How far would you go to be part of something greater than yourself? My third novel, Here in Avalon, follows two very different sisters as they fall under the spell of a mysterious midnight New York City cabaret troupe that may or may not be a cult, and may or may not be a gateway to another world.

In writing Here in Avalon, I was inspired not only by immersive theatre productions like Sleep No More (which, as I have written before, attract a highly cult-like fandom of their own) but by a rich tradition of novels and stories about ordinary human beings trying—whether through travel, religion, or political experiment—to transcend the seemingly mundane world they’re living in, and to seek enchantment outside their everyday lives.

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William Morris, News from Nowhere

An early classic of soft science fiction, News From Nowhere (1890) is the best-known novel by William Morris, the nineteenth-century English socialist, utopian, and artist. A futuristic vision of a better world, inspired by Morris’s own political ideas, News from Nowhere follows a young socialist, William Guest, who finds himself transported to a far-off land where private property, marriage, divorce, and a whole host of other social constructs simply don’t exist, and where people live and labor in harmony with nature.

Less of a plot-driven story than a meditation on Morris’s conflicted political and aesthetic ideals, News from Nowhere nevertheless challenges us to imagine what another life might look like outside the confines of post-Industrial Revolution capitalism.

Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes

Published in 1913, just a year before the author’s death in World War I, this short, lyrical novel tells the story the titular adolescent Meaulnes who one night chances across a mysterious historical costume party on an elegant estate, where he falls in love with one of the attendees, only to find himself unable to find the chateau—or the girl—again: a loss that becomes an obsession.

What starts as a seemingly magic-tinged story about a vanishing castle turns out to be a story about the all too worldly Meulnes himself: whose passion for what he cannot have leads him to lose the very things he loves most.

Rosemary MacAulay, The Towers of Trebizond

Perhaps most famous today for its outlandish first sentence (“‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my aunt Dot, climbing down from that animal on her return from high Mass.”), this 1951 travelogue-cum-novel is far more thoughtful and melancholy a work than its early comedy suggests.

Ostensibly the story of a young Englishwoman, Laurie, who travels through Turkey with her eccentric Anglo-Catholic missionary aunt, in part to get away from an adulterous love affair, The Towers of Trebizond ultimately transforms into a book about the contentious relationship between Laurie’s passion for her lover and her inchoate yearning for a faith she cannot fully understand.

Norman Rush, Mating

What if we could figure out another, better, way to love? This question haunts the unnamed American graduate student who narrates Rush’s 1991 novel about sexual and communal politics. Our narrator is in love with the older, wiser, and potentially far more foolhardy social scientist Nelson Denoon, who has, according to rumor at least, founded an experimental matriarchal society in the Kalahari Desert.

Unsure of who she is and what she thinks about life, her thesis, or anything at all, our narrator lets her passion for Denoon lead her into a quest not just for love, but for a better way to live.

R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

Equal parts campus novel and cult story, R.O. Kwon’s 2018 The Incendiaries follows Phoebe Lin, a failed piano prodigy coping with the loss of her mother, as she falls under the influence of John Leal, a mysterious half-Korean activist whose equally shadowy organization, Jejah, may in fact be more cult-like than he lets on.

A novel about the close connection between love and violence, and how those who prey upon the world’s lost and loneliest souls use that connection to their advantage, The Incendiaries is currently in development as a limited series.

Emma Cline, The Girls

Emma Cline’s 2016 debut novel is a loose retelling of the story of the Manson Family and their 1969 murder of Sharon Tate. Set in the anarchic and freewheeling summer of 1969, The Girls follows a group of disaffected seekers under the erotic and spiritual influence of Russell Hadrick: the novel’s stand-in for Charles Manson. At once clear about the dangers of the girls’ new life and honest about the power of its thrall, The Girls is a poignant reminder that our hunger for transcendence and our capacity for transgression are never far from one another.

