Here are 100 books that The Artist fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve been writing queer historical romances/murder mysteries since the third grade when I accidentally wrote a pretty homoerotic Sherlock Holmes fanfiction despite being too young to know what any of those words meant. I’m now both a writer and reader of the genre and while I’m delighted that so many other people love gay historical romance as much as I do, I feel like I always see the same few books recommended. I wanted to share some of my lesser-known favorites so that they can get the love they richly deserve and so that there are more people who can geek-out about them with me!
Imagine The Terror but with more gay romance and fewer allegorical monsters. I’m a huge polar exploration nerd, and this is one of the best polar novels I’ve read and one of the best queer historical romance novels as well.
It’s an incredibly well-researched beautiful love story that unfolds via letters and ship’s logs. The fact that so few people have heard of this gem of a book is mind-boggling.
In 1845, the HMS Vanguard, under the command of Captain William Caulderson, departed England on a voyage of discovery to find a Northwest Passage through the perilous arctic waters separating the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It was never heard from again.
Five years later, Captain David Maxwell of the Serapis sets sail to attempt to recover the Vanguard and determine the fate of his former commander.
Naturalist Embleton Hall is running from demons of his own. He doesn’t expect to find himself drawn to Captain Maxwell--but the two men form a bond that will become essential to their survival.
I’ve been writing queer historical romances/murder mysteries since the third grade when I accidentally wrote a pretty homoerotic Sherlock Holmes fanfiction despite being too young to know what any of those words meant. I’m now both a writer and reader of the genre and while I’m delighted that so many other people love gay historical romance as much as I do, I feel like I always see the same few books recommended. I wanted to share some of my lesser-known favorites so that they can get the love they richly deserve and so that there are more people who can geek-out about them with me!
If you told me a few years ago that one of my favorite books ever would end up being a fanfiction of a swashbuckling Silver Screen Era movie based on a Victorian Era adventure novel, I wouldn’t have believed you, but I’ve read this book several times and have the audiobook almost perpetually on loan from the library.
I think most fans of KJ Charles skip this one because they think they need to be familiar with the source material (The Prisoner of Zenda) but this scorching, action-packed novel from the villain’s point of blows the original out of the water.
Jasper Detchard is a disgraced British officer, now selling his blade to the highest bidder. Currently that's Michael Elphberg, half-brother to the King of Ruritania. Michael wants the throne for himself, and Jasper is one of the scoundrels he hires to help him take it. But when Michael makes his move, things don’t go entirely to plan—and the penalty for treason is death.Rupert of Hentzau is Michael's newest addition to his sinister band of henchmen. Charming, lethal, and intolerably handsome, Rupert is out for his own ends—which seem to include getting Jasper into bed. But Jasper needs to work out…
I’ve been writing queer historical romances/murder mysteries since the third grade when I accidentally wrote a pretty homoerotic Sherlock Holmes fanfiction despite being too young to know what any of those words meant. I’m now both a writer and reader of the genre and while I’m delighted that so many other people love gay historical romance as much as I do, I feel like I always see the same few books recommended. I wanted to share some of my lesser-known favorites so that they can get the love they richly deserve and so that there are more people who can geek-out about them with me!
A fun, festive little romance that I re-read any time of the year when I need a little more warmth in my heart.
Honestly, I could go on about the fun country manor setting, the delightful side characters, or the sweet relationship between the two leads, but all I’m going to say is that it has one of the most amazing, over-the-top romance novel covers ever and it is 1000% worth checking out for that reason alone.
I’ve been writing queer historical romances/murder mysteries since the third grade when I accidentally wrote a pretty homoerotic Sherlock Holmes fanfiction despite being too young to know what any of those words meant. I’m now both a writer and reader of the genre and while I’m delighted that so many other people love gay historical romance as much as I do, I feel like I always see the same few books recommended. I wanted to share some of my lesser-known favorites so that they can get the love they richly deserve and so that there are more people who can geek-out about them with me!
I love finding a great new book, and then realizing it’s only the first in the series of many, many more!
A cross between queer romance and Golden Age detective fiction, I love being drawn into the charming English university setting with each novel and curling up to find out how the two professors are going to solve a cozy murder while falling even deeper in love.
Will there be punting on the Cam? Shakespeare puns? Edwardian-era tailoring? Yes, yes, and yes!
I love travelogues and wrote a dual POV travel memoir with my husband. Travel writing allows us to see the world through others’ eyes, and my favorites are by those who used travel as a way to escape or heal. I’m more invested when I know this person not just wants, but needsthis journey. I understand this feeling. I empathize with them, I root for them, and I am happy for them when they reach their destination. I adoreEat, Pray, Loveand Wild, and want to recommend five other memoirs that have stayed with me as examples of brave people who left home behind in search of something better.
Jeremy had a career as a crime reporter that had recently turned from exciting to dangerous. He flew to Paris with little money and nowhere to go. Serendipity led him to Shakespeare and Company, a bookstore along the Seine with a perfect view of Notre Dame.
The owner, George, allowed authors to reside for free at the store, resulting in a continuous rotation of vagabonds searching for purpose, inspiration, or just a bed among the bookshelves.
I loved meeting this cast of eccentric writers from around the world, finding camaraderie at this literary haven. It reminded me how quickly travelers can bond over a shared experience, and how sometimes a place can be the most interesting and vivid character of them all.
"Some bookstores are filled with stories both inside and outside the bindings. These are places of sanctuary, even redemption---and Jeremy Mercer has found both amid the stacks of Shakespeare & Co." ---Paul Collins, author of Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books
In a small square on the left bank of the Seine, the door to a green-fronted bookshop beckoned. . . .
With gangsters on his tail and his meager savings in hand, crime reporter Jeremy Mercer fled Canada in 1999 and ended up in Paris. Broke and almost homeless, he found himself invited to a tea party…
I’m a Brooklyn-born writer of what’s now called “creative nonfiction,” and whatever literary success I’ve had, I attribute in part to having studied the works of Hunter S. Thompson, Henry Miller, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Joseph Heller. I’ve assimilated their voices and used them as guides to help me find my own voice. Read any of my books and you’ll find subtle (and at times not so subtle) echoes of this Holy Quintet. My latest book, A Brooklyn Memoir, is in part an homage to Miller’s Black Spring.
I read Tropic of Cancerat the beginning of my writing career, soon after I’d begun living on my own for the first time. Miller’s life as a Brooklyn boy in Paris, struggling to survive and to write, seemed similar in so many ways to my own life in Manhattan. I’ve since readTropic of Cancer multiple times and have portions memorized. I went through a phase where everything I wrote came out sounding like Henry Miller—that’s how taken I was by his voice. Miller taught me that it’s possible to write a great book that’s voice-driven rather than plot-driven.
I’m a cultural anthropologist with a passion for exploring how we humans make meaning of the wonderful, terrible, startling, often-absurd existence in which we find ourselves. My research has taken me from NYC’s underground occult scene to the conflict-resolution strategies of Central Peru; from circus performers in Portland, Maine, grappling with their physical potential, to a comedy club in Berlin where I set out to discover the secret sauce for evoking “collective joy” amongst strangers.I am drawn to artistic works that mix genres and defy categorization… and thus have a penchant for alienating editors, librarians, and bookstore owners who struggle to identify on which shelf my books belong.
Volume 1 of Nin’s series is my rainy day read when I don’t want to leave the house but still want to feel connected to humanity. It’s sleepy. There’s no real plot. What drama occurs takes place primarily within the author’s mind as she reflects upon what it is to be an ambitious writer (specifically, an ambitious femalewriter) in 1930s bohemian Paris. There is plenty of Eros in it—most famously her relationship with Henry and June Miller. But, again, this remains primarily within the author’s mind, acting as further fodder in her quest to uncover her truest emotional core.
**What exactly is the difference between a “memoir” and a “diary”? Please write to me via my website if you have thoughts on this.
The acclaimed author details her bohemian life in 1930s Paris—including her famous affair with Henry Miller—in the classic first volume of her diaries.
