Fans pick 74 books like The Celtic Twilight

There are more accurate translations and better selections, but I love this collection for two reasons. First, Stephens was a Dublin-born, Irish-speaking novelist, poet, and eyewitness to the Easter Rising of 1916. His stories of ancient heroes and Otherworldly folk salute a proudly Celtic past. Stephens was part of the nationalist literary revival that harnessed Irish myths to an independent future. A friend to politicians and intellectuals, he claimed (untruthfully) to have the same birthday as his friend James Joyce. Stephens cleaned up the old stories for tender ears, but his early 20th-century language casts an antiquarian sheen on his fairytales. 

So do the enchanting illustrations by Arthur Rackham, one of the most skillful depicters of fairies (second only to Harry Clarke)—my second reason for loving this book. 

This tale of tales is like a 12th-century Irish Arabian Nights. It brings Saint Patrick, a 5th-century missionary, and his priests together with magically long-lived warriors from the fían bands of the giant hero Finn Mac Cumhaill (McCool). Finn’s beloved companions, Cailte and Oisín, recount their many adventures in times gone by with the Otherworldly Túatha Dé (Tribes of the Goddess). Patrick, fearing that their history will be lost when the men finally die, orders his monks to put their tales in writing. 

Patrick must have adored stories of battling kings and alluring princesses, treasure hidden under uncanny mounds, shapeshifters, murderous ravens, and lovers who cross worlds to be together, all presented as an interview between Patrick and pagan elders. One question runs through tales: Is the sí and the ancient indigenous past of Ireland compatible with the orderly future of psalm-singing Christians? So long as the Church is in… show more.

I love that Walter Evans Wentz, a native of New Jersey, starts this book among the towering stones of Carnac, a neolithic site in Brittany. While young Wentz was studying at Stanford, he met both Yeats and William James, the famed psychologist and lecturer on the supernatural.

They inspired him to pursue a doctoral degree in Celtic mythology and folklore at Oxford, and this book is his dissertation. Around 1910, he wandered the highlands, islands, and villages of Ireland, Scotland, Man, and Brittany, gathering an archive of fascinating fairy folklore to support his dissertation on the origins of fairies.

Wentz joined a centuries-long debate. Scholars had already proposed that fairies were disembodied spirits, products of peasant imagination, fallen angels, or—my favorite—a prehistoric and almost extinct race of pygmies who dwelt in the ancient burial mounds of Ireland. Wentz decided they were a pagan religion. Later, at Oxford, Wentz met T.… show more.

The stories in this annotated selection come from the National Folklore Collection in Dublin. Beginning in the 1920s, the newly independent Irish government sent scholars and volunteers out to transcribe and record accounts of rural customs and local beliefs that were quickly disappearing. Picture these collectors pumping the pedals of a clunky bicycle loaded with recording machinery or lugging accordion cameras down muddy lanes to photograph shanachies (tale-tellers) and fairy trees. Everything went into the Folklore Collection.

This nostalgic selection of stories and songs about the sí comes with CDs (in Irish and English) that put you in the room with tellers of tales. The shanachies sing of processions on midnight roads, fairy gold buried in a field, and how to ward off the constant menace of the sí. FYI: Never pull down a fairy tree to build a house! And do not call them fairies; they prefer the Good… show more.

Yeats, a mystic poet, travelled across Ireland in the late 1800s and early 1900s, asking country people if they’d ever seen fairies and taking down their stories. “I believe when I am in the mood that all nature is full of people whom we cannot see,” he wrote in an earlier book, The Celtic Twilight. “Even when I was a boy I could never walk in a wood without feeling that at any moment I might find before me somebody or something I had long looked for without knowing….” Yates believed the songs and stories "handed down among the cottages” were “Folk art [which]… because it has gathered into itself the simplest and most unforgettable thoughts of the generations… is the soil where all great art is rooted.”  His own poetry bears this out. 

William Butler Yeats was a truly great poet who lived during revolutionary times in Ireland. I am recommending his poetry collection because his poems reflect the revolutionary times he lived in, but also because Yeats himself lived a revolutionary life of change. One of the things I most admire about Yeats is that his poetry continues to change right until the end of his life. He was never satisfied with his own work, and he always looked coldly and critically at himself. His epitaph is, “Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by.”

In his poem ‘The Great Day,’ Yeats presents an image of two beggars, one on horseback whipping another on foot. After the revolution, the beggars changed places, but the whip went on. This is a remarkable image–unfortunately, one that my research shows to be close to the truth.

This play conveys the inner world of nationalism in both its romance and fanaticism.

Yeats’s play became a cult for young revolutionary nationalists in celebrating blood sacrifice for the nation. A young man joins an uprising on the eve of his wedding after meeting an old woman, Cathleen ni Houlihan (a folk name for Ireland), who pleads for his help to recover her green fields. By his sacrifice, Cathleen is transformed into a beautiful young woman with "the face of a queen." 

Yeats later agonised over this play and developed a more ambivalent attitude to nationalism. When young nationalists staged a sacrificial rebellion in 1916, he warned in his poem "Easter 1916" that "Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart." He asked in a later poem, "Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?" 

I spent eighteen years writing the authorized biography of W.B. Yeats, and he haunts me still.

Though his poetry is world-famous, his autobiographies are less well known; yet they illuminate like nothing else the experience of living between Ireland and England and the contrast between a childhood in late-Victorian County Sligo and coming of age in the artistic circles of fin-de-siecle London.

At the end of his life, Yeats reflected on the tension between his Irish background and English conditioning and the contradictory feelings they inspired, writing, "My hatred tortures me with love, my love with hate." Elsewhere, he wrote that poetry comes out of "the struggle with ourselves," and his autobiographies show this to mesmerizing effect.

The War Poets is a powerful and moving collection that, despite being about fighting and dying, somehow managed to teach and inspire me. For certain, it made me stop and think deeply about life, choices, and consequences. This little book shows the hearts and minds of soldier poets who went to war, and the ultimate self-discoveries they achieved. For such a small book, The War Poets tackles a big topic and goes deep beneath the surface. At times in my life, I have struggled to simply accept, and this collection of raw and honest verse has helped me push on through to the other side.

This quintessential Arthur Machen collection of thirteen of his most highly praised stories and short novels was my introduction to Arthur Machen, and like Rider Haggard’s work, affected me deeply, to the extent that I eventually needed to “soak up some Arthur Machan country” and flew to Wales (from California) for no other purpose.

Arthur Machen is known best for the exceptionally vivid, mind-numbingly creepy horror stories that he wrote in the late 1880s, which have hugely inspired Lovecraft, Stephen King, and T.E.D. Kline, among many others. Machen’s work is, nearly all of it, alchemical; that is, by some divine magic, he made mere words and sentences seem far more than the sum of their parts; when he strung together any eight words, they would always sound more charming than the same eight words strung together by any other author.