100 Books Like The Complete Cosmicomics

I am a huge fan of the very-brief gothic. It’s so hard to do well; trivial jump-scares are easy, but to produce a meaningful effect in only a few pages takes real precision. Shirley Jackson holds the crown with "The Lottery," but my second favorite instance of a surprisingly quick read that produces a real gasp is Angela Carter’s mini-treasure, "The Werewolf."

It manages to be a fairy tale, feminist critique, a witch, and a werewolf story all at once—and, like the beast in the title, it may not be what it appears. Also wonderful to me are "The Company of Wolves," "The Snow Child," and the eponymous "The Bloody Chamber," that one a revisioning of "Bluebeard"—essentially, Carter updates all kinds of dark fairy tales, bringing out their subversive shadows for a savvy reader. Still so fresh to this day.

Some of the stories in this collection, like my own stories, use surreal metaphor, expressing poetic imagery in prose form; others are more about the thrill of absurdity. Though surrealism existed before the term or movement existed (in visual art and literature e.g. Lewis Carroll, Hieronymus Bosch, etc.), Andre Breton and his mates really went for it. Here you can read works by Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel, Louis Aragon, Leonora Carrington, and more. What I love about all of these artists is their obvious joy in discovering the surreal or poetic image, a joy I know well, and their absolute passion for the importance and potency of expressing such imagery. 

This is a wonderful selection of short stories and novel extracts by early authors of strange, weird, surreal fiction; writers whose subject is the so-called supernatural and who rail against the reduction of life to rational materialism. These works would broadly now be referred to as weird fiction. They are only as weird as the world. The book also contains an excellent introduction by the editor, speaking up for the strange, weird, and surreal.

This is the book I used to read with a torch under the bedcovers as a kid. It introduced me to many great science fiction writers. My copy had an excellent cover depicting an ice cream with an eyeball staring out of it. I loved entering the book’s different worlds. It inspired me to lie awake at night, speculating about the universe, only to awake the next morning wondering if this was the day when the school teacher would say, ‘OK enough of these spellings and sums, let’s talk about why life exists.’ I still don’t understand why it never happened.

I was captivated by this epic tale of Grazia dei Rossi, secretary to the powerful wife of the Pope’s physician and the daughter of a powerful banker.

The book gave me a fascinating peek into Jewish life in Renaissance Italy as Grazia struggles between the temptations of Christian life and the pull of her Jewish heritage.

Would you dare to follow your dream and move or retire to Italy? Stef & Nico did, although their dog Sara had her doubts. Now from your comfortable armchair, you can share in the hilarious & horrendous adventures they experienced when they moved to Italy to start a bed and breakfast. For lovers of amusing travelogue memoirs who like a good laugh. Moreover, for those interested in practical advice on buying a house in Italy there is valuable information along the way, pleasantly presented within the short stories. Glossary of Italian words and expressions included!

It is an anthology of essays that provide a range of topics and approaches to women who lived and worked in these small towns, now spectacularly preserved despite their sudden destruction by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE. The lives lived here tend towards the gritty, workaday world with studies of women in business and trade, although elite women, public priestesses, also make an appearance. Two that feature women's names scratched on walls (graffiti) and drawings of women etched in or painted on Pompeian walls (by Erika Zimmermann Damer and Margaret L. Laird) argue for women's (partial) literacy and their greater visibility. These essays do much to make the fascinating archaeological material accessible.

In her decades of work on Italy’s Fascist era, Marla Stone has shown an especially keen eye for the development of the regime’s policies and ideologies, whether in the sphere of art and culture, or that of political violence and imperialist aggression. Here Stone offers a succinct and penetrating overview of the origins, rise, consolidation, and eventual crash of Fascism in Italy, followed by a translation of some three dozen primary documents—about a third of which were otherwise unavailable in English—to illustrate her narrative. Particularly chilling are the propaganda texts from 1938 on, when Mussolini’s grandiose claims to the legacy of ancient Rome took a back seat to full-blown racial politics, “as Italians were declared ‘Aryans’ and biological anti-Semitism became part of official ideology.”

I wanted to include this book because it focuses not only on women in the Renaissance but on the particular experience of a Jewish woman living and writing in seventeenth-century Venice.

Even though the Venetian republic proclaimed justice and equality, those ideals did not extend to women nor to the thousands of Jews and other non-Christians who made their home in the city. As a Jewish woman, Sarra Copia Sulam had to navigate prejudice and suspicion on two fronts, yet she courageously defended herself and her faith in print.

The book does a wonderful job of showing how Sulam used her dexterous pen to take on her critics, and Westwater’s account reveals new biographical information about Sulam, her family, and Jewish life in the Renaissance.

This is primarily a novel about the life of Saint Benedict. Several minor miracles occur through his acts of faith; he becomes convinced that he is to establish an alternative society in the form of a chain of monasteries – Citadels of God; he despises the rampant political intrigues and the lures of worldly success; and he has a significant influence on several important historical characters. Secondary plots somewhat distract from the main theme.

This book gave me very helpful insights into the political and religious life in the Roman Empire in the first half of the sixth century and paints a very impressive picture of the saint and his passion to serve God wholeheartedly.