Here are 84 books that Wonderlands fans have personally recommended if you like
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I believe in the power of personal narratives and the memoir genre as tools to foster healing and forgiveness. As a licensed professional counselor with a doctorate in adult education, I devoted years toward better understanding the fractured relationship I had with my mother, eventually uncovering the source of her pain and trauma. My mother’s mental health and addiction issues were muddied by the shame she carried for years, as a terrified secret keeper, full of self-loathing. Although I was often the target of her anger, I found a pathway to compassion that mended my heart and provided an example of intergenerational healing for my own daughter.
Melissa Febos’ book Body Work provides encouragement to writers who are considering the memoir genre by highlighting the importance of storytelling as central to human experience.
Memoir writing is like magic; unique in its ability to shine a light on stories of survival, perseverance, and resilience. Febos’ book beautifully portrays the power of memoir as a tool to prompt growth, pulling back façades in ways that are both personally empowering and enriching for readers and writers alike.
“We are telling the stories that no one else can tell, and we are giving this proof of our survival to each other.” (p. 27)
Memoir meets craft master class in this “daring, honest, psychologically insightful” exploration of how we think and write about intimate experiences—“a must read for anybody shoving a pen across paper or staring into a screen or a past" (Mary Karr)
In this bold and exhilarating mix of memoir and master class, Melissa Febos tackles the emotional, psychological, and physical work of writing intimately while offering an utterly fresh examination of the storyteller’s life and the questions which run through it.
How might we go about capturing on the page the relationships that have formed us? How…
I grew up in the Scottish countryside, reading passionately. When adults asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, the answer came from my latest book: a nun, an outlaw, a queen, or an explorer. Not until I was in my twenties did I realise that I wanted to be the person behind the covers of a book, not between them. My early stories, written between waitressing shifts, were bafflingly bad. Gradually I began to understand that the fiction I loved was driven by a hidden machinery. I now teach at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and have been lucky enough to explore this idea with many talented students.
Salesses reminds us that “craft is a set of expectations,” and I love that he makes me question those expectations in fruitful ways. Jane Eyre does get to marry Rochester but at some cost. Salesses writes with warmth and wit about the western canon and about other literary traditions. I finished the book with a terrific reading list and new thoughts about my own writing and reading.
This national bestseller is "a significant contribution to discussions of the art of fiction and a necessary challenge to received views about whose stories are told, how they are told and for whom they are intended" (Laila Lalami, The New York Times Book Review).
The traditional writing workshop was established with white male writers in mind; what we call craft is informed by their cultural values. In this bold and original examination of elements of writing—including plot, character, conflict, structure, and believability—and aspects of workshop—including the silenced writer and the imagined reader—Matthew Salesses asks questions to invigorate these familiar concepts.…
I grew up in the Scottish countryside, reading passionately. When adults asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, the answer came from my latest book: a nun, an outlaw, a queen, or an explorer. Not until I was in my twenties did I realise that I wanted to be the person behind the covers of a book, not between them. My early stories, written between waitressing shifts, were bafflingly bad. Gradually I began to understand that the fiction I loved was driven by a hidden machinery. I now teach at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and have been lucky enough to explore this idea with many talented students.
Le Guin is a star in fiction’s firmament but in this book she’s also a wonderfully modest practitioner of the art of writing. She discusses the sound of your prose, naming characters, repetition, and point of view. I found her chapter on crowding and leaping especially helpful. Crowding is when you follow Keats’ advice to load every rift with ore; leaping is when you skillfully leave things out—two invaluable skills in fiction, and in life.
From the celebrated Ursula K. Le Guin, "a writer of enormous intelligence and wit, a master storyteller" (Boston Globe), the revised and updated edition of her classic guide to the essentials of a writer's craft.
Completely revised and rewritten to address modern challenges and opportunities, this handbook is a short, deceptively simple guide to the craft of writing.
Le Guin lays out ten chapters that address the most fundamental components of narrative, from the sound of language to sentence construction to point of view. Each chapter combines illustrative examples from the global canon with Le Guin’s own witty commentary and…
I grew up in the Scottish countryside, reading passionately. When adults asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, the answer came from my latest book: a nun, an outlaw, a queen, or an explorer. Not until I was in my twenties did I realise that I wanted to be the person behind the covers of a book, not between them. My early stories, written between waitressing shifts, were bafflingly bad. Gradually I began to understand that the fiction I loved was driven by a hidden machinery. I now teach at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and have been lucky enough to explore this idea with many talented students.
