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:
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
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 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
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.
