Guillermo del Toro’s Required Reading List
Can’t stop thinking about Guillermo del Toro’s new Frankenstein adaptation? Good news: the visionary director reveals his essential reading recommendations in this interview. These are the books that shaped one of cinema’s great gothic storytellers, and they might just transform your creative work too.
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Add to BookshelfFrankenstein (Netflix Tie-In)
by Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley’s classic of gothic horror — a cautionary tale of the limits of creativity that introduced the world to one of the most iconic monsters in literary history — now a major motion picture by Oscar-winning writer-director Guillermo del Toro, starring Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, and Mia Goth. Obsessed with creating life, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, which he shocks into life with electricity. But his botched creature, rejected by Frankenstein and denied human companionship, sets out to destroy his maker and all that he holds dear.
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Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Bronte
A novel of intense power and intrigue, Jane Eyre has dazzled generations of readers with its depiction of a woman’s quest for freedom. Having grown up an orphan in the home of her cruel aunt and at a harsh charity school, Jane Eyre becomes an independent and spirited survivor-qualities that serve her well as governess at Thornfield Hall. But when she finds love with her sardonic employer, Rochester, the discovery of his terrible secret forces her to make a choice. Should she stay with him, whatever the consequences, or follow her convictions, even if it means leaving her beloved?
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Jane Eyre (DK Classics)
by Charlotte Bronte
A beautiful deluxe gift edition of Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, and a silk ribbon bookmark. “It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.”
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
An astounding novel of decadence, debauchery, and secrecy from one of Ireland’s greatest writers. The Picture of Dorian Gray offers a disturbing portrait of an individual coming face-to-face with the reality of his soul. Shocking in its suggestion of unspeakable sin, this novel was later used as evidence against Wilde when he was tried for indecency in 1895.
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Bleak House
by Charles Dickens
A savage, but often comic, indictment of a society that is rotten to the core, Bleak House is one of Dickens’s most ambitious novels, with a range that extends from the drawing rooms of the aristocracy to the poorest of London slums.
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The Woman in White
by Wilkie Collins
Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism.
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The Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
by Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most original writers in the history of American letters, a genius who was tragically misunderstood in his lifetime. This edition includes his most well-known works — The Raven, The Pit and the Pendulum, Annabel Lee,” The Fall of the House of Usher, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, as well as less-familiar stories, poems, and essays.
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$27.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Jacob Elordi Recommends: A Bright Ray of Darkness
by Ethan Hawke
A bracing meditation on fame and celebrity, and the redemptive, healing power of art; a portrait of the ravages of disappointment and divorce; a poignant consideration of the rites of fatherhood and manhood; a novel soaked in rage and sex, longing and despair; and a passionate love letter to the world of theater, A Bright Ray of Darkness showcases Ethan Hawke’s gifts as a novelist as never before.
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The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers
When she was only twenty-three, Carson McCullers’s first novel created a literary sensation. She was very special, one of America’s superlative writers who conjures up a vision of existence as terrible as it is real, who takes us on shattering voyages into the depths of the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition. Some fight their loneliness with violence and depravity, some with sex or drink, and some — like Mick — with a quiet, intensely personal search for beauty.
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The Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The canonical American masterpiece of sin, guilt, and revenge, in an authoritative new edition from Penguin Classics with a foreword by Tom Perrotta. At once retrospective and radically new, The Scarlet Letter portrays seventeenth-century Puritan New England, a time period irreversibly encoded in the American identity.
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The Damned Thing, Deluxe Edition
by Ambrose Bierce
A bone-chilling, beautifully produced new collection of 11 uncanny tales from one of the great American masters of the ghost story. Bierce is often seen as the link between Poe and Lovecraft in the American fantastical tradition, and this collection showcases his mastery of the macabre. The short stories in this collection will enthrall any lover of dark and unsettling tales.
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Cuentos de Amor de Locura y de Muerte
by Horacio Quiroga
Considered by many to be one of the first Latin American masters of the short story, Horacio Quiroga is the author of some 200 pieces of fiction often compared to that of Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, and Edgar Allan Poe. Among this collection of tales selected by the author himself are stories of sickness, family tragedy, personal despair, and geographical exile, and also the frequent brutality of man.
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The Aleph and Other Stories
by Jorge Luis Borges
Full of philosophical puzzles and supernatural surprises, these stories contain some of Borges’s most fully realized human characters. With uncanny insight, he takes us inside the minds of an imprisoned Mayan priest, fanatical Christian theologians, a woman plotting vengeance on her father’s “killer,” and a man awaiting his assassin in a Buenos Aires guest house. This volume also contains the hauntingly brief vignettes about literary imagination and personal identity collected in The Maker, which Borges wrote as failing eyesight and public fame began to undermine his sense of self.
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The Book of Imaginary Beings
by Jorge Luis Borges
In a perfect pairing of talent, this volume blends twenty illustrations by Peter SĂs with Jorge Luis Borges’s 1957 compilation of 116 “strange creatures conceived through time and space by the human imagination,” from dragons and centaurs to Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat and the Morlocks of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. The Book of Imaginary Beings will delight readers of classic fantasy as well as Borges’s many admirers.
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If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
by Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino’s masterpiece combines a love story and a detective story into an exhilarating allegory of reading, in which the reader of the book becomes the book’s central character.
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