reading list for 2020
2019 reading list
literature recommendations
last updated 7.1.2020
crossed = finished
bolded = currently reading
plain = to read
* = reread
+ = priority
ask if you want PDFs!
currently reading:
The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester
We Eat Our Own by Kea Wilson
Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson
Inferno by Dante Aligheri
novels (unsorted)
The Border of Paradise by Esmé Weijun Wang
+Justine by Lawrence Durrell
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
+Death in Venice by Thomas Mann*
The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco*
The Letters of Mina Harker by Dodie Bellamy
Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille
+Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
+Malina by Ingeborg Bachman
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride
Monsieur Venus by Rachilde
+The Marquise de Sade by Rachilde
+A King Alone by Jean Giono
+The Scarab by Manuel Mujica Lainez
+The Invitation by Beatrice Guido
Operation Massacre by Rodolfo Walsh
She Who Was No More by Boileau-Narcejac
Mascaro, the American Hunter by Haroldo Conti
European Travels for the Monstrous Gentlewomen by Theodora Goss
Kiss Me, Judas by Christopher Baer
Possession: A Romance by A.S. Byatt
The Grip of It by Jac Jemc
Celestine by Olga Ravn
The Girl Who Ate Birds by Paul Nougé
The Necrophiliac by Gabrielle Wittkop
Possessions by Julia Kristeva
classics
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio*
Purgatio by Dante Aligheri
Paradiso by Dante Aligheri
short story collections
The Wilds: Stories by Julia Elliot
The Dark Dark: Stories by Samantha Hunt
Severance by Robert Olen Butler
Enfermario by Gabriela Torres Olivares
Sirens and Demon Lovers: 22 Stories of Desire edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling
The Beastly Bride edited by Ellen Datlow
+Vampire In Love by Enrique Vila-Matas
Collected works of Leonora Carrington
Collected works of Silvina Ocampo
Collected works of Everil Worrel
Collected works of Luisa Valenzuela
theatre
+Faust by Goethe
The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
Phaedra’s Love by Sarah Kane
nonfiction (unsorted)
Countess Dracula by Tony Thorne
+The Bloody Countess by Valentine Penrose
Infamous Lady: The True Story of Countess Erzsebet Bathory by Kimberly L. Craft
Blake by Peter Akroyd
Lives of the Necromancers by William Godwin
A History of the Heart by Ole M. Høystad
On Monsters by Stephen T. Asma
+Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination by Avery Gordon
+Consoling Ghosts : Stories of Medicine and Mourning from Southeast Asians in Exile by Jean M. Langford
essays (unsorted)
When the Sick Rule the World: Essays by Dodie Bellamy
Academonia: Essays by Dodie Bellamy
‘On the Devil, and Devils’ by Percy Shelley
+An Erotic Beyond: Sade by Octavio Paz
poetry
+100 Notes on Violence by Julia Carr
academia (unsorted)
Essays on the Art of Angela Carter: Flesh and the Mirror edited by Lorna Sage
The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food edited by Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Donna Lee Brien
Cupid’s Knife: Women's Anger and Agency in Violent Relationships by Abby Stein
Traumatic Encounters in Italian Film: Locating the Cinematic Unconscious by Fabio Vighi
The Severed Flesh: Capital Visions by Julia Kristeva
Feast and Folly: Cuisine, Intoxication, and the Poetics of the Sublime by Allen S. Weiss
on horrror
Terrors in Cinema edited by Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper
Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews by Robin Wood
Monster Theory: Reading Culture by Jeffrey Cohen
The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart by Noël Caroll
Dark Dreams 2.0: A Psychological History of the Modern Horror Film from the 1950s to the 21st Century by Charles Derry
Monsters of Our Own Making by Marina Warner
Monster Culture in the 21st Century: A Reader edited by by Marina Levina and Diem My Bui
the gothic
Woman and Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth by Nina Auerbach
Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters by J. Halberstam
+Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic by Eugenia C. Delamotte
Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic by Anne Williams
Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film by Xavier Aldana Reyes
On the Supernatural in Poetry by Ann Radcliffe
The Gothic Flame by Devendra P. Varma
Gothic Versus Romantic: A Reevaluation of the Gothic Novel by Robert D. Hume
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke
Over Her Dead Body by Elisabeth Bronfen
The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology by Kate Ellis
Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook, 1700-1820 by E. Clery
Limits of Horror: Technology, Bodies, Gothic edited by Fred Botting
The History of Gothic Fiction by Markman Ellis
The Routledge Companion to the Gothic edited by Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy
Gothic and Gender edited by Donna Heiland
Romanticism and the Gothic Tradition by G.R. Thompson
Cryptomimesis : The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing by Jodie Castricano
bluebeard
Bluebeard’s legacy: death and secrets from Bartók to Hitchcock edited by Griselda Pollock and Victoria Anderson
The tale of Bluebeard in German literature: from the eighteenth century to the present Mererid Puw Davies
Bluebeard: a reader’s guide to the English tradition by Casie E. Hermansson
Bluebeard gothic : Jane Eyre and its progeny Heta Pyrhönen
Bluebeard Tales from Around the World by Heidi Ann Heiner
religion
The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore by Piero Camporesi
Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middles Ages by Nancy Caciola
Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages by Nancy Caciola
“He Has a God in Him”: Human and Divine in the Modern Perception of Dionysus by Albert Henrichs
The Ordinary Business of Occultism by Gauri Viswanathan
The Body and Society. Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity by Peter Brown
cannibalism
Eat What You Kill: Or, a Strange and Gothic Tale of Cannibalism by Consent Charles J. Reid Jr.
Consuming Passions: The Uses of Cannibalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe by Merrall Llewelyn Price
Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature by Heather Blurton
+Eating Their Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Cultural Identity edited by Kristen Guest
Dinner with a Cannibal: The Complete History of Mankind’s Oldest Taboo by Carole A. Travis-Henikoff
crime
Savage Appetites by Rachel Monroe
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
The Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit by John Douglass
theory/philosophy
Life Everlasting: the animal way of death by Bernd Heinrich
The Ambivalence of Scarcity and Other Essays by René Girard
Interviews with Hélène Cixous
Symposium by Plato
Phaedra by Plato
Becoming-Rhythm: A Rhizomatics of the Girl by Leisha Jones
The Abject of Desire: The Aestheticization of the Unaesthetic in Contemporary Literature and Culture edited by Konstanze Kutzbach, Monika Mueller
The Severed Head: Capital Visions by Julia Kristeva
perfume & alchemy
Perfume: The Alchemy of Scent by Jean-Claude Ellena
The Perfume Lover: A Personal Story of Scent by Denyse Beaulieu
Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell by Jonathan Reinarz
Fragrant: The Secret Life of Scent by Mandy Aftel
Das Parfum by Patrick Süskind*
Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture by Catherine Maxwell
The Foul and the Fragrant by Alain Corbin
+throughsmoke by Jehanne Dubrow
“The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Perfume” by Katy Kelleher
medicine
The Butchering Art by Lindsey Fitzharris
Finished
(Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film by Jalal Toufic
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