Books like Mr. Fox
Mr. Fox and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus are dazzling accomplices: both turn storytelling into a contest over who gets to invent women—and whether those women will obey.
If you liked Mr. Fox, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with Mr. Fox, and we tell you exactly what.
Sophie Fevvers, a celebrated aerialist who may or may not possess real wings, recounts her life to a skeptical journalist determined to expose her. Their interview becomes a duel between his appetite for facts and her exuberant command of fiction.
Like Oyeyemi, Carter raids fairy tales without treating them as sacred objects. Her lush, bawdy sentences expose the violence hidden inside romantic myths, while Fevvers—loud, theatrical, impossible to contain—seizes the role of storyteller from the man trying to define her. A landmark of feminist fabulism and winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, this is the natural next book for anyone intoxicated by Mr. Fox’s wit, danger, and narrative mutiny.
Poor Things presents itself as a recovered Victorian memoir, complete with editorial apparatus and Gray’s grotesquely beautiful illustrations. At its center is Bella Baxter, whose existence is explained by men with great confidence—until her own account disrupts theirs.
That struggle over authorship is pure Mr. Fox territory. Gray makes every document suspect and every ornate male explanation reveal the desires behind it. Yet the book is also riotously funny: a parody of Gothic fiction, respectable history, sexual hypocrisy, and the fantasy that a woman can be neatly written into someone else’s story. Winner of both the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize, it is a formally audacious original whose tricks sharpen, rather than obscure, its emotional and political force.
Ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby receives a hearing trumpet and promptly discovers that her family intends to send her to an institution. From that plain betrayal, Carrington proceeds according to a dream logic at once deadpan, mystical, and gloriously unruly.
Where Mr. Fox undermines murderous masculine myths through competing tales, The Hearing Trumpet dismantles the conventions that render old women passive, invisible, or ridiculous. Marian’s calm practicality makes the novel’s escalating strangeness even funnier, and Carrington never explains away an image that can remain potent and mysterious. Long cherished as a cult classic of feminist surrealism, it offers the rare pleasure of entering an imagination with no interest in behaving sensibly—and realizing that its madness has exposed the ordinary world’s absurdities.