There are few more thoughtful gifts than books, especially when they come with care and intention and not the result a last-minute impulse buy pulled from the endcap at Drug Mart on Christmas Eve.
With all due respect to anyone who’s written a book, some are just more worthy of your time than others, is all we’re saying. And for the reader in your life, these 10 Cleveland novels — either set here, written by a local author, or both — will leave them tickled, challenged, and singing your praises in the months to come.
(These are pulled from our list of 42 essential Cleveland books. That guide is filled with plenty of non-fiction options if that’s more your speed.)
Happy shopping. (Many of these are available at local bookstores like Visible Voice, Loganberry, Mac’s Backs, etc., so be sure to support them when at all possible.)
Cuyahoga (2020)
Pete Beatty
What we feel about ourselves is more important in many ways than what we know about ourselves. The stakes are even higher when you’re talking about not just people but cities. Those tussles are at the heart of “Cuyahoga,” the debut novel from Cleveland native Pete Beatty, a rollicking, inventive, satirical twist on fables and tall tales, an origin story of origin stories set in early 1800s Northeast Ohio on the eve of the marriage between Cleveland and Ohio City. Your guide on the adventure is Medium Son (Meed), a young resident of the ramshackle, frontier town of Ohio City whose older brother, Big Son, is the spirit of the times. In the vein of Johnny Appleseed, Big Son “had rastled rivers and lakes and rescued women in woe. Met the devil twice and whipped him three times. Ate panther fricassee for breakfast and tiger steaks at supper. Taught wolves how to wail and put a face on the moon with a rusty musket. Big Son has done more feats than you have brains to hold etc.” For all of Big’s good works, he’d received much adoration but “little in the way of government dollars.”
With an engrossing style of prose and humor that critics have compared to John Barth, Thomas Pynchon and Charles Portis, Beatty spins the yarn from there: Cleveland wants a bridge over the Cuyahoga, but Ohio City fears it’ll be squashed in the deal, forced from little sister status to something even lowlier. And Big, falling for the lovely Cloe, seeks to pivot from his work of feats to regular pay and status to win her heart.
Readers are treated to a tale of jealousy and nativism in 1837 populated by a rag-tag cast of slapstick Deadwood-ian characters navigating their personal and collective troubles.
Crooked River Burning (2001)
Mark Winegardner
When it comes to quintessential Cleveland novels, no list would be complete without Mark Winegardner’s 2001 epic, Crooked River Burning. Weaving a mix of fiction with mid-20th century Cleveland history, this epic, coming in at just under 600 pages, gets at the story of Cleveland from a macro sense. At the heart is a love story between an eastsider and a westsider bridging the city divide, but Winegardner also inserts legendary, real-life Clevelanders like Eliot Ness, Alan Freed and Carl Stokes into the mix, as well as notable east-side families that ran the city from behind the scenes in post-WWII Cleveland. Set against an era when Cleveland was changing by the day, the love story gets into the soul of the city, one which Winegardner clearly adored.
The Coming of Fabrizze (1960)
Raymond DeCapite
An under-the-radar Cleveland novelist, Raymond DeCapite should rightly be considered the bard of the South Side. The longtime Tremont resident absorbed the ethnic melting pot of the neighborhood from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and filled his novels with characters Cleveland through-and-through. His debut effort, The Coming of Fabrizze, reaches back to the ’20s for what The New York Times called a “modern folk tale filled with love, laughter and the joy of life,” among many sparkling reviews at the time. The story follows a hardworking laborer who returns to his native village in Italy to the celebration of the townsfolk and his family but is soon followed by his nephew, Cenino Fabrizze, who accompanies his uncle Augustine back to Cleveland just in time for the stock market crash. The novel’s deft portrayal of Italian-American immigrants’ hope and hard work in times both booming and less so was glowingly celebrated. His novels had been largely out of print and hard to find prior to his death in 2009, even though his son, Mike DeCapite, told Cleveland Magazine that none other than Don DeLillo, who loved Fabrizze, had sent a copy to the New York Review of Books in the hopes of reviving modern interest. Thankfully, the Kent State University Press reprinted this, and A Lost King, in 2010 so a new audience could discover what the generation before had so thoroughly enjoyed.
The Bluest Eye (1970)
Toni Morrison
“Since why is difficult to handle,” Toni Morrison wrote in the prologue to her debut novel The Bluest Eye, “one must take refuge in how.” Hailing from Lorain, Ohio, Morrison chronicled the anguish of the black American experience in 11 revelatory novels. And while much of her work is rooted in Northeast Ohio, The Bluest Eye feels especially divined from the community in which she grew up. Morrison has written that in her first book, she wanted to explore the tragic consequences of “accepting rejection as legitimate, as self-evident.” She follows a young black girl who wants, more than anything, blue eyes. Her prose is wondrous stuff. “Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then,” Morrison wrote. “We felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness. Jealousy we understood and thought natural — a desire to have what somebody else had; but envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.”
The Dead Key (2014)
D.M. Pulley
At first glance one might expect D.M. Pulley’s The Dead Key to be a vanity project destined for a future in the local highlights section of a Northeast Ohio bookstore or Cuyahoga County Library branch. In fact, a rediscovered safe deposit box key becomes the catalyst for a tense and well-paced novel that brings to life two different eras of Cleveland — the nadir of 1978 and the hopeful resurgence of the late 1990s. (Its bona fides also include winning the 2014 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.) The reader follows the exploits of two young women, two decades apart, as they investigate the hidden activities in a downtown bank, which of course are not entirely what they seem. Like most thrillers set in a specific place and time, overly pedantic readers will have their quibbles, but don’t let that get in the way of an entertaining tale with plenty of satisfying inside references to Cleveland.
