“This is my novel, it’s about a girl named Reality.” Writer Sophie Kemp smiles into a microphone at KGB bar wearing a Vaquera slip dress with white lace panties sewn onto the outside. She’s electric, forever in on the joke, crafting a world of vibrant iconoclasm in real time. It’s a far cry from her bylines in the glossy pages of Vogue or GQ—unless you look closer.

Kemp’s short fiction and personal essays fizz and bubble across Granta, The Paris Review, and The Baffler with an infectiously effervescent voice—and killer prose. Paradise Logic, Kemp’s debut novel will be published by Simon and Schuster in March 2025, takes this bright agility into an experimental place; a delicious playplace between the world of the felt and, well, Reality.

For Kemp, the openness of language is just an example of the social awkwardness of womanhood, a fact that’s maybe what motivated writer Jen George to call her “The 21st Century heir apparent to Kathy Acker.” Acker’s Don Quixote is just one of the six delicious titles Kemp nominates for a personal canon of good prose, the kind of work whose music motivates its meaning, opens up words like rabbit-holes, supports the delectable and devotional belief that all fiction is speculative fiction.

Kemp’s ability to lend grace to ecstasy is all about sound (“prioritizing sentence acoustics over, like, plot,” she tells me in an email). It’s also what makes Paradise Logic my most highly anticipated book of next year.

My Happy Life by Lydia Millet
Everyone who has read this book per my recommendation has said something along the lines of “this book made me want to kill myself.” But for me, My Happy Life was a revelation. My writing teacher Ben Marcus turned me on to Millet’s writing. I was in my last few weeks of graduate school and was simultaneously finishing up a draft of my novel, Paradise Logic, to send to my agent. The ending of my book was not in a good place, so I asked Ben if he could meet because we had literally just talked about it in his thesis workshop. When I walked into his office he said something like: “why are you here,” (derogatory) then said “being a writer of American experimental fiction is like getting on Survivor then realizing you can’t do any of the challenges,” (?) then he talked to me about this book. My Happy Life is a comic novel about a girl who is sexually abused in the foster system. She basically becomes a street person as an adult and is committed to the psych ward. It is awful and unrelenting but also a stunning novel about care and true love. Millet puts her protagonist through everything—but she does it with so much grace and so much love. It’s devastating and perfect. The prose is amazing. She creates her own syntax here. The economy of language is beautiful and brutal.

The Princess of 72nd Street by Elaine Kraf
It’s hard for me to believe I only just read this book for the first time this winter. And I’m happy for everyone else that it’s getting reissued this year. The Princess of 72nd Street is a novel about mania, and how you can make the world beautiful for yourself through psychosis. It has one of the best openings I’ve ever read: “I am glad I have the radiance. This time I am wiser.” To imagine psychosis as a state of radiance! I love the way Kraf writes, she jams so much into her sentences.

Airships by Barry Hannah
Barry Hannah is another great sentence writer. He writes about sex in one of my favorite ways and by that I mean he refers to sex as “nooky” and a woman’s vagina as “the organ,” which is something I grifted into my book. Airships is Hannah’s most well-known work. It is a story collection. “Testimony of Pilot,” is probably my favorite story in the collection, but they’re all kind of unbelievable pieces of fiction. If you’re looking for a novel of his to read, I’d recommend Hey Jack, which is one of his least well-known works. There’s a talk by Garielle Lutz that now exists in essay form called The Sentence is a Lonely Place, that’s really important to me. It is about writing that prioritizes language, about writing as something tactile and remote and thorny and nasty. She calls this kind of writing “of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language.” And says Hannah is a practitioner of this kind of lonely writing. That in his writing every single sentence has a “force and a climax.”

Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream by Kathy Acker
Don Quixote is a real Acker B-side. It’s not a good place to start with her work. Read Blood and Guts in High School if you’ve never read her before. But Don Quixote is my favorite Acker because of the way she talks about love. She is a notoriously punishing person to read, but the opening pages of this book is one of the most lucid things she has ever written. “When she was finally crazy because she was about to have an abortion, she conceived of the most insane idea that any woman can think of. Which is to love.” What a beautiful, resonant, and feminist statement to make before plunging into the usual Acker chaos. If My Happy Life helped me fix the end of my book, this book helped me fix the beginning.

The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers
Everyone reads The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and they should, because it is an amazing book (I should know, I have three copies of it for some reason). But The Member of the Wedding has always been my favorite Carson McCullers novel. It is kind of an oddly experimental piece of writing, about an extremely eccentric little girl who is trying to form her identity around her older sister’s marriage. In this book our protagonist is sometimes Frankie, sometimes F. Jasmine. She wants to be a little boy. She wants to marry her sister. She wants to marry her sister and her sister’s husband. She wants to be her sister’s husband. I love the way this book plays with gender. It feels like a seminally queer piece of writing and I’m not really sure why more people don’t talk about it that way. I’m also kind of obsessed with Gordon Lish’s 4 A’s for good writing (loosened association, antic behavior, autism, morbid ambivalence), and this book really is all of those things.

Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson
I am still haunted by this book, which I read for the first time at the end of last year. It is written in the style of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. I have not read much Wittgenstein, and was told if I didn’t read more of him, I would not get this book. I rarely read theory anymore because most of it makes no sense. When I was in college I studied philosophy and retained none of it. I also don’t think that prescription really gives Markson enough credit as a prose stylist or as a writer of narrative. Wittgenstein’s Mistress is one of the best books about the apocalypse. It follows a woman named Kate who is convinced she is the last person alive on planet earth. More than anything though, it is about grief. Like: I might be too stupid to understand what this book is doing on a dialectal level but I’m not too stupid to know that grief can feel like the end of the world, and often is. David Foster Wallace wrote an amazing essay about the book, which I enjoyed reading far more than I enjoyed reading the actual book. Kate, he says, speaks in an “affectless language of fact,” but, he continues a little later, “whence facts, if the world is empty?” This is a difficult book to read because it is so dense and boring and seemingly has no plot. But that’s also why it’s perfect.