Fiction like Friction Creates a Warm Feeling
Discover books that create a warm feeling through fiction like friction. Explore our curated list of heartwarming reads designed to evoke comfort and emotional connection.
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Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
by Tom Robbins
“This is one of those special novels—a piece of working magic, warm, funny, and sane.”—Thomas Pynchon The whooping crane rustlers are girls. Young girls. Cowgirls, as a matter of fact, all “bursting with dimples and hormones”—and the FBI has never seen anything quite like them. Yet their rebellion at the Rubber Rose Ranch is almost overshadowed by the arrival of the legendary Sissy Hankshaw, a white-trash goddess literally born to hitchhike, and the freest female of them all. Freedom, its prizes and its prices, is a major theme of Tom Robbins’s classic tale of eccentric adventure. As his robust characters attempt to turn the tables on fate, the reader is drawn along on a tragicomic joyride across the badlands of sexuality, wild rivers of language, and the frontiers of the mind.
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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll
A little girl falls down a rabbit hole and discovers a world of nonsensical and amusing characters.
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Henry and June
by AnaĂŻs Nin
A year in the life (1931-1932) of writer Anais Nin when she met Henry Miller and his wife June.
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The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under--maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experiece as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
A handsome, dissolute man who sells his soul for eternal youth is horrified to see the reflection of his degeneration in the distorted features of his portrait.
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The Women's Room
by Marilyn French
The classic feminist novel that awakened both women AND men speaks to everyone about the deepest feelings at the heart of love and relationships. A biting social commentary of an emotional world gone silently haywire. The Women's ROom is a modern allegory that offers piercing insight into the social norms accepted so blindly and revered so completely. The Women's Room questions those accepted truths and poignantly examines the world of hopeful believers looking for new truths.
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A Room of One's Own
by Virginia Woolf
Woolf's celebrated essay based on the thesis that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
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Possessing the Secret of Joy
by Alice Walker
A NOVEL ABOUT FEMALE CIRCUMCISION AS PRACTICED IN AFRICA, FOR EASTERN AND MIDDLE EASTERN CULTURES.
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Nights at the Circus
by Angela Carter
Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction From the master of the literary supernatural and author of The Bloody Chamber, her acclaimed novel about the exploits of a circus performer who is part-woman, part-swan Sophi Fevvers—the toast of Europe's capitals, courted by the Prince of Wales, painted by Toulouse-Lautrec—is an aerialiste extraordinaire, star of Colonel Kearney's circus. She is also part woman, part swan. Jack Walser, an American journalist, is on a quest to discover Fevvers's true identity: Is she part swan or all fake? Dazzled by his love for Fevvers, and desperate for the scoop of a lifetime, Walser joins the circus on its tour. The journey takes him—and the reader—on an intoxicating trip through turn-of-the-century London, St. Petersburg, and Siberia—a tour so magical that only Angela Carter could have created it.
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On the Road
by Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac’s classic American novel of freedom and the search for originality that defined a generation “An authentic work of art.”—The New York Times Inspired by Jack Kerouac’s adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naïveté and wild abandon and imbued with Kerouac’s love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope—a book that changed American literature and changed anyone who has ever picked it up.
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Swastika Night
by Katharine Burdekin
In a "feudal Europe seven centuries into post-Hitlerian society, Burdekin's novel explores the connection between gender and political power and anticipates modern feminist science fiction."--Cover.
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Blood and Chocolate
by Annette Curtis Klause
Having fallen for a human boy, a beautiful teenage werewolf must battle both her packmates and the fear of the townspeople to decide where she belongs and with whom.
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Blood and Guts in High School
by Kathy Acker
Jamey lived in the locked room. Twice a day the Persian slave trader came in and taught her to be a whore. Otherwise there was nothing. Once day she found a pencil stub and scrap of paper in a forgotten corner of the room. She began to write down her life, starting with "Parents stink" (Her father, who is also her boyfriend, has fallen in love with another woman and is about to leave her). With "Blood and Guts in High School, " Kathy Acker, whose work has been labeled everthing from post-punk porn to post-punk feminism, has created a brilliantly subversive narrative built from conversation, description, conjecture, and moments snatched from history and literature.
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Chocolat
by Joanne Harris
An exotic stranger arrives in the French village of Lansquenet and opens a chocolate boutique directly opposite the church. The priest is a firm believer in the virtues of self-denial and austerity.
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To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, To Kill A Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic. Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill A Mockingbird takes readers to the roots of human behavior - to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos. Now with over 18 million copies in print and translated into forty languages, this regional story by a young Alabama woman claims universal appeal. Harper Lee always considered her book to be a simple love story. Today it is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature.
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
by Ken Kesey
McMurphy, a criminal who feigns insanity, is admitted to a mental hospital where he challenges the autocratic authority of the head nurse.
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Life and Loves of a She Devil
by Fay Weldon
This is not a book for everyone, but its admirers are vigorously enthusiastic. For example: Rhoda Koenig in New York Magazine, who calls it ". . . a novel of blazingly hot revenge, one that amply illustrates the saying about heaven having no rage like love turned to hate, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned." Or Rosalyn Drexler, who said on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, "It affords a scintillating, mindboggling, vicarious thrill for any reader who has ever fantasized dishing out retribution for one wrong or another." Or Carol E. Rinzler, who wrote on The Washington Post Book World's front page, ". . . what makes this a powerfully funny and oddly powerful book is the energy of the language and of the intellect that conceived it, an energy that vibrates off the pages and that makes SHE-DEVIL as exceptional a book in the remembering as in the reading . . . . a small, mad masterpiece."
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Grey Area and Other Stories
by Will Self
In the title story, a woman working in a terrifyingly neutral environment takes anal neatness to rare extremes. In another tale, Self considers an atmosphere plagued by poisonous fog and chest disorders where linctus is preferred to champagne. From the author of "Cock and Bull".
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Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
Huxley's story shows a futuristic World State where all emotion, love, art, and human individuality have been replaced by social stability. An ominous warning to the world's population, this literary classic is a must-read.