Peter Turchi is an amazing guide to writing which is to say he is an amazing guide to reading. This book explores fiction in terms of power dynamics, imagery, digressions—think Tristram Shandy—and story-telling, (among other topics). Turchi argues passionately for the pleasures of close reading. I especially love his chapter on characters who tell stories—why do they tell them, what if we want them to shut up?
In (Don't) Stop Me If You've Heard This Before, Peter Turchi combines personal narrative and close reading of a wide range of stories and novels to reveal how writers create the fiction that matters to us. Building on his much-loved Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, Turchi leads readers and writers to an understanding of how the intricate mechanics of storytelling-including shifts in characters' authority, the subtle manipulation of images, careful attention to point of view, the strategic release of information, and even digressing from the (apparent) story-can create powerful effects.
Using examples from Dickens, Chekhov, and Salinger,…
One of the gifts of the horror genre is that the stories use metaphor to examine human behaviors that defy understanding. My favorite horror novels, novellas, and short stories can be read again and again. While my Feral graphic novel series is for middle school readers, I wanted to provide grey areas, perhaps more than the editor always liked! I wanted the adventure, the scares, the questions, the uncertainty that would let the small town of Feral take on a larger-than-life presence for a reader and encourage revisiting it whenever the mood strikes. It's almost pleasant, the rhythm, the anticipation. A little unnerving too.
This is the only graphic novel/comic book on my list and it goes above and beyond in art and story.
I have enjoyed reading the Harrow County stories many times. I prefer the collected edition where you can take your time and read comic issues 1-16 of Darkhorse Comics Harrow County. The artwork pulls you in, and the story is filled with zippy turns and good dialogue.
It pulls from many of the books I've mentioned in building an early American horror story that heads off in multiple directions. I can smell the grass and trees, hear the click-clack of the horse-pulled carts, and taste autumn in the air while reading these books.
A topic for another time would be examining the different experiences when reading a graphic novel compared to a novel. The strengths and weaknesses, what exactly the illustrations add, but for a horror fan who has never…
The first half of the highly acclaimed, Eisner-nominated horror fantasy tale, collected in a value-priced omnibus.
Emmy always knew that the woods surrounding her home crawled with ghosts and monsters. But on the eve of her eighteenth birthday, she learns that she is connected to these creatures--and to the land itself--in a way she never imagined.
As a middle grade horror writer, I attribute my love of everything spooky to my early obsession with reading. Of course, my little brain was twisted already, but I found a perfect home in the monsters and ghouls of the library. These are the five books that inspired me to become a writer who scares children in the best possible way.
These fall more in the young adult world rather than middle grade because of the sexual situations. With that being said, I totally devoured them in middle school.
In my opinion, there is no greater master of the end of chapter cliffhanger than R.L. Stine, which keeps you frantically turning the page waaaaay after lights out. I carried these books around with me in my grandmother’s huge makeup case like my spooky book security blanket. And yes, my family was concerned.
FEAR STREET -- WHERE YOUR WORST NIGHTMARES LIVE...
The new girl is as pale as a ghost, blond, and eerily beautiful -- and she seems to need him as much as he wants her. Cory Brooks hungers for Anna Corwin's kisses, drowns in her light blue eyes. He can't get her out of his mind. He has been loosing sleep, ditching his friends...and everyone has noticed.
Then as suddenly as she came to Shadyside High, Anna disappears. To find a cure for his obsession, Cory must go to Anna's house on Fear Street -- no matter what the consequences.
Though I’ve always found the idea of survival after death fascinating, it was my interest in Modern Spiritualism that really sparked the desire to write Chasing Ghosts. That era (mid-1800s to the early 1900s) was a time when millions confidently believed they could communicate with the dead. Of course, this was only the tip of the paranormal iceberg. So I continued the journey into the lore of haunted places, ancient cultural beliefs, and scientific endeavors to find evidence for paranormal experiences or to debunk it. As a historian of the weirder pages of the past, this topic endlessly fascinates me. I hope it will for you as well.
This obscure 1896 book is a collection of interviews with dead luminaries. At least, that’s what the psychic author alleges. Inside you’ll find conversations with Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, and others. Discover their wisdom from beyond the veil, and in the case of Ben Franklin, you can enjoy a new set of his famous aphorisms, including this one: “Spiritual knowledge, like gems hidden in the bowels of the earth, is only to be reached by patient upturning of the soil.”
A previous volume, given through the mediumship of Mrs. Horn, entitled Strange Visitors, was so interesting, that it gave pleasure to learn that another volume of a similar kind was in preparation, and that the Spirit editor, Judge Edmonds, desired that it Should be placed in our hands for publication. The matter was found to be insufficient to form a volume of the kind intended, and during the movements of the medium, to secure favourable conditions for receiving further communications, much time was exhausted, as the dates appended indicate. The localities subjoined to the…
My Swedish grandmother first introduced me to the horror genre when I was a small boy. Her folktales of trolls and witches really fueled my imagination! Then, when I was in junior high, my father encouraged me to read Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. I didn’t get hooked on things Gothic, however, until I heard the lyrics of Jim Morrison and the Doors in high school. After college, I became a freelance writer. I quickly learned that 80% of my spooky stuff got accepted by magazines while only 10% of my general interest work was published. That said, it’s no wonder I became a horror writer!
The Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood features the author’s scariest tales, including “The Willows” and “The Wendigo”. Blackwood piles detail after detail atop one another until the reader nearly suffocates from the gloom and terror they create! He also squeezes much fear from isolated places like Canada and the Danube River.
A woman of snow . . . a midnight caller keeping his promise . . . forests where Nature is deliberate and malefic . . . enchanted houses . . . these are the beings and ideas that flood through this collection of ghost stories by Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951). Altogether thirteen stories, gathered from the entire corpus of Blackwood's work, are included: stories of such sheer power and imagination that it is easy to see why he has been considered the foremost British supernaturalist of the twentieth century. Blackwood's ability to create an atmosphere of unrelieved horror and sustain it…
I often refer to myself as a haunted body. Death is something that has fascinated and alarmed me since I can remember. I’ve even had a spooky experience or five that I can’t explain. But to write a ghost story is akin to making someone fall in love with you, or lean in close to hear a secret. I love the intrigue and power of that kind of tale. Our oldest stories are ghost stories and the biggest and most enduring mystery for the entirety of humanity is: Is there life after death?
Helen has been haunting the English classroom for 130 years and has never, not once, been seen. And then she feels his eyes on her. Seeing her, reallyseeing her like she hasn’t been seen in decades. Without wanting to be, Helen is drawn to him. That he has a body and she doesn’t is nothing in the face of their growing love, and the two form a bond that defies death. Let me tell you this book had me in tears. I read it years ago and still think of it with deep affection. I even wrote a song about it when I was far younger and far less self-conscious than I am now!
In the class of the high school English teacher she has been haunting, Helen feels them: for the first time in 130 years, human eyes are looking at her. They belong to a boy, a boy who has not seemed remarkable until now. And Helen—terrified, but intrigued—is drawn to him. The fact that he is in a body and she is not presents this unlikely couple with their first challenge. But as the lovers struggle to find a way to be together, they begin to discover the secrets of their former lives and of the young people they come to…
I enjoy stories that bring together diverse themes, such as family life, myths and legends, quests, and cutting-edge science, in an uncomplicated way. I love hidden communities, where accepted rules do not apply, allowing the development of original storylines. The suggestion that there is something on the edge of the supernatural, yet grounded in reality, the weirdest of events retaining a rational explanation. My writing has been inspired by the films of David Lynch. I admire his ability to evoke a sense of menace and a fear that things are not as they seem, leaving much to the reader’s imagination.
One of the most daring and original voices I have read in recent years.
I admire Kirsty Logan’s boldness in imagining and describing personal viewpoints and her unique interpretation of possible alternate realities. She shows the courage to commit to ideas and storylines that are original, innovative, and beyond the imagination of most people.
The two darkest stories are "Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by", a menacing tale of abuse, kidnapping, and violence, and "Half Sick of Shadows". The latter is profoundly moving and disturbing and almost unbelievable in its callousness.
A writer whose progress I will follow with interest.
'Gripping . . . You won't put it down' Sunday Telegraph
A shocking collection of dark stories, ranging from chilling contemporary fairytales to disturbing supernatural fiction.
Alone in a remote house in Iceland a woman is unnerved by her isolation; another can only find respite from the clinging ghost that follows her by submerging herself in an overgrown pool. Couples wrestle with a lack of connection to their children; a schoolgirl becomes obsessed with the female anatomical models in a museum; and a cheery account of child's day out is undercut by chilling footnotes.
