Backlist fiction to read in one sitting

Short books, long attention spans!!!

There’s nothing like finishing a novel in one sitting. It’s a feeling a lot of us readers associate with being a kid, ravenously tearing through the latest Harry Potter or Hunger Games book during summer break, only coming up for air for snacks and swim team practice, feeling hungover after you finish and have to go back to the real world where the book characters only exist in your imagination. I’m always seeking this feeling, and I recently got it while reading Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy over the weekend (highly recommend). It’s not a short book, however, and so I’ve picked out some little guys so you too may experience the rush of Full Book Consumption this summer.

None of these titles are more than 256 words, several are books in translation, and all are backlist titles, which means that they were published over a year ago or more (the oldest was published in 1973!). Why is it important to read backlist works? Aside from clout, it’s always a good idea to support author’s previous books so publishers keep them in print—if demand is down, they’ll stop printing new copies. Several of the books below are getting shiny new reprints in the next year or so, but you can still find older copies online too.

Recommended by my friend Rushil, Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto tells two stories of mothers, love, tragedy, and the power of the kitchen and home in the lives of young women in Japan. Originally published in Japanese in 1989, the first English translation came out in 1993.

Katie Kitamura is the queen of slim, sparely written novels that pack a punch. Intimacies is her second novel in an unofficial trilogy of sorts (A Separation, 2017, Intimacies, 2021, and Audition, 2025), and it tells the story of an interpreter in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, where she is put on a highly publicized war crimes case and becomes the favorite interpreter of a Central African warlord. Her work is paralleled by her personal life, where she’s entangled in a relationship with a Dutch man who’s still married. Rachel Cusk fans will love Kitamura’s prose!!!

Martin Amis is a famed British author, if you’re unfamiliar, and his debut novel is a picaresque little romp called The Rachel Papers, originally published in 1973. It follows Charles Highway, a precocious teen, in the year before he heads to university and his obsession with a manic pixie dream girl named Rachel. It looks like they’re rereleasing the title next year with a shiny new cover (Amis died a couple of years ago).

César Aira is an Argentine author who has published over one hundred short novels and stories. So if you like The Seamstress and the Wind, you’ll have plenty to come back to ;). This one is set in Argentina and follows a seamstress who thinks her son has been abducted and taken to Patagonia while playing inside an eighteen-wheeler, prompting a journey to track it down at the end of the world. Magical realism heads, this one is for you!

I’ve written about In The Cut by Susanna Moore…a lot. If you haven’t read this literary thriller following a serial killer in 90s New York City yet, consider picking it up for your next plane ride. The twist at the end is shocking and will leave you demanding to read the rest of her books!!

As someone who loves woo-woo wellness and also knows most of it is horse shit, I love reading takedowns and satire of the industry. Self Care by Leigh Stein follows the female co-founders of a wellness startup, as one is put on digital detox for tweeting mean things about a woman—which they do NOT do as a startup created to SUPPORT women—and as the rest of the employees deal with their own secrets and scandals.

Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill is a collection of stories set on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, following artists and creatives and sex workers, focusing on a world filled with romance and danger and a disenfranchised generation seeking connection. Published in 1988, said disenfranchised generation is comprised of people who moved to New York in their twenties in the late eighties with a dream of…something (Gaitskill is from Kentucky). This collection really hits if you’re an aspiring artist of any kind!

My creative writing professor introduced me to Mary Miller in college, and she is now one of my favorite Southern writers. Her novel Biloxi takes place in the titular town, and is told from the POV of a 63-year-old man who has just been left by his wife, lost his father, and leaves his job in anticipation of an inheritance check to retire on. On a whim, he gets a dog. The dog changes his life :’). Filled with a vibrant cast of Gulf Coast characters, the book is heartwarming and strange and, of course, short.