David Burr Gerrard, The Epiphany Machine

A cult story of a different kind, the late David Burr Gerrard’s second novel—inspired by since-shuttered New York speakeasy bookstore Brazenhead Books—reimagines its notoriously eccentric proprietor as the bombastic Adam Lyons: the possessor of an unprepossessing but inexplicably powerful machine capable of tattooing personalized “epiphanies” on users’ forearms: truths visible to everybody but themselves.

When young Venter Lowood, whose parents’ lives have been destroyed by use of the machine, seeks out Adam—and gets drawn into a web of violent deaths surrounding the device—he finds that the machine may upend his life, too.

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Here in Avalon by Tara Isabella Burton is available via Simon & Schuster.

In London in 1892, everybody—or, at least, everybody who was anybody—was talking about one thing: green carnations. Nobody was sure, exactly, what wearing a green carnation meant, or why it had suddenly become such a deliciously scandalous, dazzlingly fashionable sartorial statement. All anybody knew was that one day, at a London theater, someone important (stories differed as to who exactly it was) wore a green carnation, or maybe it had been a blue one (stories differed about that too).

Green carnations may have had something to do with sexual deviance. They may also have had something to do with the worship of art. And the whole thing somehow had to do with Oscar Wilde, the flamboyant playwright, novelist, and fame-courting dandy who—as he never tired of telling the press—put his talent into his work but put his genius into his life. Wilde lived his life as a work of art (or let people think he did). The affair of the green carnation gives us a little glimpse into how.

One story about what exactly happened comes from the painter Cecil Robertson, who recounts his version in his memoirs. According to Robertson, Wilde was keen to drum up publicity for his latest play, Lady Windermere’s Fan. A character in the play, Cecil Graham—an elegant and witty dandy figure who rather resembled Wilde himself—was ostensibly going to wear a carnation onstage as part of his costume. And Wilde wanted life to resemble art.

“I want a good many men to wear them tomorrow,” Wilde allegedly told Robertson. “People will stare…and wonder. Then they will look round the house [theater] and see every here and there more and more little specks of mystic green”—a new and inexplicable fashion statement. And then, Wilde gleefully insisted, they would start to ask themselves that most vital of questions: “What on earth can it mean?”

Robertson evidently ventured to ask Wilde what, exactly, the green carnation did mean.

Wilde’s response? “Nothing whatsoever. But that is just what nobody will guess.”

It’s unclear how much of Robertson’s story is true. If any large group—including the actor playing Cecil Graham—wore green carnations at the Lady Windermere’s Fan premiere on February 20, nobody in the press commented upon it. That said, the author Henry James, who was in the audience that night, remembers Wilde himself—the “unspeakable one,” he called him—striding out for his curtain call wearing a carnation in “metallic blue.”

Within days, carnations were everywhere. Just two weeks later, a newspaper covering the premiere of another play, this one by Théodore de Banville, reported a bizarre phenomenon: Wilde in the audience, surrounded by a “suite of young gentlemen all wearing the vivid dyed carnation which has superseded the lily and the sunflower,” two flowers that had previously been associated with Wilde and with fashionable, flamboyant, and sexually ambiguous young men more generally.

A little over a week after that, a London periodical published another piece on this mysterious carnation. It is a dialogue between Isabel, a young woman, and Billy, an even younger dandy—heavily implied to be gay—about the flower, which Billy has received as a gage d’amour (the French is tactfully untranslated) from a much older man. Billy shows off his flower to the curious Isabel with the attitude of studied nonchalance: “Oh, haven’t you seen them?…. Newest thing out. They water them with arsenic, you know, and it turns them green.”

The green carnation is something desperately exciting, understood not by ordinary society women but by Brummell-style dandies, shimmering with hauteur. It’s deliciously dangerous, perhaps even a tad wicked; the carnations are colored with poison, after all. It’s also, in every sense of the word, a little bit queer.

