100 Books Like Hellfire

When I started writing The Majesties, I wanted the narrative to be a continual excavation of secrets, one after the other. This sort of multi-layered story has always intrigued me and my fascination with it has influenced all my written work so far. I am particularly fascinated by books where characters unconsciously keep secrets from themselves, and where the line between the “real” and the fantastic is blurred beyond recognition. Sometimes it’s not just about solving a mystery, but articulating its mysteriousness—giving it flesh and bone, stitching its parts together, and bringing it to life through words.

When I started writing The Majesties, I wanted the narrative to be a continual excavation of secrets, one after the other. This sort of multi-layered story has always intrigued me and my fascination with it has influenced all my written work so far. I am particularly fascinated by books where characters unconsciously keep secrets from themselves, and where the line between the “real” and the fantastic is blurred beyond recognition. Sometimes it’s not just about solving a mystery, but articulating its mysteriousness—giving it flesh and bone, stitching its parts together, and bringing it to life through words.

When I started writing The Majesties, I wanted the narrative to be a continual excavation of secrets, one after the other. This sort of multi-layered story has always intrigued me and my fascination with it has influenced all my written work so far. I am particularly fascinated by books where characters unconsciously keep secrets from themselves, and where the line between the “real” and the fantastic is blurred beyond recognition. Sometimes it’s not just about solving a mystery, but articulating its mysteriousness—giving it flesh and bone, stitching its parts together, and bringing it to life through words.

When I started writing The Majesties, I wanted the narrative to be a continual excavation of secrets, one after the other. This sort of multi-layered story has always intrigued me and my fascination with it has influenced all my written work so far. I am particularly fascinated by books where characters unconsciously keep secrets from themselves, and where the line between the “real” and the fantastic is blurred beyond recognition. Sometimes it’s not just about solving a mystery, but articulating its mysteriousness—giving it flesh and bone, stitching its parts together, and bringing it to life through words.

The Multiverse had been my deepest passion of interest for a long time. Experiencing crossover stories in various mediums, both official and fan-made, especially fan-made. To see how two different worlds would meet. I spent hours reading fanfictions involving crossovers, as well as conjuring up my own. I considered the multiverse as a grand bedrock to create any story, hence why I wrote The Mariverse, followed by The Mariverse: Guardians, to create my own bedrock for my writing career.

Anurag Anand is a keen observer of humankind. He believes that the diversity of human emotions, motivations, and actions offer him a rich palette of tones to paint his stories with. He is the author of thirteen books across genres like self-help, historical fiction, crime thrillers, and contemporary fiction. Anurag’s works have been lauded for their realism, simplicity, and sharp characterization by readers across the spectrum. Of course, he is an avid reader and likes to remain abreast with the developments in the Indian writing space. He is a familiar face (and voice) in literature festivals, television debates and other related forums across the country.  

Since an early age, I loved getting lost in a good story and knew I wanted to be a writer one day. As an adult, I tried writing in many genres but it was when I had my children that I knew I wanted to write children’s bedtime stories. I loved that special time at the end of a busy day when I could snuggle down with my children and get lost in a story with them. I now write children's bedtime stories for a podcast called Koko Sleep. The stories are written in a soothing way and are designed to help the listeners drift easily to sleep.

I’ve been fascinated by how people behave and how in-group bias can change who they are. That interest led me into computational sociology (I study human behavior for a living), with my work appearing in The New York Times, USA Today, WIRED, and more. But my deepest fascination has always been with people’s propensity for the horrific. I LOVE the liminal space where fear, secrecy, and belonging collide. Being neurodivergent, living in a small Virginia town with my wife and our neurodivergent, queer son, I see how communities can both shelter and suffocate. That tension is why I’m drawn to stories saturated in dread, beauty, and what lives in the shadows.

In 2011, after years reporting on media and technology for Wired, I published The Art of Immersion, about how digital technology is changing the way we tell stories. Then I joined Columbia University’s Digital Storytelling Lab, started the executive education course Strategic Storytelling, and put together the toolkit that inspired The Sea We Swim In. The ostensible subject of all this was storytelling, but the common thread, I came to realize, was the role stories play: They facilitate pattern recognition, the skill we need to make sense of our random world. The pattern that’s governed the past 15 years of my life, in other words, has been pattern recognition. 

I’m a law professor who, among other things, writes about the culture and law of secrecy. I’ve written two books: Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture, the second edition of which was published in 2008, and The Transparency Fix: Secrets, Leaks, and Uncontrollable Government Information (2017). I hold a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and I teach at the University of Florida.