Books like Chantal V. Johnson

Rachel organizes her life around calorie limits, ritualized meals, and the illusion of bodily control—until Miriam, the exuberant woman working at a frozen-yogurt shop, unsettles her rules. Like Johnson, Broder understands disordered eating not as an isolated “issue” but as a whole language for expressing fear, maternal injury, desire, and self-punishment.

Where Post-Traumatic is flinty and confrontational, Milk Fed becomes lush, erotic, and almost devotional. Its jokes are filthy, its hungers embarrassingly specific, and its emotional breakthroughs never feel hygienic or inspirational. Read it for the rare pleasure of watching appetite become both the problem and a possible way out.

Edie is a young Black artist stuck in a badly paid publishing job and conducting an affair with an older white man whose marriage supposedly permits it. That arrangement is only the opening pressure point: Leilani is really writing about who gets to be desired, who gets watched, and how precarity can make degradation feel dangerously close to opportunity.

A lover of Johnson’s barbed observations about race, sex, work, and self-presentation will recognize Edie’s habit of turning ruthless intelligence against herself. But Leilani’s prose has its own voltage—sensuous, painterly, and startlingly funny. Winner of the Kirkus Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize, Luster earned its acclaim sentence by sentence; skipping it would mean missing one of contemporary fiction’s most unforgettable voices.

Greta earns money transcribing a sex therapist’s sessions, then becomes fascinated by one patient, a woman she privately names Big Swiss. When their lives intersect, voyeurism turns into intimacy without becoming any less ethically alarming.

Beagin shares Johnson’s refusal to make trauma solemn, morally clarifying, or narratively tidy. Big Swiss is packed with bodily comedy, bad boundaries, eccentric domestic detail, and people whose damage makes them magnetic rather than exemplary. Yet beneath its absurdity lies an exacting question: what happens when another person’s pain becomes the organizing fantasy of your life? This is the recommendation for readers who loved Post-Traumatic most when it was funniest, strangest, and least respectable.