Here are 100 books that The Ogre fans have personally recommended if you like
The Ogre.
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I’ve loved fiction that excites my mind and imagination since I was very young. I spent a lot of time in the library growing up, mostly reading horror and historical narratives. Later, I became interested in music, painting, film, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, religion, and politics. I’m not an expert in anything—I’m too driven to make things to be a good scholar—but these are the subject areas that inform what I write.
McCarthy’s second novel is an underappreciated masterpiece, one that combines the author’s distinct style and notoriously difficult subject matter with a genuinely sublime vision of the world. Simultaneously a horror novel, a historical fiction, a Gnostic heresy, a cosmic joke, and act of spiritual seeking, I cannot recommend it enough.
By Cormac McCarthy, the author of the critically acclaimed Border Trilogy, Outer Dark is a novel at once mythic and starkly evocative, set in an unspecified place in Appalachia sometime around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother's child, a boy; the brother leaves the baby in the woods and tells her he died of natural causes. Discovering her brother's lie, she sets forth alone to find her son. Both brother and sister wander separately through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers, headlong toward an eerie, apocalyptic resolution.
I’ve loved fiction that excites my mind and imagination since I was very young. I spent a lot of time in the library growing up, mostly reading horror and historical narratives. Later, I became interested in music, painting, film, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, religion, and politics. I’m not an expert in anything—I’m too driven to make things to be a good scholar—but these are the subject areas that inform what I write.
Millhauser’s stories are miracles. He combines the wonderstruck imagination of the fairy tale lover with surpassing technical expertise, and the result is beautiful art. This collection’s title story, for instance, is simultaneously a fairy tale, an exploration of group morality, a rigorous demonstration of the Freytagian dramatic structure, and a gripping story from start to finish.
Included in this short story collection is "The Sisterhood of the Night", now a major motion picture. From the bestselling author of Martin Dressler, this volume explores the magnificent obsessions of the unfettered imagination, as well as the darker, subterranean currents that fuel them.
With the panache of an old-fashioned magician, Steven Millhauser conducts his readers from the dark corners beneath the sunlit world to a balloonist's tour of the heavens. He transforms department stores and amusement parks into alternate universes of infinite plentitude and menace. He unveils the secrets of a maker of automatons and a coven of teenage…
I’ve loved fiction that excites my mind and imagination since I was very young. I spent a lot of time in the library growing up, mostly reading horror and historical narratives. Later, I became interested in music, painting, film, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, religion, and politics. I’m not an expert in anything—I’m too driven to make things to be a good scholar—but these are the subject areas that inform what I write.
This novel evokes an extraordinary range of emotions. Skibell works wonders with folklore and history, turning out a tale of tales that is by turns shocking and horrifying, tender, and outrageously funny. The language is deceptively simple and beautiful. Consider this description from the murdered narrator, on returning to his plundered neighborhood after climbing out of a mass grave: “In front of every house were piles of vows and promises, all in broken pieces. How I could see such things, I cannot tell you.” The balance here—of imagination, grief, and lightness—is exquisite.
Joseph Skibell’s magical tale about the Holocaust—a fable inspired by fact—received unanimous nationwide acclaim when first published in 1997.
At the center of A Blessing on the Moon is Chaim Skibelski. Death is merely the beginning of Chaim’s troubles. In the opening pages, he is shot along with the other Jews of his small Polish village. But instead of resting peacefully in the World to Come, Chaim, for reasons unclear to him, is left to wander the earth, accompanied by his rabbi, who has taken the form of a talking crow. Chaim’s afterlife journey is filled with extraordinary encounters whose…
I’ve loved fiction that excites my mind and imagination since I was very young. I spent a lot of time in the library growing up, mostly reading horror and historical narratives. Later, I became interested in music, painting, film, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, religion, and politics. I’m not an expert in anything—I’m too driven to make things to be a good scholar—but these are the subject areas that inform what I write.
This is one of the best, most alive short fiction collections published in the 21st Century. Steinberg’s fictions are generally powerful, but the episodes and sentences that compose them tend to be compelling in their own right. So while the individual narratives in this book are brilliant short fictions on their own, the sentences or thoughts that construct them have an electrifying effect few writers can manage.
