Claire-Louise Bennett's second novel Checkout 19 - a "fantastically various novel" (Alex Clark in The Guardian), is fierce and funny and bold and brazen and rude and a little bit angry and very very bookish. Most of the books on this list have walk-on parts within Checkout 19, they are the 'books within the book' so to speak. And some of them are not exactly 'modern' but never mind about that.

Bennett's innovative, funny, and much lauded debut novel Pond was published by Stinging Fly in Ireland and Fitzcarraldo in the UK in 2015.  Fish Out of Water, a short story about the author and the artist Dorothea Tanning, was published by Juxta Press in 2020 as part of its Words for Portraits editions and more recently she wrote the afterward to the new edition of Marlen Haushofer's The Wall and the introduction to the new edition of Ann Quin's novel Passages. 

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