Photo: Hunter Abrams, fashion credits courtesy of R.Swiader Save Story Save this story Save Story Save this story Privilege is a slippery thing to define in literary circles. While many have it, the commodification of personal struggles and systemic trauma can also be a kind of currency for those who don’t. That tension animates British author Josh Silver’s Fruit Fly , a lively and buzzy—no pun intended—debut novel in which a well-to-do author entangles herself with a young, gay, drug-dependent sex worker in order to defeat her writer’s block.
Below, Silver shares the 10 books that paved the way for his own:
I read Great Expectations as a teenager, not expecting it to be the kind of book I would enjoy at all. Instead, I was completely pulled in. It was funny, strange and exciting, and full of these enormous characters who seemed to propel the story simply by being themselves and making terrible or brilliant choices. I think it was the first time I understood that plot does not have to feel imposed on a novel. It can come entirely from character, from what people want and what they are willing to do to get it. Mostly, though, I remember being surprised by how funny Dickens was. It completely changed my idea of what a classic could be.
The scale and scope of The Handmaid’s Tale blew my mind when I first read it, but what stayed with me was how intimate it felt. Atwood creates this enormous political and social reality, but we experience it through human relationships, desire, memory, fear and the small negotiations people make in order to survive. It taught me that the bigger the idea, the more important it can be to find the most human way into it. I think about that a lot when I write. You can build an entire world, but ultimately it is the people inside it, and what they do to one another, that make us care about it.
I read A Thousand Splendid Suns on a family holiday when I was a teenager and became so attached to Mariam and Laila that finishing it felt like being forced out of a world I was not ready to leave. I cried so much at the end that I went for a walk by myself because I did not want my family to see me. I think it was one of the first books that showed me the extraordinary intimacy a writer can create between a reader and a character. I did not just want to know what happened to these women. I felt as though I knew them. I have been chasing that feeling in fiction ever since.
I loved how dark and funny this book was, and how much Braithwaite manages to explore through such an outrageous premise. On the surface it is about a woman whose sister keeps killing her boyfriends, but underneath it is about loyalty, resentment, beauty, family and the things we are willing to forgive in the people we love. I found the tension between those two things so exciting. It never loses its humour or becomes weighed down by what it is trying to say. As a writer, it reminded me that you can use something heightened and even absurd to get at something completely human.
Erasure is a book that made me excited about what satire could actually do. Percival Everett takes enormous questions about race, authorship, publishing and who gets to tell whose story, then makes them incredibly funny without ever making them feel less serious. I thought about it a lot while writing Fruit Fly , which asks some similar questions about our appetite for other people’s experiences and what happens when a writer starts treating suffering as material. Erasure ga…