An inventive new collection from the author of Hydroplane and The End of Free Love
* A San Francisco Chronicle, Complex, Flavorwire, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Largehearted Boy and Slaughterhouse 90210 Best Book of the Year *
In these innovative linked stories, women confront loss and grief as they sift through the wreckage of their lives. In the title story, a woman struggles with the death of her friend in a plane crash. A daughter decides whether to take her father off life support in the Pushcart Prize-winning "Cowboys." And in "Underthings," when a man hits his girlfriend, she calls it…
I’ve adored holiday love stories ever since I was a kid watching Hallmark movies. There’s something about the magic of the holidays that makes two people falling in love even more special. That’s why I chose a contemporary holiday romance for my debut. And we see so much straight romance on TV and in bookstores, but I want to contribute to the queer community with my writing. I write a mix of sexualities;Make the Yuletide Gay features two lesbian women. All that to say, I just love queer holiday romances!
I learned about the existence of Don’t StopBelieving through Gwen Hayes’ writing craft book Romancing the Beat.She used it as her example outline. It was the first thing I read to pick out story beats, and I meant to focus on writing craft while reading, but I fell in love with the characters. Both leads are precious! It gets me in the holiday mood but I reread this one all year round. Snowed in at Christmastime when they both secretly like the other already? Gimme gimme gimme (this book after midnight). It’s just so festive and cute.
The Ogre from the HillSimon Powell, the town recluse, only comes to town to deliver firewood and get supplies. Two days before Christmas, he sees the new librarian’s car in a ditch and knows he can’t leave him on the road, but it’s too late to take him back to town. He’ll have something he’s never had in his cabin in the ten years that’s he’s lived there…company.
The Book Nerd from the CityAdam Parker moved to the small community to make big changes in his life, but being snowbound with the bearded lumberjack in his rustic cabin was something…
I’m a professional history nerd who is perennially interested in both sides of the history coin: What happened? How do we know? I’ve got a PhD in sixteenth-century European history, have written articles that cover things from antiquity to Vikings in America, and have written several history books about Australia and its region. I like history that is robust, so I’m always looking for books that make clever use of sources. And I love stories that disrupt preconceptions, so I enjoy researching and writing and reading histories that make you think.
Brilliantly executed, this stunning book provides a composite firsthand view of history’s darkest turn. Using a suite of interesting travellers in Hitler’s Germany this book perfectly captures the looming ominousness and increasing brutality of this infamous time and place. It also reveals a very human capacity to be misled, prejudiced, or uninterested. This is a book that will open your eyes to the past and make you think hard about the present.
This fascinating and shocking history of the rise of the Nazis draws together a multitude of expatriate voices - even Charles Lindbergh and Samuel Beckett - into a powerful narrative charting this extraordinary phenomenon.
Travelers in the Third Reich is an extraordinary history of the rise of the Nazis based on fascinating first-hand accounts, drawing together a multitude of voices and stories, including politicians, musicians, diplomats, schoolchildren, communists, scholars, athletes, poets, fascists, artists, tourists, and even celebrities like Charles Lindbergh and Samuel Beckett. Their experiences create a remarkable three-dimensional picture of Germany under Hitler—one so palpable that the reader will…
My husband, Robert McLaughlin, and I taught at Illinois State University for over thirty years. Our fathers both served in World War II (one in the Army Air Forces and one in the Navy) but would never talk about it. That spurred our interest in the war and what it was like. One way to know about it was through the popular culture of the time, such as movies, plays, radio, and books. As we watched more and more movies and gave presentations on them (we’re English professors by trade), we realized how these movies still affect how we think about the war.
This is a really good overview of how the studios responded to the rise of fascism overseas and how, as the reality of America becoming involved in the war became more possible, what plans they made to adapt, from more military screenplays to what actors to use (since many of the male actors were either drafted or enlisted), to how to get military equipment for sets.
Dick also probes how these war films, including some made after the war, altered or rearranged history in order to make a better movie.
