Find more of your favorite novelists with this literature map

Find your next book by prompting this AI

Have a general idea of the sort of book you'd like to read next, but don't know how to find a specific one? Try this fun and impressive tool. Describe the type of book you're looking for. It will suggest five options which attempt to meet your prompt. Find your next page-turner with this very cool tool.

Explore a list of the 100 best novels of all time, compiled by some of the world's best living writers, including Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, and Jennifer Egan.

Explore a list of the best novels of all time

Browse a detailed visual analysis of over 200,000 similes—comparisons that often use 'like' or 'as'—from popular fiction to see how frequently writers the same idiomatic expressions.

Eight ways literature can make us happier

Novels are often characterized as a form of cultural escape, but psychologists argue there are health benefits to the many elements comprising fiction. The Greek philosopher Aristotle explored this in his "Poetics," asking if literature was something meant to make us happier. This article highlights eight different innovations common to literature that provide psychological benefits, including the plot twist and more.

A computational analysis of Jane Austen's writing

Researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln translated Austen's novels into code to analyze her diction, then published their findings in a searchable database. Users can explore all six of her novels, analyzing the unique words used by her characters and the narrative techniques she employs.

Explore an interactive map built from more than 100,000 survey responses on where people find joy in their lives

See which similes appear most often in popular fiction

King sets many of his stories in Maine

In the process, he has created a few fictional towns. This extensive travelogue by a superfan explores the writer's favorite haunts, pinpointing specific details from and inspirations for King's fiction. Helpfully, it also provides plenty of photos, allowing you to venture through King's haunted version of the state without ever leaving the comfort of your home.

The 21st-century novel is increasingly autofictional

Although autofiction, a literary genre blending autobiography and fiction, has been around for millennia, it has become a popular mode in the 21st century. This extensive study of the genre—which analyzes works by Megan Boyle, Tao Lin, and others—argues that the form has become more prevalent because it mirrors the defining technology of the times: social media.

Find connections between Wikipedia articles utilizing a node mapping tool

Multiple Wikipedia articles can be placed on the map, each with its own node, and expanded to reveal related articles. The goal is to expand as many subsequent nodes as needed to connect articles and identify related concepts. Any node can be double-clicked on to open its respective Wikipedia page.

Inside 'Blood Meridian' author Cormac McCarthy's library of 20,000 books

The reclusive writer published 12 novels and taught himself stonemasonry and quantum physics, among myriad other skills and subjects. Since he died in 2023, scholars have been mining his personal library for lessons on his influences, interests, and more.

Mapping fiction's imagined breakdowns of the US after apocalypse

Post-apocalyptic fiction in the US is at least a century old, and how the future is envisioned reflects contemporary anxieties and divisions. This piece examines the various creative maps birthed from the tradition from Jack London's 1912 "The Scarlet Plague," a pandemic novel set in 2073, through Stephen King's "The Stand", dystopian "The Hunger Games," and visions of civil war.

Improve your typing speed by retyping classic literature

Why practice with nonsense letters and syllables when you can retype full books you always wanted to read, from Jane Austen and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to George Orwell and W.E.B. duBois. And it's free.

Why 2 literary writers think you should read Colleen Hoover

The "It Ends With Us" author is one of the most successful contemporary writers in American literature; she's also one of the most derided. Elizabeth Kaye Cook and Melanie Jennings argue that the criticism is mostly unfounded and that literary types should embrace more commercial authors like Hoover.

How famous writers chose their pen names

From Joseph Conrad to JK Rowling, writers employ pseudonyms for all kinds of reasons. How they find those pseudonyms, however, depends on the individual.

Explore an interactive map showing what makes people happy

Using 10,000 responses collected from people around the world about what makes them happy, this map offers insights into how relationships, finances, purpose, and small treats all contribute to a person's contentment. Recent data suggests that young people today are less happy than those in previous generations, indicating a need to reflect on what really matters in life.

Explore the wineries of the Napa Valley

Plan your own Napa tour with this interactive map of the hundreds of wineries, vineyards, and tasting rooms in the valley. You can sort by a variety of different factors, including whether or not the location requires reservations, types of wine available, and even dog-friendliness. Once you’ve selected your stops, the site can also optimize your route so you spend less time in the car and more time at the wineries.

Explore the world of fan fiction

This guide to the genre's major platforms breaks down their strengths and weaknesses, offering an excellent primer for the uninitiated newcomers.

Twelve artworks you'll love zooming into

Zoom in on these famous paintings to see what's hiding up close, then go exploring the rest of Google's incredible Arts and Culture hub.

The full list of every Pulitzer Prize winner

Since its inception in 1917, over 2,000 Pulitzers have been awarded to writers published in the US, from poetry and fiction to investigative reporting and history books. You can explore the winners by decade and year here, or click the view to see winners by category, including those no longer used.

