Books like The First Bad Man
Cheryl Glickman, a fussy, solitary employee of a women's self-defence nonprofit in Los Angeles, agrees to let her bosses' sullen twenty-year-old daughter move in with her, and her ordered life comes apart.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The First Bad Man
Big Swiss
Greta, who transcribes the recorded sessions of a sex and relationship coach in Hudson, New York, falls for a client she knows only as Big Swiss, and when she meets her by chance at the dog park, she starts an affair built on a lie.
No One Belongs Here More Than You
Sixteen stories about lonely, awkward people reaching for one another in odd ways, among them a woman who teaches swimming lessons to elderly neighbours on her kitchen floor.
Detransition, Baby
A trans woman, her ex-boyfriend, and his pregnant wife form an unlikely family in New York, navigating parenthood, identity, and who gets to start over.
Milk Fed
Rachel, a twenty-four-year-old talent-agency assistant in Los Angeles who controls her life through strict rules about food, falls for the zaftig Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her frozen yogurt shop.
All Fours
A semi-famous artist in her mid-forties sets out to drive alone from Los Angeles to New York, stops at a motel thirty minutes from home, and does not leave, spending a fortune remaking the room around a sudden obsession.
Pretend I'm Dead
A housecleaner in Taos, New Mexico drifts through odd jobs and stranger relationships, narrating her life with deadpan humour and unacknowledged pain.
Perfume & Pain
Astrid Dahl, a lesbian novelist cancelled after a West Hollywood bookstore event, retreats to her Sapphic Scribes writing group, tries to give up pills and drink, and falls for nearly every woman in her orbit while her agent waits for the next book.
Boulder
A lesbian line cook named Boulder agrees to have a child with her partner and watches her desire and identity unravel into brine and rock.
Exalted
In Los Angeles, Emily runs an astrology meme account that charges people to read their charts, and Dawn is one of her most devoted followers, as both women's lives, relationships and finances near collapse.
The Pisces
Stuck on her dissertation about Sappho and newly dumped, Lucy house-sits her sister's place on Venice Beach, minds the dog, goes to group therapy and falls for a swimmer she meets on the rocks who turns out to be a merman.
Mostly Dead Things
After her father's death, Jessa-Lynn Morton takes over the family taxidermy shop in Tampa, while her mother starts posing the stuffed animals in explicit tableaux and her brother falls apart.
City of Night
A young man from El Paso leaves home and drifts through the night cities of America, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New Orleans, hustling on the streets and meeting the people who live there after dark.