Eight thrilling books about getting what you want by taking it

Brendan Gillen is an Emmy-winning writer living in Brooklyn. His fiction has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and appears in Wigleaf, Taco Bell Quarterly, New Delta Review, HAD, X-R-A-Y, South Carolina Review and elsewhere. His debut chapbook is I've Given This a Lot of Thought, and his first novel Static.

At Electric Lit Gillen tagged eight "favorite books [that] deal with stealing in some capacity, or at the very least, getting the things you want by taking them from others." One title on the list:

Breaking & Entering by Joy Williams

It’s right there in the title. Breaking & Entering. Or so you would think. Ostensibly, this book is about a married pair of drifters—Liberty and Willie—who break into the unoccupied beach homes of wealthy families on the Gulf Coast of Florida to escape their meager lives and experience the finer things, their slice of the American Dream. They drink the owners’ booze, wear their clothes, sleep in their beds, and when danger starts to peek around the corner, they move on.

But like all of Joy Williams’ best work, the novel is difficult to categorize; masterfully off-kilter, unsettling, and beguiling, surreal surfaces hinting at a rotten, Lynchian core. Liberty and Willie have been lovers since they were teens, but as they drift around the palm-studded landscape, they begin to drift apart, and to this reader, the heart of the novel is loneliness and desolation. This is a novel about taking the life you wish you had and then realizing that it’s as cold as death without comfort and companionship. Or, as the softies among us (raises hand) might call it, love.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue