Best first reads, 2024

Pre-2024 releases only.

TOP 10 (one per author)

Daisy Miller, by Henry James (1879)
A Room with a View, by E. M. Forster (1908)
Pan’s Garden: A Volume of Nature Stories, by Algernon Blackwood (1912)
The Custom of the Country, by Edith Wharton (1913)
Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
Cassandra at the Wedding, by Dorothy Baker (1962)
Another World, by Pat Barker (1998)
Heartbreaker, by Maryse Meijer (2016)
Babysitter, by Joyce Carol Oates (2022)
The Guest, by Emma Cline (2023)

ADDITIONAL STANDOUT READS

We Are Here to Hurt Each Other, by Paula D. Ashe (2022)
This Mortal Coil, by Cynthia Asquith (1947)
The Space of Literature, by Maurice Blanchot (1955)
The Writing of the Disaster, by Maurice Blanchot (1980)
Dandelion Wine, by Ray Bradbury (1957)
Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale, by Charles Brockden Brown (1798)
Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker, by Charles Brockden Brown (1799)
The Sublime and the Beautiful, by Edmund Burke (1757)
The Daughters of Block Island, by Christa Carmen (2023)
Gothic Metaphysics: From Alchemy to the Anthropocene, by Jodey Castricano (2021)
The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers (1895)
Don’t Look Now, by Daphne du Maurier (1971)
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, by Ruth Franklin (2016)
Sea, Swallow Me and Other Stories, by Craig Laurance Gidney (2008)
Twice-Told Tales, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1837)
The Marble Faun, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1860)
The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith (1955)
The Woman in Black, by Susan Hill (1983)
The Witchcraft of Salem Village, by Shirley Jackson (1956)
Let Me Tell You, by Shirley Jackson [edited by Laurence Hyman & Sarah Hyman DeWitt] (2015)
Burn Man: Selected Stories, by Mark Anthony Jarman (2023)
Man and His Symbols, edited by C. G. Jung & M.-L von Franz (1964)
Uzumaki, by Junji Ito (2013)
The Red Tree, by Caitlín R. Kiernan (2009)
The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, by Thomas King (2003)
Something Like an Autobiography, by Akira Kurosawa (1981)
What Are You, by Lindsay Lerman (2022)
Existence and Existents, by Emmanuel Levinas (1947)
Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious (1956)
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, by Lorrie Moore (1994)
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, by Toni Morrison (1992)
Devil in a Blue Dress, by Walter Mosley (1990)
Black Water, by Joyce Carol Oates (1992)
New England’s Gothic Literature, by Faye Ringel (1995)
The Gothic Literature and History of New England, by Faye Ringel (2022)
The Devil’s Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco, by Julie Salamon (1991)
The Last Man, by Mary Shelley (1826)
The Craft of Writing, by William Sloane (1979)
Lost Boy Lost Girl, by Peter Straub (2003)
The Door, by Magda Szabó (1987)
The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, by Tzvetan Todorov (1970)
A Fatal Inversion, by Barbara Vine (1987)
The Color Purple, by Alice Walker (1982)
Star-Begotten, by H. G. Wells (1937)
Ghosts, by Edith Wharton (1937)
The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe (1987)
Strange Seed, by T. M. Wright (1978)