Here are 100 books that Twilight fans have personally recommended if you like
Twilight.
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I am passionate about this topic for two main reasons. The first is the narrative skill required to write a story with or from the perspective of a fully-formed, believable child character. I admire this skill, and I think it is deeply important, which leads me to my second reason. Stories about children in need, danger, and overwhelming burden are deeply moving and are a quick way into another person’s perspective. While one may be able to brush away the experiences of adults, and, importantly, justify this dismissal, the child begins in a position of sympathy and vulnerability, which automatically triggers a reader’s care.
As someone who considers her brother her creative muse, I would describe this novel as one interested in siblings.
Between Leonie and Given, and Jojo and Kayla is an indescribable, utterly unique bond, held within and beyond both family and friendship.
I was utterly consumed by this heartbreaking novel. From the opening scene where Pop and Jojo kill and skin a goat, to the heat in Leonie’s car and the scene of Jojo’s police cuffing, Ward delivers a pace, language, and viscerality that means you can’t look away.
Somewhat surprisingly, I was even compelled by the book’s ghostly elements. I found they enhanced the magnitude of the characters’ burdens, especially for thirteen-year-old Jojo, who already shoulders so much.
I highly recommend this book, as a pleasure and as a duty to your fellow human beings.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2017
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S BEST BOOKS OF 2017
SELECTED AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE NEW STATESMAN, THE FINANCIAL TIMES, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, TIME AND THE BBC
Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Finalist for the Kirkus Prize
Finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
'This wrenching new novel by Jesmyn Ward digs deep into the not-buried heart of the American nightmare. A must' Margaret Atwood
'A powerfully…
Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: “Are his love songs closer to heaven than dying?” Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard it…
I’m a human being who struggles with feeling human. When I was 17, I got my brain pretty shaken up after a traumatic event, causing a swathe of memory loss and mental health problems. How do you regain a sense of yourself when chunks of your childhood memories, your skills, and your sense of self have disappeared? Here are some books that grapple with that question, and others.
I grew up with and write horror stories, so it’s very difficult for a book to unnerve me; this is one of the only books I can think of that earns the honor. It is half an ecological text and half a horror story, with its romantic prose balanced by intense natural research to create a surreal, unnerving description of the natural world.
This book made me hyper-aware of everything from the grass outside my window to the cells that make up my body, and I love how it uses both existential horror and the real, biological horror of being a living creature to leave a lasting unease. Are you aware you’re breathing? Can you feel your tongue in your mouth? Your heart’s nonstop beating? You can, now.
THE FIRST VOLUME OF THE EXTRAORDINARY SOUTHERN REACH TRILOGY - NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ALEX GARLAND (EX MACHINA) AND STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAAC
For thirty years, Area X has remained mysterious and remote behind its intangible border - an environmental disaster zone, though to all appearances an abundant wilderness.
The Southern Reach, a secretive government agency, has sent eleven expeditions to investigate Area X. One has ended in mass suicide, another in a hail of gunfire, the eleventh in a fatal cancer epidemic.
I’ve always loved books about outsiders and stories that make you palpably feel what others do. In real life and fiction, the characters that interest me most are often outsiders. Because characters on the outside of social groups and norms are often isolated and lonely, there is something so powerful about works that can bring you inside their experience and relate what their inner life is like. Interiority is the great strength of literature, and stories that convey the inner architecture of outsiders have always attracted me. I love books that make me feel deeply connected and that linger in my subconscious long after I’ve read them.
This book haunted me for days after I finished reading it. I felt like someone I loved had died. Few works of art have stuck with me the way O’Connnor’s book did. Its main characters—Hazel Motes and Enoch Emery—are the epitome of outsiders. I grew up in a religious family in Kentucky, so I can understand Motes’ struggle with faith. The way that Motes and Emery are so severely separated from the rest of humanity is affecting them.
The book caused me to passionately take their side, rooting for them and their cause, sharing in their anger towards the rest of mankind. This book had such a powerful emotional impact and influence on me, leaving me with a palpable feeling of hopelessness and catharsis over several weeks—unlike I’ve experienced with any other work of art.
Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's first novel, is the story of Hazel Motes who, released from the armed services, returns to the evangelical Deep South. There he begins a private battle against the religiosity of the community and in particular against Asa Hawkes, the 'blind' preacher, and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter. In desperation Hazel founds his own religion, 'The Church without Christ', and this extraordinary narrative moves towards its savage and macabre resolution.