The American World War II film depicted a united America, a mythic America in which the average guy, the girl next door, the 4-F patriot, and the grieving mother were suddenly transformed into heroes and heroines, warriors and goddesses. The Star-Spangled Screen examines the historical accuracy - or lack thereof - of films about the Third Reich, the Resistance, and major military campaigns. Concerned primarily with the films of the war years, it also includes discussions of such postwar movies as Battleground (1949), Attack! (1956), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), and Patton (1970). This revised edition includes new…
Jay Geller is a professor of history and Judaic studies and has published five books on the experience of the Jews in twentieth-century Germany. He has worked with secondary school teachers, religious communities, and museums to develop programs on the Holocaust, Nazism, and dangers of intolerance and radicalism. He is a graduate of Princeton University and Yale University.
There are very few German novels about Nazi persecution written at the time it was taking place, but the Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers is among the very best. (Another is The Oppermanns by Lion Feuchtwanger, which shows the experience of a single, affluent German-Jewish family.) Seghers narrates the story of George Heisler, a communist who escapes from a concentration camp along with six other men. Can he reach freedom across the border before the manhunt catches up with him? Will anyone hide him or help him in a society wracked by fear, where friends no longer meet and strangers do not trust each other?
'At once a suspenseful manhunt story and a knowing portrait of the perils of ordinary life in Hitler's Germany, The Seventh Cross is not only an important novel, but an important historical document. This new, unabridged translation is a genuine publishing event' - Joseph Kanon, author of 'The Good German' and 'Leaving Berlin'
'A masterpiece. Written in the midst of terror, but with such clarity, such acuity; Seghers is a writer of rare insight' RACHEL SEIFFERT author of A Boy in Winter
Seven prisoners escape from Westhofen concentration camp. Seven crosses are erected in the grounds and the commandant vows…
I’ve loved comic strips since I was a kid, so children’s books that had cartoon art in them were the ultimate for me. That love drove me to research and write about the career and life of Jack Kent. Books by cartoonists tend to have the whole package: They tell a story visually, they’re funny, and they use language economically but memorably. The limitations I placed on myself in choosing this list were 1) the creator had to have both written and drawn the book, and 2) they had to have been established as a professional cartoonist before moving into children’s books.
Shrek! was a book before it was ever a wildly successful film franchise, but the book bears almost no resemblance to the movies.
Yes, William Steig’s ogre is both vile and reviled, and he has a donkey for a friend, but the story itself is very straightforward, detailing Shrek’s rampage across the countryside on his way to meet a “stunningly ugly princess” with whom he can live “horribly ever after.”
Steig had been a celebrated New Yorker cartoonist for almost four decades when he produced his first children’s book in 1968. He wrote and drew Shrek! when he was in his early 80s. He breaks the cardinal rule of using simple language, but makes up for it with fun-to-read-aloud choices in vocabulary and sentence structure, such as “The irascible dragon was preparing to separate Shrek from his noggin.”
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What is this book about?
Read the book that inspired the famous film franchise in this wonderfully funny picture book.
Before Shrek made it big on the silver screen, there was William Steig's SHREK!, a book about an ordinary ogre who leaves his swampy childhood home to go out and see the world. Ordinary, that is, if a foul and hideous being who ends up marrying the most stunningly ugly princess on the planet is what you consider ordinary.
I grew up on fairy tales and folklore in the Appalachian Mountains. Stories of adventure and dusty fairy tale books in my grandmother’s attic were my entertainment. The library trips we took “into town” added to my reading. I discovered that the step from fairy tales to classics wasn’t as wide as folks argue. Years later, when I went off to college, I became an English major, then a graduate student, and then started teaching literature at college. From childhood to adulthood, magic and fiction were my life... which led to selling a book of my own. Over the last 17 years, I’ve been writing fantasy.
Long before Harry Potter came The Secret of Platform 13, and the idea of a railroad station where a magical doorway existed.
I grew up in a town built on the railroad. My grandfather worked as a mechanic at the railyard. My field trips were to train museum or train-related locations, so the idea of hidden portal there made perfect sense to my childhood heart.
Trains take us places, why not a magical world? It simply makes sense to me to find a magical world beyond a train station.
Under Platform 13 at King's Cross Station there is a secret door that leads to a magical island . . .
It appears only once every nine years. And when it opens, four mysterious figures step into the streets of London. A wizard, an ogre, a fey and a young hag have come to find the prince of their kingdom, stolen as a baby nine years before.
But the prince has become a horrible rich boy called Raymond Trottle, who doesn't understand magic and is determined not to be rescued.
Shortlisted for the Smarties Prize, The Secret of Platform 13…
