Here are 100 books that The Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector, & Selected Stories fans have personally recommended if you like
The Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector, & Selected Stories.
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I am a bit of a contradiction in that I am a Christian pastor but also a horror aficionado. I love all things sci-fi and horror. My fascination with these genres stems from childhood, when I stumbled upon Star Wars, the old Addams Family cartoons, and even Scooby Doo. As I matured, my love of reading grew, and I soon consumed literature like a Dyson, especially sci-fi and horror. I often joke about how the odd combo of my two biggest writing influences, Stephen King (I’ve read his entire bibliography) and C.S. Lewis, perfectly sums up my character, and I think that’s what makes me perfect for this recommendation.
The most iconic and somehow most misrepresented vampire story of all time. I read this book because it was iconic and for no other reason. It was not long before I began to see this book's Christian themes and messages. Though the book may not be explicitly Christian, the influences and messages are most apparent in Mina Harker.
I loved how the character of Mina becomes a prototype of what people would eventually call “The Final Girl”, not because of her physical strength or survival instincts, but because of her unwavering faith in God. I knew this was essentially a story of good and evil, but I was wonderfully surprised by this being a story of faith vs flesh and corruption vs holiness.
28
authors picked
Dracula
as one of their favorite books, and they share
why you should read it.
This book is for kids age
17.
What is this book about?
'The very best story of diablerie which I have read for many years' Arthur Conan Doyle
A masterpiece of the horror genre, Dracula also probes identity, sanity and the dark corners of Victorian sexuality and desire. It begins when Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula purchase a London house, and makes horrifying discoveries in his client's castle. Soon afterwards, disturbing incidents unfold in England - an unmanned ship is wrecked; strange puncture marks appear on a young woman's neck; a lunatic asylum inmate raves about the imminent arrival of his 'Master' - and a determined group of adversaries…
I have always been drawn to the weird, fantastic, supernatural, and unexplained. Whether it’s film or TV (The Twilight Zone, the X-files, Ingmar Bergman) or gothic and speculative literature, I become mesmerized by the mysteries involved. I have written 10 books (poetry and fiction). Of the fiction, most is either speculative, as in magical realism, or somewhat gothic in nature. My newest novel, due out in 2025, is pure gothic and takes place in a haunted abbey inhabited by ghosts and the devil himself. And yet, behind it all is an exploration of human faith and frailty and a search for answers about our beliefs.
I love being taken to places I’ve never been before and being exposed to leaps in imagination. Marquez, the most famous of the school of magical realism, takes the reader on a journey through time and history in an unforgettable tale. The style of writing captures me in this book and has also influenced me. If you read no other book, read this one.
One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, and alive with unforgettable men and women -- brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul -- this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.
Like a caricature, satire lets you see reality better by exaggerating it. When satire is done right, every element, from the overall plot to the characters to paragraph-level details, is there to cast an exposing light on some part of our real world. They are books that exist on many levels, expose hubris and essential misunderstandings, and generally speak truth to power. They should leave the reader reassessing core assumptions about how the world works. I’ve written a best-selling nonfiction book about machine learning in the past, and I probably could have taken that approach again, but AI and American politics are both ripe for satire.
If I ever have to write a book to get past the censors, this book will be my model. Who knew that a mordant critique of a corrupt state could be so elegant, even whimsical?
The barbs are so oblique that the censor has a hard time finding something to pick on or even noticing it, and yet they’re unmistakable to anyone living in a society with even a passing resemblance to Stalin’s Russia—and after reading The Master and Margarita, I see those resemblances in every organization and every regime.
'Bulgakov is one of the greatest Russian writers, perhaps the greatest' Independent
Written in secret during the darkest days of Stalin's reign, The Master and Margarita became an overnight literary phenomenon when it was finally published it, signalling artistic freedom for Russians everywhere. Bulgakov's carnivalesque satire of Soviet life describes how the Devil, trailing fire and chaos in his wake, weaves himself out of the shadows and into Moscow one Spring afternoon. Brimming with magic and incident, it is full of imaginary, historical, terrifying and wonderful characters, from witches, poets and Biblical tyrants to the beautiful, courageous Margarita, who will…
I have always been drawn to the weird, fantastic, supernatural, and unexplained. Whether it’s film or TV (The Twilight Zone, the X-files, Ingmar Bergman) or gothic and speculative literature, I become mesmerized by the mysteries involved. I have written 10 books (poetry and fiction). Of the fiction, most is either speculative, as in magical realism, or somewhat gothic in nature. My newest novel, due out in 2025, is pure gothic and takes place in a haunted abbey inhabited by ghosts and the devil himself. And yet, behind it all is an exploration of human faith and frailty and a search for answers about our beliefs.
