Recommendations
Books Like The Princess Bride
Best books to read after The Princess Bride by William Goldman
William Goldman's The Princess Bride is one of the most beloved comic fantasies — Westley, Buttercup, Inigo Montoya, and the most quotable villain in fiction. These recommendations continue the comic fantasy tradition, explore the adventure-romance genre Goldman was parodying, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the witty, self-aware fantasy novel.
- 1Buy
Good Omens
by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
The comic fantasy equivalent — the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley preventing the Apocalypse, the same love for wit, warmth, and the comic subversion of genre conventions that makes The Princess Bride so enduring.
- 2Buy
The Princess Bride
by William Goldman
If you only know the film — Goldman's novel is even funnier than the movie, with the full metafictional apparatus of his 'abridgment' of the fictional Morgenstern original, the extended Goldman-as-editor jokes, and more backstory for every character.
- 3Buy
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams
The comic science fiction equivalent — Arthur Dent on an absurdist journey through space, Adams's wit matching Goldman's line for line, the most beloved comedy in the British science fiction tradition.
- 4Buy
Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes
The original adventure-romance parody — Quixote tilting at windmills in sixteenth-century Spain, Cervantes demolishing the same chivalric romance tradition that Goldman parodies, the founding text of the comic novel.
- 5Buy
The Name of the Wind
by Patrick Rothfuss
The epic fantasy hero as self-narrator — Kvothe telling his own legend in an inn, aware that he is telling it well, the same metafictional self-consciousness about the hero's story that Goldman builds into his framing device.
- 6Buy
Stardust
by Neil Gaiman
The fairy-tale romance companion — Tristran Thorn in Faerie, Gaiman writing a love story with the same warmth and wit as Goldman while drawing on Victorian fairy-tale tradition rather than adventure-romance.
- 7Buy
Captain Blood
by Rafael Sabatini
The swashbuckling adventure novel that Goldman was parodying — Peter Blood, physician turned pirate captain, the archetypal English adventure-romance, the kind of novel Goldman grew up reading and loving and gently mocking.
- 8Buy
Redwall
by Brian Jacques
The animal epic fantasy in the adventure-romance tradition — Matthias the mouse defending Redwall Abbey, Jacques writing the same love for heroic adventure and noble courage that Goldman celebrates while gently sending up.
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