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
Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu
Madam Bovary by Gustav Flaubert
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
A Good Man is Hard to Find
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
The Poetry-lover Academic:
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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.]
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