us were assigned in school. I think they would all make excellent additions to a future syllabus, and I’ve added the classic text I would assign along with each, just for fun.
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Let’s get this out of the way first. I’m hardly the first person to suggest that you read Barbara Kingsolver’s Appalachia-set Dickens retelling. In all honesty, I put off reading it as long as I could, worried I’d be disappointed by the hype. Alas, the reviewers aren’t lying. This book is so brilliantly in conversation with its source text and with the present day that I couldn’t in good conscience leave it off the list. Though you don’t need to read David Copperfield to enjoy it, I do recommend them as a pairing, if only so you too can fully appreciate the incredible literary puns that are Kingsolver’s character names.
If I begin this by saying “the incredibly detailed whale facts are one of the most impressive parts of this novel,” you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d stumbled into a meeting of the Herman Melville Fan Club. But no, I’m talking about Whalefall, one of the most moving and profoundly weird books I read in 2024. A meditation on masculinity, father-son relationships, abuse, self-worth, and self-discovery, Whalefall takes place over the operating time of a single pressurized scuba tank, and it’s not a spoiler to say that a solid two-thirds of the book is set in the stomach of a whale. I laughed, I cried, I learned about the baleen digestive system. Pair this with Moby Dick and then impress your marine biologist friends at parties.
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima
I picked this up in a book exchange six years ago and haven’t stopped thinking about it ever since. It follows a band of disillusioned, nihilistic thirteen-year-olds who idolize a sailor from afar. As they come to know him, their hero worship turns to disgust, with horrifying consequences. “Shock value” doesn’t generally appeal to me, but there’s something else going on in this book—it’s not gratuitous violence so much as staring straight into the abyss that might be in each of us. Pair this with A Clockwork Orange if you want to have a very unsettling afternoon thinking about what the kids are capable of.
Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou
Sour Cherry won’t be released until April 2025, but I have made it my solemn mission to tell everybody to pre-order it. A retelling of the Bluebeard story, this book takes the form of a mother telling a fairy tale to a child, while an audience of ghosts listens in. As the fairy tale unfolds, telling the story of a boy whose nails grow too quickly and who brings pestilence everywhere he goes, it becomes clearer that this is not just a story—or, at least, not the one we thought we were hearing. A hauntingly beautiful examination of domestic violence, Sour Cherry would pair well with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” as an example of what happens when we place victims in a remote room and lock the door.
Extended Stay by Juan Martinez
Extended Stay is a brilliant and deeply weird love letter to the haunted house story. We follow Alvaro and his sister Carmen as they work to build a new life in Las Vegas after fleeing violence in Colombia. Alvaro finds work at the Alicia Hotel, an unsettling building where nothing is as it seems—and where the building itself is hungry. This delectably surreal feast of a book is best enjoyed if you fully detach your brain from its usual frameworks and just let it ride. Pair with The Haunting of Hill House, then join me after class to continue the discussion about why more readers should take horror seriously.
This is arguably the most heartbreaking book I’ve read in years. In Memoriam follows English schoolboys Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood, two teenagers each completely unaware that the other is desperately in love with him. When they both enlist to serve on the front lines of World War I, their childish visions of honor and glory are stripped away, and what emerges is a masterpiece of what love can become under pressure. Pair this with A Separate Peace by John Knowles for a look at innocence shattered, as well as for a chance to take queer love out of historical subtext and into text.
If the phrase “Zimbabwean reimagining of Animal Farm set in the age of social media” doesn’t intrigue you enough to pick up Glory, we have very little in common as people. Inspired by the fall of Robert Mugabe, the book is set in the fictional animal-occupied country of Jidada and opens with a coup against the country’s longtime strongman leader, Old Horse. What follows is a cracklingly angry—and at times devastatingly funny—look into an authoritarian state in a constant evolution and crisis. Bulawayo’s narrative voice is so engaging she sweeps you along for the ride, and what a ride it is. Pair this with Orwell’s original to help students see just how much and how little has changed.
This is hardly a niche recommendation, as there’s a film adaptation starring Amy Adams now streaming on Hulu. But Nightbitch is such a sharp, searing look at the dark side of new motherhood that I fully believe it deserves its place on the shelf as a modern classic. The premise is straightforward but arresting: as the unnamed narrator puts her creative career on hold to care for her newborn son, she starts to lose sight of her own identity—to the point that she’s certain she’s turning into a dog. Pair this with Medea by Euripides and spend a class period talking about what we consider a “bad mother.”
The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf by Isa Arsén
In this 2025 new release, the titular Margaret Wolf is an off-Broadway Shakespearian actor in the 1950s who has just entered a lavender marriage with her best friend and fellow actor Wesley Shoard. When a public breakdown puts her career on hold, she and Wesley set off to spend the summer in New Mexico, staging a Shakespeare play in the desert for an enigmatic stranger with a suspiciously steady stash of cocaine. It’s a gloriously tense study of depression, agency, and ambition, and the twists and turns only speed up as opening night draws closer. Pair this with Macbeth and get ready to think about revenge tragedies in a whole new way.
