Twenty Favorite Books of Transgressive Fiction
(Some transgressive fiction writers seem like all transgression and no art to me, but by no means all of them. I’ve arranged this list alphabetically by title and restricted myself to one book per author.)
Altmann’s Tongue: Stories and a Novella by Brian Evenson
Cleanness by Garth Greenwell
Closer by Dennis Cooper *
Crapalachia: A Biography of a Place by Scott McClanahan
Crash by J. G. Ballard *
Dear Dickhead by Virginie Despentes
Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin *
Dogs by C. Mallon
Earthlings by Sayaka Murata
Essays and Fictions by Brad Phillips
Grow a Pair: 9½ Fairy Tales About Sex by Joanna Walsh
The History of Luminous Motion by Scott Bradfield
Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr. *
The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold
My Happy Life by Lydia Millet
Mysterious Skin by Scott Heim
Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte
This Is Pleasure by Mary Gaitskill
The Torturer’s Wife by Thomas Glave
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller *
* some of the standard bearers of transgressive fiction
(Also, Samuel Delany probably deserves a place on this list, but his least obviously transgressive books are the ones I like best—or else the ones that are transgressive but nonfiction.)
— April 2, 2026