Franz Kafka is best known for this book, though he has written many others, including The Trial. The novel explores social and political topics through the use of the fantastic, in this case, a man who wakes up one morning and finds he has turned into a gigantic cockroach.
I am drawn to books that explore things in ways that have not been explored before and books that make one think. I read this one in college; it has stuck with me and influenced me through my writing career.
“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”
With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing—though absurdly comic—meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century…
Since I was a little boy, long before I dreamed of becoming a Daoist monk, I sensed that there was far more beneath the pond of life than on the surface. I remember feeling jealous of a little turtle I saw in the Connecticut River. Why couldn’t I pop out of my world and see what was happening above, but he could? My spiritual questing led me to Asia and also deep into myself. Writing magical realism does not feel like engaging a fantasy; it feels like I can finally share how the world really is.
I grew up speaking Russian with my grandparents and always yearned to read classic Russian literature in the original. Perhaps it was my great love for those grandparents or the stories they told that led me to major in Russian at Yale University. Like any translated work, Russian literature loses something in translation. Still, it gains something, too, effectively juxtaposing a culture that is neither Eastern nor Western yet entirely alien to most of us today.
Satire, dark humor, and perfect pacing make this story a laugh-out-loud work, at least to me. Despite being ridiculous, its delivery is straight-faced, which at least makes the humor and the social commentary all the more powerful. The gritty reality of Russia in the age of tsars is so palpable you can taste it, and so is the humor.
'Strangely enough, I mistook it for a gentleman at first. Fortunately I had my spectacles with me so I could see it was really a nose.'
With this pair of absurd, comic stories Gogol indulges his imagination and delights readers.
Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe.…
I particularly enjoyed writing this book about a city that I love and have visited many times (starting in the late 1970s, when I was a student), and whose history I know well too. Most books, by foreigners anyway, talk about the city from a distance; I wanted to write something visceral, about sounds and smells as well as sights, and above all, how locals themselves think about their city, the way in which its intense and in some respects oppressive past shapes St Petersburg’s life today – yet all the same, never gets taken too seriously. Readers seem to agree: as well as an appreciative letter from Jan Morris, whose travel writing I’ve always admired, I treasure an email message from someone who followed my advice and tramped far and wide – before ending up in the room for prisoners’ relatives to drop off parcels at Kresty (the main city prison) when he wrongly assumed he was using an entrance to the (in fact non-existent) museum.
This is a great anthology in the City Picks series, with lots of different literary and essayistic texts about St Petersburg, including recent and offbeat ones as well as the classics. You can get lost in the place even if, for the moment, you can’t travel there!
'Floating, lyrical, miraculous Petersburg ... Here's beauty built on bones, classical facades that cradled revolution, summers that lie in the cup of winter' - Helen Dunmore, The Siege Malcolm Bradbury guides us to the Hermitage Anna Pavlova describes her school days Vladimir Nabokov re-lives a Petersburg winter Helen Dunmore plunges us into the worst of times Serge Dovlatov shows some 'different' Petersburg film-making Dmitry Shostakovich reveals a musical secret Truman Capote takes Porgy and Bess to the Soviets Nikolai Gogol walks us down Nevsky Prospekt J.M.Coetzee reimagines Dostoyevsky ... over sixty writers on one of the world's most fascinating and…
For three decades I have been the first violinist of the Takács Quartet, performing concerts worldwide and based at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I love the ways in which books, like music, offer new and surprising elements at different stages of life, providing companionship alongside joys and sorrows.
Suspicious of biography, Malcolm dissects various myths about Chekhov’s death in this engaging book that mixes travel writing with acute readings of Chekhov’s stories and plays. As Malcolm visits some of the places crucial to Chekhov’s life and work (the scenes in Ukraine are of course poignant), she moves seamlessly between her own everyday experiences and the predicaments of Chekhov’s characters. In amongst the despair, disappointment, and absurdity she discovers beauty, humor, and occasional visions of hope.
