Recommendations from our site
“I’m going to say something stupid, because, yes, of course, it was a best-seller that was turned into a film starring Brad Pitt. So it’s hardly unknown. But when I started reading it I thought: why did nobody tell me how good this book is? Fundamentally, I think so many people think: ‘zombies are not for me.’ I’m one of them. But this book totally transcends that category. The realism is extraordinary; it’s a wild feat of imagination.” Read more...
The Best Near-Future Dystopias
Rosa Rankin-Gee, Novelist
“World War Z is a novel that bridges the gap between pulp and high literature. It takes a subject matter which we would think of as mainstream geek culture, but it finds universal human themes, develops characters that you care about, and also manages to be culturally critical. It is clearly critical of many of the post-9/11 choices made by the United States and Britain.” Read more...
Greg Garrett, Literary Scholar
“He offered a fresh look at this zombie genre by knitting it into our real world. His characters react as we think they would. He uses the multiple perspectives format, which is challenging to write but as a reader I really enjoy it as you get to experience the war through the eyes of multiple characters. Because it’s so realistic, it fits into the category of a ‘useful’ read; I love the way he plays with how bureaucracies are resistant to change and bad information. This is significant not just when dealing with zombie outbreaks but, for example, in how the US military and government handled the early years of the Iraq war. Also, the audiobook is just great. An amazing listen.” Read more...
“World War Z is told from multiple different perspectives and multiple different cultures. It’s about how they respond to the impending apocalypse: what the Americans do and what happens in the Middle East, how individuals respond. So you have a couple of people who are already preparing for the end of the world and you’ve got the military view. It’s great because Max Brooks really pulls together this multi-cultural viewpoint, it’s not just a Brad Pitt action-movie vehicle.” Read more...
The best books on Surrealism and the Brain
Bradley Voytek, Medical Scientist
Zombie stories are, essentially, a bloodstained sub-genre of the pandemic novel. They tend towards shock and gratuitous gore. But, like Severance, Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, is notable for its literary styling and thoughtful world-building. It’s “a novel that bridges the gap between pulp and high literature,” explained the literary scholar Greg Garrett, when he selected the best books on zombies: “It takes a subject matter which we would think of as mainstream geek culture, but it finds universal human themes, develops characters that you care about, and also manages to be culturally critical.” Like Station Eleven, this book takes many different perspectives, this time in the form of a series of statements made by witness from around the globe. “There is a lovely effect like those achieved by modernists like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf in which you have a chapter from one character’s point of view, and then another chapter from another character’s point of view. You are putting together thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird.”
From our article Books like Station Eleven