'A literary talent that has about it the uniqueness of greatness.' Sunday Telegraph
'No other major American writer of our century has constructed a fictional world so energetically…
Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: “Are his love songs closer to heaven than dying?” Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard it…
I was lucky enough to land a job teaching English at the University of Montevallo, a small public liberal arts college where I have had the opportunity to explore my strange academic interests and teach classes with titles like “Am I Human?” and “Southern Neogothic II: Disability, Hicksploitation, Meat.” When I got tenure, I also had the time and freedom to try my hand at writing the kind of Southern Gothic, Bizarro, and Horror tales that I have always adored. From Mad Magazine to MaddAddam, I have always craved dark satire, body horror, and the grotesque. It’s in my blood.
I love this novel because it mixes Southern Gothic with speculative fiction in a hilarious epic struggle between man and hog. When middle-aged taxidermist Romie Futch becomes a research subject in the shady Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience, he becomes both super genius and guinea pig, his middle-aged brain now brilliant beyond comprehension. Troubled by errant downloads that track his thoughts and actions, Romie turns taxidermy into pop art as he hunts down the legendary super pig “Hogzilla.” This is the funniest, wittiest book I’ve read in a long time.
From the author of The Wilds, which Publishers Weekly called “a brilliant combination of emotion and grime, wit and horror,” comes a debut novel that is part dystopian satire, part Southern Gothic tall tale: a disturbing yet hilarious romp through a surreal New South where newfangled medical technologies change the structure of the human brain and genetically modified feral animals ravage the blighted landscape.
Down on his luck and still pining for his ex-wife, South Carolina taxidermist Romie Futch spends his evenings drunkenly surfing the Internet before passing out on his couch. In a last-ditch attempt to pay his mortgage,…
As a writer, I consider myself lucky to be born and raised in the Deep South. Although I currently live near Los Angeles, I continue to draw upon the region’s complex history, regional color, eccentric characters, and rich atmosphere for inspiration. I also love to read fiction set in the South, especially mysteries and thrillers—the more atmospheric, the better!
Not for the squeamish, this gothic tale of a depraved serial killer in rural Tennessee is probably the closest Cormac McCarthy ever came to writing a horror novel. For all the sordidness, the power of the author’s language shines through. I enjoyed the humor, pathos, and psychological insight woven in throughout
As with other McCarthy novels I’ve read, this book contains beautiful sentences and phrases, as well as searing images, that have lingered in my mind for years.
In this taut, chilling novel from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road, Lester Ballard—a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape—haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail.
While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance.
"Like the novelists he admires-Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner-Cormac McCarthy has created an imaginative oeuvre greater and deeper than any single book. Such writers wrestle with the gods themselves." —Washington Post
Look for Cormac McCarthy's new novel, The Passenger.
As both a librarian and a writer, I've dedicated my life to reading, creating, and recommending books that blur genres. I'm always searching for something that jams Sci-Fi, Horror, Mystery, Fantasy, and Romance together with LitFic. Every week, I'm trying to put something unique into a library patron's hands, something that may not be on the New York Times best sellers list...or may not even be in a genre they knew existed. There's so much good literature out there and I want people to be able to find the weirdest things their hearts desire...and maybe I'll write that thing along the way if it doesn't already exist.
This is the most beautiful book I have ever read. Seriously. Line to line, nothing beats it! I’m never not thinking of Russell’s work. One sister quests for love with the ghost of a dead canal bargeman in the Florida Everglades, while her younger, alligator-wrestling sister follows her with the Bird Man, hoping to rescue her from a tragic fate.
I thought it was hilarious that while this epic quest is going on, their third sibling is working at a trashy amusement park to financially support their family. It sounds like a lot jammed together, but Russell doesn’t make a single misstep. I was wondering the whole time what was real and what was fantasy, and the truth is one of the most devastating reveals in all of fiction.
New York Times Bestseller | Pulitzer Prize Finalist
"Ms. Russell is one in a million. . . . A suspensfuly, deeply haunted book."--The New York Times
Thirteen-year-old Ava Bigtree has lived her entire life at Swamplandia!, her family’s island home and gator-wrestling theme park in the Florida Everglades. But when illness fells Ava’s mother, the park’s indomitable headliner, the family is plunged into chaos; her father withdraws, her sister falls in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, defects to a rival park called The World of Darkness.
Raised alongside three feral younger brothers in the rash-inducing, subtropical climate of Cairo, Georgia, I am a lifelong resident of the South. A circumstance, no doubt, leaving an indelible mark on my voice as a writer. At this point in my writing career, I write what I know. As a reader, I enjoy exploring the rich stories woven by Southern authors, capturing other places, people, and experiences beyond my own frame of reference. Ultimately, as a Southerner, I endeavor to reconcile the South’s troubled past of racial and social oppression with the romanticized notion others have of this place I call home.
Truman Capote’s 1948 debut novel holds a special place with me because it was my introduction to Southern Gothic when I was thirteen. A coming-of-age tale, it takes place at Scully’s Landing, a decaying mansion in Mississippi.
Rich with place and atmosphere, the book follows lonesome thirteen-year-old Joel Harrison Knox, who travels to live with his father, an emotionally unavailable presence who abandoned the boy at birth. Replete with a cast of the peculiar and grotesque, this book holds firm with literary merit and thematical relevance.
Truman Capote’s first novel is a story of almost supernatural intensity and inventiveness, an audacious foray into the mind of a sensitive boy as he seeks out the grown-up enigmas of love and death in the ghostly landscape of the deep South.
At the age of twelve, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully’s Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face—and heart—of a debauched child; and…
Raised alongside three feral younger brothers in the rash-inducing, subtropical climate of Cairo, Georgia, I am a lifelong resident of the South. A circumstance, no doubt, leaving an indelible mark on my voice as a writer. At this point in my writing career, I write what I know. As a reader, I enjoy exploring the rich stories woven by Southern authors, capturing other places, people, and experiences beyond my own frame of reference. Ultimately, as a Southerner, I endeavor to reconcile the South’s troubled past of racial and social oppression with the romanticized notion others have of this place I call home.
This 2002 novel follows young Harriet Cleve Dufresnes in 1970s Mississippi during the aftermath of the death of her nine-year-old brother, who was killed by hanging in the shadow of unexplained circumstances. I am particularly enamored by the novel’s focus on the customs and dynamics of Harriet’s extended Southern family.
Tartt best describes in her own words why I love this novel: It is “a frightening, scary book about children coming into contact with the world of adults frighteningly.”
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Goldfinch comes an utterly riveting novel set in Mississippi of childhood, innocence, and evil. • “Destined to become a special kind of classic.” —The New York Times Book Review
The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents’ yard. Twelve years later Robin’s murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin’s sister Harriet—unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets…
I’ve been in the funeral profession my entire professional career, and my family has deep roots in the profession too. My great-great-great grandfather was a cabinet maker, or “tradesman undertaker” in rural Milford, Delaware prior to the Civil War. In addition to being a funeral director and embalmer, I’m a certified post-mortem reconstructionist and cremationist, and the president of the Delaware State Funeral Directors Association. I’ve written five books on the subject of the funeral profession and am an associate editor for Southern Calls, “The Journal of the Funeral Profession.”
As I said before, I love history, and Puckle’s book gives the reader a great look into the why of our funeral customs. As in: why do we send funeral flowers? (To which Puckle offers the glib answer, “the half sovereign he paid for it save him from the mental exercise of composing a suitable letter of condolence” before offering a serious explanation). Sure, the book was published almost a century ago, but that has no bearing on the contents. It’s an evergreen book and a highly recommended read for serious funereal scholars or those considering a career in funeral service.
Puckle's "Funeral Customs" is one of the more in-depth looks at death ever penned. Created in the early 20th century, it casts a rational and skeptical glance at the superstitions of burial practices and cremation alike, and lists in some detail the customs of death over time and changes to them during the black death and then-modernity among other eras. Not just a European work, it delves into Hinduism as well as Egyptian and Zoroastrian practices from antiquity.
From the memento mori to funeral feasts, its pages are filled with interesting folklore, astonishing history, and more than a few bits…
Before I turned twenty-five, I lost my father to illness, my brother to a car accident, and a cousin to murder. Experiencing this string of tragedies so young profoundly changed me. As a writer, I’ve often worried that my naked grief on the page would come across as soft, cloyingly sentimental, and wholly without bite. Over the years, I have looked to examples of books that deal with death, grief, and mourning with a kind of brutal honesty. I sought out writing that conveyed the reality of loss in all its messiness. Reading these beautiful, honest accounts of grief have always made me feel less alone in mine.
This book is a classic for a reason. It’s a sobering (and deeply entertaining) look at the industry of death.
With so few universal truths, one would imagine that humanity’s shared capacity to understand our own mortality would be a source of connection. Instead, it feels like the mechanics of death and everything surrounding it, get shoved under the carpet in our desperation to avoid the topic.
As Mitford lifts the veil on the funeral industry, it becomes apparent how important it is to shine a light on the things we’re most afraid of.
Only the scathing wit and searching intelligence of Jessica Mitford could turn an exposé of the American funeral industry into a book that is at once deadly serious and side-splittingly funny. When first published in 1963, this landmark of investigative journalism became a runaway bestseller and resulted in legislation to protect grieving families from the unscrupulous sales practices of those in "the dismal trade."
Just before her death in 1996, Mitford thoroughly revised and updated her classic study. The American Way of Death Revisited confronts new trends, including the success of the profession's lobbyists in Washington, inflated cremation costs, the…