To illuminate the mysterious greatness of Anton Chekhov’s writings, Janet Malcolm takes on three roles: literary critic, biographer, and journalist. Her close readings of the stories and plays are interwoven with episodes from Chekhov’s life and framed by an account of Malcolm’s journey to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Yalta. She writes of Chekhov’s childhood, his relationships, his travels, his early success, and his self-imposed “exile”—always with an eye to connecting them to themes and characters in his work. Lovers of Chekhov as well as those new to his work will be transfixed by Reading Chekhov.
I have a Ph.D. in English from Lehigh University, where I studied and published articles on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, one of the greatest short fiction collections. I have written and published a number of short stories myself. I even won a contest for one of them. The tale told around the campfire is probably the oldest literary form there is, much older than the novel. The best short fiction, I believe, can “pack everything that a novel can hold into a story,” as Jorge Luis Borges said, and this is the kind of short fiction I believe I have found.
I recently re-read Six Great Modern Short Novels, after I’d been reading a lot of recent commercial fiction. I shook my head in amazement. A thought came unbidden into my head: “This is what they mean by great literature.” All six novels are simply so much ̶ better (I can say it no better). I had read it as a youth. But the second time was even more compelling. Even the lesser novels were light-years ahead of your run-of-the-mill bestseller. Each left me with a feeling I had forgotten literature could engender ̶ a kind of exalted acceptance, an awed wonder, a transcendence, a nobility. Read them one at a time. All at once may be too powerful.
Six immortal shorts works of fiction, each by a brilliant artist, each universally acclaimed. The Dead, by James Joyce. Billy Budd by Herman Melville. Noon Wine by Katherine Anne Porter. The Overcoat by Nikolay Gogol. The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott and The Bear by William Faulkner.
My journey to wildlife storytelling had a very unusual beginning, I started out as a wildlife photographer with an intense curiosity for bears and other North American wildlife. I would pursue these animals wherever it took me and ended up with a large photographic portfolio of these majestic creatures. This quest resulted in remarkable, interesting, and sometimes dangerous wildlife encounters, which I shared in my book, Wild Among Us. My combination of images and storytelling has been a complete immersive experience and has made me appreciate the varied and specific behaviors each animal possesses. These unique adaptive animal behaviors when presented with an interesting adventure story always has interested and captivated me.
The central theme of The Winter Horses involves an almost extinct horse breed (Przewalski) with ties to prehistoric cave horses located in the middle of one of the worst wars in our human history, World War Two. As starvation and Nazi occupation reduce the humanity within, heroes surface to protect not only the horses but the desperate survivors who have adapted to living on the fringe. The book has much to recommend besides the local saviors, a young female Jewish teen surfaces who is on the run and befriends the horses. She along with the past horse caretaker precariously exist within the occupation, until she is forced to lead the horses away from death, through a snowy and treacherous terrain all while being pursued. This book explores the importance of protecting our fragile almost extinct animals, counterbalanced with highlighting the horses’ strong adaptive abilities that allowed them to survive so…
From Philip Kerr, the New York Times bestselling author of the Bernie Gunther novels, comes a breathtaking journey of survival in the dark days of WWII in Ukraine, a country that remains tumultuous today. This inspiring tale captures the power of the human spirit and is perfect for fans of The Book Thief, Milkweed, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.
It will soon be another cold winter in the Ukraine. But it's 1941, and things are different this year. Max, the devoted caretaker of an animal preserve, must learn to live with the Nazis who have overtaken this precious…
As a child, I was drawn to the silences in family stories and as a young adult, the gaps in official records. Now I’m a former English professor turned full-time writer who is fascinated with who gets written out of history, and why. I love exploring overlooked lives, especially women’s lives—from Stalin’s female relatives to nineteenth-century shopgirls, and most recently, a pair of early medieval queens.
If you’ve ever found yourself obsessed with a family mystery, you’ll be captivated by The Lost. Mendelsohn had always wondered what happened to his great-uncle and aunt, and their four daughters, during the Holocaust. His search starts with ordinary genealogical curiosity but quickly spirals into an epic quest. I admire Mendelsohn’s elegant, lyrical prose and was swept up in his ruminations on what we owe the past. His discoveries are heartbreaking but they also spark hope—by rescuing one ordinary family from oblivion.
A writer's search for his family's tragic past in World War II becomes a remarkably original and riveting epic, brilliantly exploring the nature of time and memory.
'The Lost' begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust - an unmentionable subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939, Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relative's fates. The quest takes him to a…
