The 10 Most Popular Books Purchased by Electric Literature Readers

In January 2020, Bookshop.org was created as an online retail alternative to Amazon. Since then, the platform has raised more than $29 million for local bookstores. The books we feature on the site link directly to Bookshop, with 10% of the profit from each sale going to support our mission as a literary nonprofit. 

In celebration of Bookshop’s 4th anniversary, we’ve decided to look back at the 10 most purchased books on our website. The books that our readers bought are a diverse mix, spanning countries such as Chile, India, and Ireland and genres including graphic novels, political histories, and short story collections. Despite their wide-ranging forms, dates of publication, and countries of origin, these books are linked by their eclectic nature: many are considered forgotten, rediscovered, or modern classics, and nearly all are formally inventive and experimental. There’s something for all of EL’s readers here, from the gothic horror of Shirley Jackson and Carmen Maria Machado, the thought-provoking histories of India’s 1947 partition and the Black Panther Party, and postmodern novels that pay tribute to Latin American surrealism and magical realism. Whichever our readers chose, EL is proud to play a key role in introducing them to a vast range of new authors and new stories.

Here are the 10 most purchased books on Electric Literature, starting from the most popular:

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

Is it a surprise that the book our readers loved the most is We Have Always Lived in the Castle? After all, Shirley Jackson’s haunting final novel is widely considered to be her masterpiece and if we know anything about our readers, it’s that you guys love weird, subversive stories about women rebelling against society in their own messed-up ways.

The novel follows 18-year-old Mary Katherine “Merricat” Blackwood, who lives on an isolated estate with her older sister Constance and ailing uncle. A tragedy that resulted in the deaths of the rest of the Blackwood family six years earlier has isolated the surviving members from the rest of the village, who believe that Constance is responsible. When the sisters’ estranged cousin Charles arrives and threatens to destroy the family’s fragile existence, Merricat is driven to new extremes.

Read an essay about how Shirley Jackson predicted America’s fetishization of the murderess here.

Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick

Widely considered a lost American classic, Sleepless Nights experiments with form by collaging fiction, memoir, essays, and letters to form a moving meditation on womanhood in the 20th century. After leaving her home in Kentucky, the narrator arrives at a bohemian hotel in New York City to discover a new life filled with friends, parties, and love affairs. Hardwick’s luminous prose paints unforgettable portraits of the people she encountered over her long life and literary career in this groundbreaking autobiographical novel.

By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño

The first of Bolaño’s novels to be published in English, By Night in Chile is narrated by the ailing and elderly Father Urrutia over the course of a single evening. A feverish, hallucinatory monologue narrated by the failed priest, this short narrative touches on wide-ranging topics including the Catholic Church, falconry, and Chile’s political history. Famously, the entire book is written without paragraphs or line breaks, except for the final sentence. Here are more brilliant short novels you can read in a sitting.

Child of God by Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy’s third novel is set in Sevier County, Tennessee in the 1960s and tells of the story of the violent outcast and serial killer Lester Ballard, who the narrator describes as “a child of God much like yourself perhaps.” The controversial book established McCarthy’s interest in representing human experience through isolation, violence and moral degradation. McCarthy also experiments with the absence of literary conventions such as quotation marks and alternates between descriptive, poetic, and colloquial narrative styles.

Her Body and Other Parties: Stories by Carmen Maria Machado

Carmen Maria Machado’s celebrated short story collection won the 2017 Shirley Jackson Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, receiving rave reviews from readers and critics. These eight inventive short stories blend psychological horror, science fiction, and queer theory to explore depictions of gender relations, female monstrosity, and desire. Drawing upon diverse sources such as folklore and urban legends, Her Body and Other Parties is a thrilling collection poised to become a modern classic that expands the boundaries of the horror genre.

In this essay, Jane Dykema writes about “The Husband Stitch,” the first story in Her Body and Other Parties, and how it brings up big questions about who we believe and why.

The Complete Novels of Flann O’Brien, introduction by Keith Donohue

One of Ireland’s best-loved novelists, Flann O’Brien’s five novels are collected here in a tribute to his off-kilter humor and intertextual satirizing of Irish life and literature. At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life, and The Dalkey Archive all combine hilarious fantasy and a riotous cast of recognizable characters from Gaelic legend. A key figure in modernist and postmodernist literature in the vein of James Joyce and one of the country’s best-loved 20th-century literary talents, O’Brien’s influential works are introduced here to a new audience.

The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India by Urvashi Butalia

The partition of India into two countries, India and Pakistan, in 1947 caused the displacement of over 12 million people and one of the greatest political and social upheavals in history. Yet over 75 years later, little is still known about the human impact of the event. Through a series of interviews conducted over ten years and a close examination of primary sources such as diaries, letters and parliamentary documents, Urvashi Butalia investigates the the stories of how people on the margins of society—women, children, and the lower castes—were affected by the violence of partition and brings their hidden narratives to light.

For more books about The Partition, check out this reading list by Anjali Enjeti.

The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History by David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson

This vibrant and groundbreaking illustrated history of the Black Panther Party explores the organization’s foundation in Oakland, California in 1966, its social impact through educational and healthcare programs designed to uplift the Black community, and its ongoing clashes with police brutality and the FBI. The book’s graphic retellings of major events and illustrated profiles of key figures capture the story of the party’s major leaders and political evolution, as well as its enduring cultural and political legacy in the civil rights movement and American society.

Read an interview with the author and the illustration of the book here.

Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen

In Rivka Galchen’s debut novel, Dr. Leo Liebenstein becomes convinced that his wife has disappeared and been replaced by a double, so he sets off on a quest to find her with the help of his psychiatric patient Harvey, who believes he is a secret agent who can control the weather. This obsessive journey takes them from New York to Patagonia to investigate the Royal Society of Meteorology and the mysterious Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen, among other unexplained phenomena. At once a love story, psychological thriller, and portrait of psychiatric disintegration, Atmospheric Disturbances investigates the mysteries at the heart of human relationships.

The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia

This astonishing debut novel pays tribute to the magical realism of Latin American literature by weaving together a cast of characters including a monk, a gang of carnation pickers, and a woman made out of paper. After his wife leaves him, Federico de la Fe and his daughter Little Merced must start a new life together in California among a community of flower pickers. While Little Merced becomes dangerously addicted to limes, Federico becomes engaged in an even more sinister battle against the planet Saturn. The book is famous for its experimental form featuring columns of text running perpendicular across the page, blackouts, and a name that is literally cut out of the novel.

Looking tor more illustrated novels for adults to add to your TBR? Here are 7 books with visual elements.