The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread (1965, 2008)
Don Robertson
A road story set against one of the most devastating moments in Cleveland’s history, Don Robertson’s most beloved and well-regarded novel follows 9-year-old Morris Bird III as he sets out from his home on Edmunds Avenue off East 90th Street with his sister and wagon in tow to visit a friend across town. It is October 20, 1944, when gas leaked from an East Ohio Gas storage tank, seeped into the sewer system, and caught fire, exploding a good chunk of the east side. One hundred and thirty people died, 70 homes were destroyed, 600 were left homeless. Robertson’s tale of adventure, friendship, loyalty and childlike awe brought comparisons to Tom Sawyer when it was first published in 1965. (It was later reissued in 2008.) Robertson, a native Clevelander and former Plain Dealer reporter, was regarded as a mid-selling author, and though some of his novels found homes in big publishing houses, he also struggled to find an audience at times. Stephen King, who has said Robertson is one of his favorite novelists of all time, published one of Robertson’s last books on his imprint in 1987.
The End (2008)
Salvatore Scibona
Set on a single day in 1953 in Elephant Park, Cleveland, an Italian immigrant community modeled after Murray Hill, Scibona’s rhapsodic 2008 novel was all the rage in MFA circles in the late aughts. The Plain Dealer uttered Scibona’s name in the same breath as such modernist giants as T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein! Esquire called it a mashup of Joan Didion and Alfred Hitchcock. Scibona faded from view until the publication of his second novel, The Volunteer, but The End remains a forceful, and at times ravishing, novel of immigration and family bonds. It should be more widely embraced by Cleveland readers.
Memoirs of an Ex Prom Queen (1972, 2019)
Alix Kates Shulman
Forty-five years after it was first published and became a best-seller, Alix Kates Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex Prom Queen was reissued in 2019 by Picador, bringing the groundbreaking feminist novel to a whole new audience. Though The New York Times condescendingly dinged it upon its debut — “The publishers announce this angry little book as the first feminist novel” — it found a wide and eager audience thanks to its darkly comedic and fiercely honest portrayal of Sasha, a girl who, like the author, grows up in Cleveland in the 1940s and ’50s, a time when things like abortions, date rape, gender roles, sexuality and vanity are both explicitly buried below the surface of everyday life and yet define it all. From dating to marriage to motherhood and divorce and beyond, from hope to crushing resignation and what comes after, it was a consciousness-raising flashbulb delivered to a mass audience in digestible fiction form that, some five decades later, remains a vital read.
The Changelings (1955, 1985)
Jo Sinclair
“The real ghetto, [Jo Sinclair] believed, was the ‘ghetto of the spirit’ into which large numbers of Americans were herded as children, when their inability to rationally explain such rejection left them with a bewildering sense of shame (and ever-present fear) that would inhibit their full flowering,” the Cleveland Arts Prize notes of the author, its recipient in 1961 for the prize for literature. That, as critics and academics have eloquently addressed at further lengths since then, is at the heart of Sinclair’s four novels, and for good reason. Jo Sinclair was the pseudonym used by Ruth Seid from the time of her first submitted and published piece for Esquire in 1938 — written while she was working at the WPA during the Great Depression — when entry into the world was easier for someone who could be male, and not Jewish, as opposed to the Cleveland middle-class Jewish lesbian that she was. Her first novel, Wasteland (1945), might be her best known, but The Changelings, first published in 1955 and reissued in 1985, is her most complete. Set in an Italian-American Cleveland neighborhood that’s become more Jewish over time and has lately witnessed an influx of African-Americans, the book centers on two young female teens who battle back fiercely against the racism, anti-Semitism and “mob thinking” of their elders. The New York Times championed it for the “power with which the author reveals the impact of [racial] struggle on the new generation, whose survival lies in their power to love.” Half a century later, what Sinclair was talking about — of young generations challenging the ignorance inflicted upon them by the older generations around them, of acceptance and the erosion of racial, social and LGBT discrimination and hate — feels as relevant as when it was first published.
The Headmaster’s Papers (1983)
Richard Hawley
Richard Hawley is both a commercial best-selling author and someone who happens to be among some of your favorite authors’ favorite authors — count John Irving and Alice Munroe as fans. “Imagine a good man whose props have fallen away,” Hawley wrote in a journal before starting work on this book, which was first published by a small press in Vermont before receiving critical acclaim and a paperback reprinting from Bantam years later. That man is John Greeves, the headmaster at an all-boys private school in Cleveland. (Hawley would, months after the publication of this book, himself become the headmaster of University School.) This episolatory novel — a form in which the entire story is delivered by letters, notes, addresses, etc. — traces, in absolutely heartbreaking fashion, the changes in his professional and personal lives, which are driving the headmaster into uncharted and uncomfortable territory. His wife is dying, his son is an addict, his tethers to all that defined him are disappearing, and in letter after letter, speech after speech, life is propelling him toward the end as he attempts to grasp one last bit of autonomy from the wreckage.
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