The green carnation’s appeal as a symbol of something esoteric persisted. Two years after the premiere of Lady Windermere’s Fan, an anonymous author—later revealed to be the London music critic Robert Hichens—published The Green Carnation, a novel that appears to be very obviously based on Oscar Wilde’s real- life homosexual relationship with the much younger Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas.

That relationship would prove to be Wilde’s downfall. In 1895, Wilde would be arrested on charges of “gross indecency” at the behest of Bosie’s influential father and spend two years imprisoned at Reading Gaol.

Wilde would emerge penniless and psychologically shaken, and he died in effective exile in Paris a few years later. Indeed, The Green Carnation, despite being a work of fiction that Wilde didn’t even write, would be presented at his trial as evidence of his moral and sexual degradation. The press, meanwhile, took Wilde’s own propensity for carnations “artificially colored green” as another admission of guilt. By then, it was allegedly common knowledge that such a flower was worn by “homosexuals in Paris.”

In The Green Carnation (the novel, that is) we see Oscar Wilde reimagined as the playwright Esmé Amarinth, the “high priest” of what we learn is the “cult of the green carnation.” Amarinth and his followers are all dandies. Their religion is a passionate worship of the artistic and the artificial, which they believe is superior to the meaningless, empty, and brutal world of nature. Like Rameau’s nephew before them, they are fascinated with originality and the way in which a soupçon of carefully chosen transgression can help them ascend the dull, natural plane and reach a higher, more divine form of existence.

Placing a green carnation into his buttonhole, one of Amarinth’s devotees, Reggie, muses how “the white flower of a blameless life was much too inartistic to have any attraction for him.” Rather, we learn, Reggie “worshipped the abnormal with all the passion of his impure and subtle youth.” Meanwhile, Amarinth predicts that the artificially green carnation will soon be replicated by nature.

Just as Wilde’s seemingly arbitrary decision to promote the green carnation had, within years, transformed the flower into a gay fashion symbol whose origins nobody could seem to remember, so, too—in Amarinth’s telling, at least—would reality change to fit the fantasy. “Nature will soon begin to imitate them,” Amarinth is fond of saying, “as she always imitates everything, being naturally uninventive.”

The Green Carnation is not a very good novel. Oscar Wilde, who was briefly accused of being its anonymous author, declared angrily that he most certainly had not written that “middle-class and mediocre book.” He had, of course, invented that “Magnificent Flower”—the arsenic-green carnation—but with the trash that “usurps its strangely beautiful name,” Wilde had “little to do.” “The Flower,” he concluded, is “a work of Art. The book is not.”

Be that as it may, The Green Carnation, though it is certainly a satirical exaggeration, can tell us much about this strange, new class of young men cropping up not only in London but also in Paris, Copenhagen, and so many other European capitals during the nineteenth century: the dandy. Inheritors of the mantle of Beau Brummell but far more flamboyant in their affect—John Bull would certainly have turned around to look at them in the street—these modern dandies didn’t just live their lives artistically.

Rather, as Hichens’s novel suggest, they had discovered in their obsession with beauty and self-fashioning a new kind of religion, a worship of the unnatural and the artificial as a means of escaping from both the meaningless void of “nature” and the equally meaningless abyss that was modern life.

These dandies believed—or at least made out that they believed—that the highest calling a person could have was a careful cultivation of the self: of clothing, sure, and of hairstyle, but also of gesture, of personality. And behind that belief lay a kind of bitter nihilism, as poisonous as arsenic itself. Nothing meant anything, unless you decided it did. A green carnation could signify homosexual desire, or aesthetic dandyism, or “nothing whatsoever,” depending on your mood and what you felt like conveying to the world that morning.

Self-creation was possible, even desirable, even godlike, precisely because there was no meaning in the world without it. The world was nothing but raw, formless material for the clever and the enterprising to shape to their will. Truth was not objective, something out there in the ether. Rather, it was something for human beings to determine for themselves by shaping the impressions and responses of other people.