A comparative analysis of the romance and horror genres' overlap

Both genres aim to make their readers' hearts pound, albeit in different ways. Romance novelist Trilina Pucci argues that the gap between the two aims is much slimmer than it may seem, with some horror tropes (like a man enraged by the abuse of his wife) and romance tropes (like the subgenre of dark romance) blurring the line.

An interactive periodic table maps every possible combination of cheese variables

Plotting milk type, texture, rind, mold, aging, and processing as intersecting axes, the tool shows which combinations already exist as named cheeses, which survive only as rare regional styles, and which remain entirely unexplored.

Camus and Sartre admired each other's work before becoming friends

The two writers, who would later be considered two of the biggest names associated with existentialism, wrote positive reviews of each others' early work, with Camus praising Sartre's novel "Nausea" and story collection "The Wall" and, later, Sartre favorably compared Camus' "The Stranger" to Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway. Still, their reviews included some critiques, hinting at the larger disagreements that would come much later.

Maps of murder across medieval England

These interactive maps show the sites of murders across York, Oxford, and London during the 14th Century. Explore the data by clicking site pins or experimenting with map filters, including crime scene type and murder weapon. Each pin includes a blurb on what researchers concluded about the attack, such as how a fight between the London fishmonger and skinner guilds during August 1340 ultimately left one man dead.

Eleanor Roosevelt's son wrote mystery novels starring his mother

Elliott Roosevelt wrote 20 novels about a fictional version of his mother, an amateur detective. Titles included "Murder and the First Lady," "The White House Pantry Murder," and "New Deal for Death."

See how each of the more than two million known species relates to each other—and to common ancestors—in this zoomable tree of life.

Meet the the scientists of the Manhattan Project

This resource profiles the scientists behind the Manhattan Project—from Nobel laureates like Fermi and Bethe to controversial figures like Teller and Fuchs—showing how their ideas, rivalries, and choices shaped the development of the atomic age.

Pub crawl generator: In the United Kingdom, a lot of pubs have the same name

For instance, the UK’s most popular pub name is Red Lion—if you wanted to have a drink at every Red Lion in the UK area, you’d have to finish 339 drinks. (For the record, we don’t advise this!) This fun resource plots the shortest route between all the pubs with the same name in the UK, in case you’re up for visiting all 339 Red Lions in a row.

Explore an interactive map of battles from the American Revolution, along with detailed summaries of each engagement

Mid-century modern graphic designers, known for their bright colors and bold lines in advertising, also found success with children's books.

Stanford built a Google Maps for the Roman Empire, revealing how much it cost to travel in the ancient world

Existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre coined the famous phrase 'Hell is—other people' in his play 'No Exit'

See these 16 pieces of art evoking phobias of snakes, flying, spiders, and more. 

The Dracula character, now seen as the vampire archetype, was inspired by a seafood-induced nightmare its creator experienced.

Netflix profits when you're not watching, and its movies are designed that way—read a detail-rich critical essay exposing lesser-known Netflix takes

The 19th-century painters of the Hudson River School were among the first American romantics, with portraits that displayed the natural beauty of the young country.

Search a massive database of over 4 decades of clues from the TV quiz show 'Jeopardy!'

Famed poet TS Eliot rejected the manuscript for George Orwell's political fable 'Animal Farm,' writing that its criticism of authoritarianism was not 'the right point of view.'

As of 2025, the most cited papers in science include a review of graphene, methods to improve image recognition, streamlining electron density calculations, and optimizing protein studies.

A century of Billboard issues documenting the evolution of popular music.

The Brothers Grimm were lawyers before they were storytellers, but became interested in fairy tales as they began investigating how rules and customs had been passed down through cultures.

When you complete a CAPTCHA on a website to prove you are human, you may be unknowingly training algorithms for self-driving cars, whose systems require training data to help identify crosswalks, bicycles, and other outdoor objects.

A Yale student wrote a profound essay about the consulting industry's influence on elite college students that was published in a book of her writing after she died in a post-graduation car accident.

Some researchers have labeled nomophobia, the fear of being without your phone, as 'the phobia of the 21st century.'

The term 'algorithm' originated from the Latinized name of al-Khwārizmī, a 9th-century mathematician whose works introduced Arabic numerals and the decimal-based numeral system to Europe and whose treatise 'Al-Jabr' gave algebra its name.

Alzheimer's can lead to brain shrinkage, with an average of around 2% of volume reduction per year

While El Niño moves warm Pacific Ocean waters east along the equator, La Niña moves them west, shifting where rainfall will become more common for months.

The United States is one of only around two dozen countries with a fully federal system of government, in which power is divided between national and state governments.

US intelligence allegedly pursued more than 600 schemes to assassinate Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro.