100 Books Like Emily Dickinson's Poems

This early American novel starts off with an episode of human spontaneous combustion, followed by repeated episodes of characters hearing disembodied voices.

Brown’s novel uses these Gothic devices and a couple of real-life murder cases to explore religious and political issues that preoccupied Americans in the years after the Revolution. How do we know whether we’re really being guided by reason? What is the basis of authority?

Most editions of Wieland include Brown’s prequel Memoirs of Carwin, which complicates the story by placing one of the main characters in an Illuminati-like organization. American Gothic literature pretty much starts here.  

Hawthorne’s House has a little of everything: mystery, romance, the supernatural, family treachery, and a surprising dose of humor.

A family curse, dating back to the days of New England witch trials, hangs over a present-day (1850s) land dispute, pitting strange but lovable Hepzibah and Clifford Pyncheon against their scheming, powerful cousin Jaffrey.

While much of the Gothic plot concerns the way the past controls the present, the novel also involves technologies that will help shape the future: photography (which is linked here to spiritualism) and, in one memorable scene, the railroad.

The popularity of the book and its 1940 film adaptation helped make the house that inspired Hawthorne a tourist attraction (which I also highly recommend) in Salem, Massachusetts.

This might seem like a strange pick, since it’s almost never described in terms of Gothicism.

Douglass’s narrative is essential reading regardless—a compelling narrative and one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century literature. What makes it Gothic? In Douglass’s world, nothing is what it appears to be, because slavery has corrupted not only institutions but virtually all personal relationships. There are trap doors everywhere and a constant threat of violence.

A century and a half before Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Douglass’s book describes the Gothic horror of everyday life under slavery.

No one reads this book nowadays, but in the 1840s and 50s, readers were captivated: it was the nation’s most popular novel. Published in monthly installments, the style is lurid, hallucinatory, a fever delirium, as befits a hastily improvised serial novel written by Edgar Allen Poe’s bestie.

The plot is impossible to summarize, but try this: “Monks Hall” is a place where Philadelphia’s elite—politicians, ministers, publishers, medical professors, businessmen, judges, and lawyers—go to fraternally seduce and rape virgins, torture and murder their enemies, and revel in their hypocrisy. And the ringleader, or maybe just the concierge, is Devil-Bug, a ghoulish murderer, blackmailer, thief, and bodysnatcher.

The novel consists of a succession of terrible things these terrible men do to good women, orphans, and weak men. One bad thing after another… It’s like Dickens on a bad acid trip. And, of course, anatomy figures. I’ll just cite two memorable scenes. First,… show more.

This is the book that enabled me to make the transition from legal writer to novelist. I purchased it at an aspiring writer’s conference without knowing it was well-respected in the publishing industry. I quickly liked the clearly stated, practical guidelines: show not tell, resist the urge to explain, what is point of view, dialogue that works, easy beats. And the book contains humorous illustrations by George Booth. Every writer needs a laugh in the midst of giving birth. 

This writing instruction book came to my aid as I began to teach writing at Harvard University in the late 1990s, when I was trying to help college students cultivate their own voice as writers.

The title was brilliant, surprising the reader that the subject was revision and not writing, per se. This focused on a fundamental truth, which is that good writing – whether it be fiction or non-fiction, artistic or professional – almost always goes through several revisions. Students often recoil at the idea of revisions because they threaten to burden them with more work.

What Murray underlined (and a point I’ve reiterated) is that revisions provide the opportunity to improve your work. The more that writers are comfortable with making revisions, the easier it will be to cultivate and improve their voices in their written work.

I loved this book so much – and found it so incredibly useful in manuscript revisions — that I ran to my laptop and sent the author a fan letter. If you need help wrestling your manuscript into shape or inspiration to keep improving a story, immediately grab this book — and lots of sticky flags to mark pages. The author, with a ton of developmental editing experience, writes with a friendly style and an affection for storytelling. She explains how to find problems in your manuscript and how to fix them. It’s great for fiction or nonfiction—I’m using it now for revisions on a novel.

Writers often struggle to think of themselves as “writers” because the world has us believing that we can only carry that title if we are successfully published, and of course words such as “success” and even “published” can be fraught with subjective controversy. One of the lessons I learned from Brenda Ueland, among other great thinkers, is that we need to focus first on our own authenticity and only much, much later dare we think about what the world might have to say. This allowed me to let go and move on and trust myself on my writing path. It wasn’t easy, but as emphasized in If You Want to Write, we will be all right if we believe in our inner richness.  

Considered to be the longest poem in the world, the Sanskrit Mahabharata is comprised of around 1.8 million words (for comparison: the combined length of the seven Harry Potter books is barely 1.1 million words). At 928 pages, Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling is by no means a short book, but it does make the massive Sanskrit epic very accessible for general readers. While the Sanskrit Mahabharata is primarily composed in couplets called shlokas, Carole Satyamurti’s masterful retelling is in blank verse, which is the meter of my two favorite English epics: John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Jack Mitchell’s The Odyssey of Star Wars. I also especially love the way Satyamurti presents Karna, the secret elder brother of Pandavas and one of the greatest tragic heroes in world literature. 

Oof, this book is heartbreaking/heartmaking.

I love hearing Andrea read it because of the feeling conveyed in their voice and the way it brings out the musicality in their incredible words. There is also something mesmerizing about reading it on the page, having the time to taste the words and all the space in between the lines.

Andrea’s writing is raw, visceral, and bittersweet-hurts-so-good kind of writing. Their poetry goes right to the quick. This is a book for the ages that, every time I read it, distills for me what matters in my life.