“Reggie was considered very clever by his friends,” we learn from Hichens, “but more clever by himself. He knew that he was great, and he said so often in Society. And Society smiled and murmured that it was a pose. Everything is a pose nowadays, especially genius.”

Vivian Grey’s “sneer for the world” had become something every dandy needed to possess.

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Excerpted from Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians by Tara Isabella Burton. Copyright © 2023. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Every few years, I go through entries of my now-defunct Livejournal: a journaling website I used with obsessive regularity throughout my teenage and college years. Invariably, my attention turns to my earliest entries on the platform; largely written during the three years I spent in somewhat feral isolation at a red-brick, ivy-trellised boarding school in New Hampshire. They are, of course, what we might now call cringe: agonizingly earnest, intellectually rapacious, emotionally overrwrought. But they are also, in their way, beautiful.

Back then, I believed that everything I ever learned in class applied directly, and exactly, to the life I would one day live. I would write thousands of words after Latin class, meditating on whether I was more like pious, self-controlled Aeneas or the passionate Dido: her heart constantly aflame. (The answer was, naturally, the latter, although I often wished I could develop the capacities of the former). I would write about reading Antony and Cleopatra in my senior Shakespeare seminar, and wonder aloud—to a “friendslocked” audience of ten or twenty strangers—whether all human relationships demanded performative artificiality.

My emotional life and my academic life were intertwined, as they had never been before, and never would be thereafter: in college, in grad school, in adulthood. What I read—whether in class or sequestered away on my school library’s third-floor mezzanine, sufficiently ill-attended that it doubled as an infamous campus hookup joint—mattered to me. And I believed, with childish conviction, that books—and only books—could teach me how to live. I remember once patiently explaining to a classmate that I planned to spend my semester working on an erotic novel set in fin de siècle Paris.

They asked me how I could write an erotic novel when I was—quite obviously—a total virgin.

This did not deter me.

“Well,” I continued, “I’ve read a lot of of Anaïs Nin.”

Granted, even by the standards of teenagers, I was particularly bereft of self-awareness. I was an awkward teenager, invariably an insufferable one. I had been homeschooled for much of the previous two years, moving halfway across the world and then back again with an itinerant mother. Much of my eighth grade year had been spent riding my bicycle unsupervised through the streets of Rome, doing my makeshift Latin homework in the forum. Flesh-and-blood people confused me. They did not operate with the same purity of intention that the characters I loved most did; they were not gloriously elemental—like Oscar Wilde’s seductive Henry Wotton, say, or the desperately saintly Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov—but uncertain and self-contradictory.

But when I think back to those three years I spent in New Hampshire, what strikes me most is how widespread this tendency was. All of us—nearly all academically gifted, absolutely all emotionally immature—took the conversations we had in class with utmost, credulous seriousness. We believed that because we were clever, and good at school, and good at reading, that we could somehow skip ahead past the messy bits of our own adolescence. We could learn what a good life looked like without ever needing to actually live. We would corner one another at the dining-hall, in order to share unsolicited advice about how our peers could better develop social graces.

We would take notes in history class about whether it was better to emulate someone like Klemens von Metternich—the consummate conservative, wary of the bloody consequences of political change—or the scheming Otto von Bismarck, whose flint-eyed realpolitik lent itself neatly to the social vagaries of the dormitory status hierarchy.

Much of this, of course, seems nightmarish in retrospect—and I cannot say my years at Phillips Exeter were particularly happy. But the geographic isolation of a small New England campus, combined with our shared conviction in the relevance of our intellectual pursuits, rendered us collectively, and wonderfully, vulnerable. For the first time in my life, we were in a place where ideas mattered; where what we read we read not in pursuit of academic laurels, nor in college acceptances, but rather of genuine answers to the questions whose relevance teenagers, in particular, feel most keenly: who am I supposed to be? How do I live? What does it mean to love a person, or to want a person—and are they the same thing?

It is precisely that sense of both isolation and vulnerability that makes me particularly susceptible to the campus novel, and in particular the campus bildungsroman: a genre that, at its best, explores the concentrated effects of extreme ideas on receptive human beings. As in a fairy-tale—where parents are often conveniently absent—the campus novel uproots voracious, capacious young people from their ordinary settings. Their friends, their families, their before-life are often elided from the narrative entirely; we are left, rather, with characters who both hunger for knowledge and lack the self-protection that would make it possible to take that knowledge less seriously.

Even interpersonal relationships—of love, of lust, of grudging respect or enmity—are inextricable from this hunger for ideas, for certainty in the world; there’s a reason that a standard trope of the campus novel, from Evelyn Waugh’s 1946 Brideshead Revisited to Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to Donna Tartt’s 1992 The Secret History is the mysterious “chosen set”: students set apart by perceived intellectual or spiritual or aesthetic superiority, who induct the protagonist into a world of both interpersonal tensions and, ultimately, interior knowledge.

In Evelyn Waugh’s 1946 Brideshead Revisited, for example, which takes place largely in 1930’s Oxford, the protagonist, Charles Ryder, comes to an uneasy Catholicism through his homoerotic relationship with the aristocratic dandy Sebastian Flyte. In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, also set in the 1930’s, the titular teacher indoctrinates her favored students (including our protagonist Sandie) into a passionate worship of romantic strength and power that culminates in fascist sympathies. And in The Secret History (about which I’ve recently written in more detail), narrator Richard Papen’s corruption comes through his election into an elite campus Greek reading group: his moral corrosion, which leads him and his new friends to murder and madness, explicitly linked to the seriousness with which the characters take the brutality of Greek tragedy as a serious model for understanding the world around them.

At their best, these books reveal to us two truths: truths I intuited, but did not fully understand, during my own time at boarding school. They reveal the sheer power—and danger—of pure ideas, unadulterated by the compromises maturity often demands: what does it look like, these novels ask, to take anything too seriously? They reminds us that ideas are not just playthings—conceits to bandy about at cocktail parties, or espouse for clout on Twitter—but rather the fundamental building blocks of human life: integral to how we actually live. But they reveal, too, the way in which our love of ideas and our love of other people are inseparable from one another.

Consider the way in which, for example, Charles and Sebastian’s relationship is both the story of two men falling in some confusing kind of love love—a love that leads Charles in turn to faith; and also the story about how Charles’s love of beauty, and his pursuit of something more than the bourgeois existence his class background seems to consign him to, makes him particularly susceptible to someone as alluring—and as emotionally disastrous—as Sebastian proves to be. The best campus bildungsromans are those that at once take ideas seriously and also help us understand how our own relationships—of love, envy, and desire —are never as divorced from our hunger for knowledge, of both the self and the world.

In my own forthcoming novel, The World Cannot Give—at once an homage to, and a subversion of—the classic campus bildungsroman, I tried to capture something of my own boarding school experience. I tried to capture the astounding awkwardness of loving too much, of loving too deeply, of falling in love with books and people alike and never quite being sure where the one ends and the other begins. And, perhaps more than anything else, I tried to capture that heady sense—so familiar to my sixteen-year-old self—that the love we have for one another, and the love we have for what we read and learn, all perhaps come from the same place. That what we hunger for, in the books and the people who break us open, is at once to understand and to be understood: to make sense of a world that feels, in adulthood no less than at sixteen, too big, too wild, and too wonderful for us to ever fully grasp.

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Tara Isabella Burton’s The World Cannot Give is available now via Simon & Schuster. 

In his 1941 poem “The Dry Salvages,” composed against the backdrop of Britain’s air-raid sirens, T.S. Eliot wrote of the various ways we search for meaning, and prophecy, in an era of despair. “To communicate with Mars,” he begins, listing a variety of occult practices:

converse with spirits,
To report the behaviour of the sea monster
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry… By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable
With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams
Or barbituric acids.