Born in France to Cuban parents, Anais Nin began keeping a diary at the age of eleven and continued the practice for the rest of her life. Confessional, scandalous, and thoroughly absorbing, her diaries became one of the most celebrated literary projects of the twentieth century. Writing candidly of her marriages and affairs—including those with psychoanalyst Otto Rank and author Henry Miller—Nin presents a passionate and detailed record of a modern woman’s journey of self-discovery. Edited and…
My father, when he consented to talk about all the moments in his life when the odds against his survival were so small as to make them statistically non-existent, would say, ‘I was lucky.’ Trying to understand what he meant got me started on this book. As well as being a novelist, I’m a poker player. Luck is a subject that every poker player has a relationship to; more importantly it’s a subject that every person has a relationship to. The combination of family history and intellectual curiosity and the gambler’s desire to win drove me on this quest.
Argentinians in 1950s Paris argue about art and philosophy. They fall in and out of love to a jazz soundtrack. The novel itself is in love with the modern city and the secret patterns of chance. Prefacing it is a ‘table of instructions’ in which the author writes that "this book consists of many books, but two books above all. The first can be read in a normal fashion and it ends with Chapter 56... The second should be read by beginning with Chapter 73 and then following the sequence indicated at the end of each chapter."
There’s an exhilaration of structure, a deadpan formal playfulness that still thrills. It’s the book that taught me the most about reading. And, not entirely coincidentally, it’s the book that made me realise I was going to become a writer.
"Cortazar's masterpiece ... The first great novel of Spanish America" (The Times Literary Supplement) • Winner of the National Book Award for Translation in 1967, translated by Gregory Rabassa
Horacio Oliveira is an Argentinian writer who lives in Paris with his mistress, La Maga, surrounded by a loose-knit circle of bohemian friends who call themselves "the Club." A child's death and La Maga's disappearance put an end to his life of empty pleasures and intellectual acrobatics, and prompt Oliveira to return to Buenos Aires, where he works by turns as a salesman, a keeper of a circus cat which can…
I started reading about the 1920s after I read Among the Bohemiansby Virginia Nicholson in 2008. I kept reading about the 1920s, particularly 1920s Paris, through my Masters and then my Doctorate in war fiction. I would read about interwar Europe, or America, or Britain, when I needed to work on my doctorate but was too tired to read about trenches or trauma, and it became an obsession. Then it became the subject of two novels, which involved more and more particular research. I love the period's brittle gaiety, its dirty glamour, a time of cultural and political revolution as people fought for a better world.
This book should not be out of print. It is beautifully written – economical, witty yet discreet, and joyful. Bowen was a young woman from Adelaide, in South Australia, who set off to London to be an artist and landed there during the Great War. She had a long affair and daughter with writer Ford Madox Ford, painted and partied in Paris, moved her daughter back to England in time to watch German bombers fly overhead during the Blitz. This book became another guide for how to live the creative life, the bohemian life, a life full of honesty and art. Like Hemingway’s memoir, it’s full of anecdotes of other writers and artists that were her friends for a time. It reflects on what it means to be an artist, a woman artist, an artist and mother, ideas that still hold true as they are about the inner life of…
First, I'm a woman and I'm inspired by women from the past who overcame the rules of the day in which they lived. It doesn’t matter where they lived, or what they tried to overcome, but to have bucked the patriarchal system and achieved some measure of success, is phenomenal. Second, I became inspired by silent film star Marion Davies, and I wrote a book about it. I never intended to write historical fiction. My first book was a memoir about sailing to Tahiti at fourteen with my father and two sisters. But life has a funny way of directing us where we need to go. Here I am: inspired by women from the past!
I love to read about artists in Paris in the 1930s. And this book is about a woman who tries to leave the world of modeling to become a photographer, and then she morphs again into one of the only WW2 journalists.
Lee Miller was a real person and she fell in love with Surrealist Man Ray in Paris.
'Scharer captures the thrill of artistic creation and the swirling hedonism of Paris's beautiful people.' The Times
Model. Muse. Lover. Artist.
'I'd rather take a picture than be one,' Lee Miller declares, as she arrives in Paris one cool day in 1929. Lee has left behind her life in New York and a successful modelling career at Vogue to pursue her dream of becoming a photographer. She soon catches the eye of renowned Surrealist artist Man Ray and convinces him to hire her as his assistant. Man is an egotistical, charismatic force, and as Lee becomes both his muse and…
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