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thatdarkcornerofmymind:

Booklist for all the Dark Academics:

[Dark Academia book recs of all the different kinds I could think of. It’s a long journey. Buckle up.]

The Classic Dark Academic :

  • Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
  • Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
  • Anything by the Brontë sisters
  • Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (this book birthed Dark Academia)
  • Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
  • The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
  • Short stories by Edgar Allan Poe
  • Bram Stokers Dracula
  • Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu
  • Maurice by EM Forster
  • Madam Bovary by Gustav Flaubert
  • Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • A Good Man is Hard to Find
  • To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
  • Macbeth by Shakespeare
  • Othello by Shakespeare
  • Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

The Poetry-lover Academic:

  • Poetry of Baudelaire
  • Odes of Keats (ALL OF THEM ARE A MUST READ)
  • Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe (especially The Raven)
  • Shelley’s Alastor, Prometheus Unbound, Masque of Anarchy
  • Kubla Khan by Coleridge
  • T.S Elliott’s Wasteland
  • all Emily Dickinson poetry but especially ‘I felt a funeral in my brain’, 'Because I could not stop for death’ (read them a thousand times already)
  • Pablo Neruda’s Nothing but Death
  • Langston Hughes Poems
  • Tennyson’s Lotos eater (underrated gem)
  • Sylvia Plath poems but special mentions to Lady Lazarus and the Bell jar
  • Paradise Lost by Milton (if you want to include something about the Devil in your list)
  • Poems by Sappho
  • Poems of Charles Bukowski (especially Love Is a Dog from Hell)

The Contemporary Dark Academic:

  • A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee
  • The Secret History by Donna Tartt (the origin of Dark Academia)
  • My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
  • Ace of Spades by Amanda Foody (could recommend it a hundred times)
  • The Maidens by Alex Michaelides
  • If We Were Villains by ML Rio
  • Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
  • The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh
  • The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
  • The Temple House Vanishing by Rachel Donohue
  • The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
  • The Girls are all so nice here by Laurie Elizabeth Flynn
  • Heaven by Mieko Kawakami
  • Wilder Girls by Rory Power
  • The Likeness by Tana French
  • Never let me go by Kazuo Ishiguro
  • One of us is lying by Karen Mcmanus
  • Bunny by Mona Awad
  • The Plot by Jean Hanff
  • The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
  • The Lessons by Naomi Alderman
  • A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
  • Conversion by Katherine Howe
  • Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth
  • Love is a Dog from Hell by Charles Bukowski
  • A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
  • A Quaint and Curious Volume
  • We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen
  • The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
  • The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis
  • Walden by Henry David Thoreau
  • Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
  • The Lying Games by Ruth Ware
  • Black Chalk by Christopher J Yates
  • The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman
  • The Furies by Fernanda Eberstadt
  • The Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas
  • Bad Habits by Charleigh Rose
  • Good Girls Lie by JT Ellison
  • Shadow of the wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
  • The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
  • If We were Villains by M.L. Rio

Queer Dark Academic:

  • THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (yes, yes, yes it’s the gay shit)
  • Notes on a Scandal (What was she thinking?) by Zoë Heller
  • Hex by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight
  • Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (lesbian vampire, hell yeah!)
  • The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
  • Maurice by EM Forster
  • Christabel by Coleridge
  • Poems by Sappho
  • Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M Danforth
  • They Never Learn by Layne Fargo
  • Ace of Spades by Amanda Foody

The Dark Romantic Academic:

  • Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M Danforth
  • The Lessons by Naomi Alderman
  • Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
  • Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
  • Never let me go by Kazuo Ishiguro
  • The Likeness by Tana French
  • The Temple House by Rachel Donohue
  • The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
  • Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
  • A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

Mythological Dark Academic:

(pardon me for my cluelessness)

  • I have not really read much about mythology but if Norse mythology is the area of your interest, Neil Gaiman is the God of it. (aka not only Good Omens and American Gods, but also the book 'Norse Mythology’)
  • The Furies by Fernanda Eberstadt
  • The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
  • Circe by Madeline Miller
  • Ovid’s Metamorphoses for Greek mythology enthusiasts


[Remember: Some of these books have dark academia as their major aspect but most of them have dark academia as their minor aspect, and many of them have been put into the list because I got a dark academia kind of vibe from them. Moreover these books have a lot more to offer than just Dark Academia, even if we ignore that aspect, these books are just great pieces of literature. This list is entirely created out of my own reading researches, friendly recommendations, and book recs from reddit, pinterest and the internet in general. If I have gone wrong somewhere or if you want me to add something new, feel free to drop an ask.]

Oct 08, 2022

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