“All these,” he concludes, “are usual Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press… When there is distress of nations and perplexity / Whether on the shores of Asia / or in the Edgware Road.” In times of cosmic confusion, in other words, people search for meaning: whether through witchcraft or politics, drugs or sex or mysticism.

In our own time of crisis, more and more of us—particularly younger Americans—are searching for meaning outside of established channels. Thirty-six percent of Americans born after 1985 identify as a religious “none” (compared to about a quarter of Americans overall: itself a massive spike since the early 2000s). We’re turning to new channels of spirituality, new ways of belonging, new churches.

In my own book, Strange Rites, I chronicle some of these—wellness culture, the rise of progressive activist witchcraft. But the search for meaning in the time of crisis is nothing new. Here are a few books, fiction and nonfiction alike, that capture our hunger for something, anything, to believe in.

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Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Devils

Also frequently translated as Demons or The Possessed, this 1871-2 novel is one of Dostoevsky’s most disturbing. Set against the backdrop of Russia’s political upheaval in the 1860s—with its scores of student uprisings ranging from the socialist to the nihilist—The Devils tells the story of a failed revolutionary coup in a small Russian town. As in all of Dostoevsky’s novels, The Devils is primarily a study of fascinatingly elemental characters, in whom ideology and perversity are constantly at war, including the unsettling genius—and terrorist—Stavrogin. A story that’s as much about nihilism as about idealism, The Devils is the ultimate novel for an age of political and moral crisis.

Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

Joris-Karl Huysmans is best known for his 1884 “breviary of decadence” Against Nature (best-known to English-language readers as the “little yellow book” that corrupted Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray). His 1891 novel Là-Bas follows the journey of a dissolute Parisian intellectual, Durtal, into the seedy underbelly of the then-raging fin-de-siècle occult scene. Durtal tries to escape the stultifying ennui of the modern world through his biography of a Medieval murderer, Gilles de Rais, and a psycho-sexual relationship with the mysterious Satanist Madame Chantelouve. Equal parts philosophical study and thriller, Là-Bas captures the allure of the occult in the heart of modernity, and what it means to try to look for something “more”: even if that more turns out to be evil itself.

Gilbert Seldes, The Stammering Century 

Gilbert Seldes’s study of the “Prohibitionists and the Pente­costalists; the diet-faddists and the dealers in mail-order Personality; the play censors and the Fundamen­talists; the free-lovers and eugenists; the cranks and possibly the saints” of 19th-century America isn’t a novel, but it reads like one. A biographical study of America’s occultists, spiritualists, and utopians, from the founder of the New Thought movement Phineas Quimby to the free love proponent John Humphrey Notes, Seldes shows how new spiritual movements have always been part of the American religious fabric.

Jean-Patrick Manchette, Nada

If Dostoevsky’s The Devils tries to find profundity in its characters’ nihilism, then Jean-Patrick Manchette’s taut 1972 thriller seeks the emptiness in its characters ideals. Manchette revolutionized the “left-wing thriller” with this pot-boiler about a group of French anarchists that kidnap the American Ambassador—with chaotic and predictably tragic results, as its one-time idealists conclude that “Leftist terrorism and State terrorism, even if their motivations cannot be compared, are the two jaws of . . . the same mug’s game,”

Victor LaValle, Big Machine

Equal parts black comedy and phantasmagoric thriller, this surreal 2011 novel about the heroin-addicted childhood survivor of a suicide cult summoned to a mysterious gathering of paranormal investigators known as “Unlikely Scholarss” is a bleakly funny meditation on faith, ideology, group order, and the fine lines between them.

Emma Cline, The Girls

A fictionalized retelling of the 1969 Manson Family murders that rocked a generation, Emma Cline’s 2016 novel captures the heady idealism and the incipient darkness of a California cult. The story of an impetuous upper-middle class teenager who is drawn into a free love commune, Cline captures at once the ideological upheaval of the late 1960s and the no less dizzying uncertainty of our own.

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Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites is available from PublicAffairs.