Stephanie Wambugu’s Recommended Reading List
Stephanie Wambugu is the author of the newly released novel Lonely Crowds, published by Little Brown (2025). She is also an editor at Joyland Magazine and lives in New York City. She was born in Mombasa, Kenya and grew up in New England.
We’re thrilled to have Stephanie share her recommended reading list with us below!
To learn more about Stephanie and her inspiring career, visit here.
“Edited by Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones first novel attends to some of the oldest and most troubling American themes: love between men and women, incest, the personal cost of being an artist, violence and the strange ways that history is reenacted in the family. It’s a book that warrants being read in a single sitting. It is very hypnotic and you will lose track of the hours reading it or at least I did. I didn’t sleep until I finished this novel and years later I still recommend it to basically everyone I know.”
“I think that Vigdis Hjorth is one of the most important writers working today. Her work is elliptical, entrancing and sweeping. She writes about lovesick people and about the problem of having a family in a way that captures the weirdness and complexity of real life. I think that her novels, four of which have been translated into English, are some of the most “life-like” contemporary novels I have ever read. I would recommend them all, but Is Mother Dead is a good place to start. She is also a very funny writer.”
“An excellent novella about the strangeness of getting an education. The influence of a single teacher can mark a person’s life forever – not always in a good way – and Confusion takes this dynamic on with real wisdom and subtlety. It was very influential to me as I wrote my own novel. Like Kafka’s stories this book points to irreducible mysteries and ends, like most things, without true resolution. Probably one of the most beautiful and devastating final pages I’ve ever read.”
“Percival Everett is a novelist known for his inventiveness and for his intricate conceits that somehow come across with subtlety and a feeling of inevitability. This is my favorite of his novels. So Much Blue is a painter’s novel told in three recurring parts. It is a triptych concerned with three narrative threads: an extramarital love affair in Paris, a tense search for a missing person in El Salvador, and the domestic life of an abstract painter in New England. No section is weaker than the last and this book is reflective of Everett’s wide-ranging cultural interests.”
“Gary Indiana’s 2001 roman à clef, Do Everything in the Dark, has a fairly narrow scope. It’s about the myopic interpersonal dramas of a cast of intellectuals and bohemians in New York City and the Hudson Valley, but in Indiana’s hands the subject matter is sort of beside the point. This novel reminds me of something Toni Morrison said about plot which is that she discloses the plot of a novel in its entirety very early on so that a reader reads not for the reporting of events but for the language. Gary Indiana is a truly great stylist and the precision and quality of his language will appeal to any reader, whether or not they care about artists.”
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