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Some friends and I are exchanging book recommendations, and I have no idea what to recommend to them. They don't generally go in for sci-fi/fantasy-type stuff, but that's practically all I read!
The recommendations so far have been the kind of thing many bookstores just toss under the heading "literature": Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver, "Everything is Illuminated", and a whole bunch of other stuff that I've never heard of. I don't go in for the Morrison/Kingsolver stuff so much, though, and I want to recommend something that I would like too. Maybe classic young adult-type books like A Wrinkle in Time? Other classic must-reads? I'm drawing a blank.
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Pretty much everything by Louise Erdrich is fantastically good. Tracks was where I started, and that worked pretty well for me.
Maureen McHugh is a SF author whose stuff isn't always particularly SF. Her latest short story collection, Mothers and Other Monsters would be an excellent introduction to her work for the non-SF reader. There are a couple of stories that I'd count as SF in it, specifically "The Cost to Be Wise" (the germ of her novel Mission Child, "The Lincoln Train", which is an alternate history short set in a world in which John Wilkes Booth didn't *quite* finish the job, and "Nekropolis", from which her novel of the same name was developed, but even those stories are written in a style that should be approachable for the non-SF reader (but will be satisfying to you as a SF reader--McHugh is a wizard at creating very lived in worlds).
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Tom Robbins! He is an excellent read. I would always recommend his work very very highly. Try Still Life with Woodpeckerfirst.
Also, Chuck Palahniuk is a really great author. You, or your friend, should definitely check him out. He wrote Fight Club and several other excellent novels. Check 'em out, especially Invisible Monsters or Survivor.
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Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is a fantastically good book. I've not read all that much of his stuff yet (just this, a short story collection, and a young adult novel), but what I have read is good enough that I'm eager to read the rest of what he's written.
Here are the first couple pages of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, if you'd like to get a taste of it. You'll need to have an Amazon account to read them, but I can't imagine that many people who frequent Hatrack *don't* have an Amazon account.
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