Yahoo Lifestyle12 Books to Read If You Loved Everything Everywhere All at Once
- 1/13
12 Books to Read If You Loved Everything Everywhere All at Once
There's nothing quite like Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's film Everything Everywhere All at Once. The Daniels, as they're known, have explained that their influences range from Rick and Morty to Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai to Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, a children's book by William Steig. However, for those viewers who are looking to capture, for lack of a better word, the vibes of Everything Everywhere All At Once, there's a plethora of novels that could do the trick.
Here, 12 of the best books to read for fans of EEAAO—from multiverse stories to tales that center the Asian American immigrant experience.
courtesy - 2/13
1) This Is How You Lose the Time War
Gallery / Saga Press
amazon.com
$8.71
In this epistolary science fiction novel, time travel agents Red and Blue are fighting for different sides in a war. They go back in time to try and alter different strands of the multiverse—and along the way, the enemies leave notes for each other, and start to fall in love.
amazon.com - 3/13
2) Interior Chinatown: A Novel
Vintage
amazon.com
$12.99
Interior Chinatown focuses on Willis Wu, an actor stuck doing background character work on a fictional police procedural. When he inadvertently witnesses a crime, his life in Chinatown spirals out of his control—and gives him a taste of life in the spotlight. It's a satire of Hollywood that examines Asian representation, assimilation, and Chinatown.
Plus: If you like reading the book before watching the adaption, read this soon! It's currently being adapted for Hulu by Taika Waititi, starring Jimmy O. Yang, Chloe Bennet, Ronny Chieng, and more.
amazon.com - 4/13
3) Disorientation: A Novel
amazon.com
$19.69
Ingrid Yang, a 29-year-old Taiwanese American PhD student, is the protagonist of Elaine Hsieh Chou's Disorientation. The novel is described a "coming-of-consciousness," and follows Ingrid as an explosive discovery in her dissertation research leads her down a path she would've never expected.
amazon.com - 5/13
4) How High We Go in the Dark: A Novel
amazon.com
$18.99
Japanese American writer Sequoia Nagamatsu’s debut, How High We Go in the Dark, is set in a future where a deadly Arctic plague is unleashed on the world. It's all interwoven stories that hop across time, and the reader journeys from interstellar starships to hotels for the dead in a post-apocalyptic tale that feels all too real.
amazon.com - 6/13
5) How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel
Vintage
amazon.com
$16.95
Charles Yu is a time travel technician who lives in Minor Universe 31, a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction. Every day, he tries to help save people from themselves—who want to travel to change the past. Charles's father invented time travel, and he has been searching for him... No spoilers, but this wildly inventive science fiction novel will leave you thinking about it for days after you finish.
amazon.com - 7/13
6) How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse (Thorne Chronicles, 1)
Daw Books
amazon.com
$17.00
If you're obsessed with stories of multiverses, How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse is a space opera that's also a feminist fairy you should definitely read. It takes place in space, where Rory Thorne is a princess whose father is assassinated. After his death, she is betrothed to the prince of a distant world—and when she arrives, she finds herself in the middle of a plot to usurp her new husband's throne. Can she stop it and save the world?
amazon.com - 8/13
7) Native Speaker
Riverhead Books
amazon.com
$14.04
If you want to think more about Asian American identity and representation, something central to Everything Everywhere All At Once, look no further than Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker. Henry Park, the protagonist, has spent his entire life trying to become a "native speaker," an assimilated American. Per the publisher, Native Speaker is a "story of cultural alienation. It is about fathers and sons, about the desire to connect with the world rather than stand apart from it, about loyalty and betrayal, about the alien in all of us and who we finally are."
amazon.com - 9/13
8) Bliss Montage: Stories
amazon.com
$22.49
Ling Ma's short story collection grapples with characters "making their way through the madness and reality of our collective delusions: love and loneliness, connection and possession, friendship, motherhood, the idea of home," the publisher writes. These tales range from the absurd and surreal—in one story, a woman has sex with a yeti—to the uncanny, like one where women take drugs to disappear (literally). The majority of the narratives center Chinese American women, and you never know how they'll end.
amazon.com - 10/13
9) Dark Matter: A Novel
Ballantine Books
amazon.com
$15.99
Blake Crouch's thriller Dark Matter is a multiverse tale. When Jason Dessen is knocked unconscious by his abductor, the last words he hears are: "Are you happy with your life?" When he wakes up, he's in a different life. It's a science fiction thriller about all the paths not taken, and all the decisions we make over the course of our lives.
amazon.com - 11/13
10) Self-Portrait with Nothing
amazon.com
$22.49
Like in Everything Everywhere All at Once, a mother-daughter story is at the heart of Aimee Pokwatka's novel. Pepper was adopted by her two moms, and never knew her birth mother, Ula Frost, a reclusive painter. Ula is famous (or infamous) for the claim that her portraits actually summon the subject's doppelgänger from a parallel universe. When Pepper finds out her birth mom has disappeared, and she's the sole benefactor of her estate, she sets out to find Ula.
amazon.com - 12/13
11) Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World
amazon.com
$13.49
Sasha Fletcher's debut novel takes place at the end of the world, centering the beauty of love while the world is falling apart around you. The tale of Eleanor and Sam, a young couple in love, begins, "It’s Brooklyn. It’s winter. It’s so cold outside you could execute billionaires in the street and it hasn’t even snowed. In the aisles of the supermarket, the landlords gather…."
amazon.com - 13/13
12) Everything Matters!: A Novel
Penguin Books
amazon.com
$16.00
Junior Thibodeau grows up in rural Maine, and he knows that the world will end when he turns 36. How does he search for meaning in a world that is ending? Everything Matters! tries to answer that question, and reflects it back onto our everyday life. The story is an outrageous ride, and—fair warning—it's not told in straight chronological order.
amazon.com
