Genre Wheel

Spin 120 book genres for a reading challenge or a book club pick, with short film and music wheels on the side.

Genre Wheel

Click the button or the wheel, or press Space or Enter. Press again to skip.Tap the button or the wheel. Tap again to skip.

SatireLow fantasySpace operaSteampunkPost-apoca…AfrofuturismGothic fictionSouthern…Vampire…Locked-room…Nordic noirCaper storyTechno-thr…Time-travel…Chivalric…PicaresqueRobinsonadeWuxiaFairy taleParableEssayThriller filmClassical…Hip-hop

Sample result

Space opera

Big adventures in outer space, played out among interstellar wars, alien civilizations and galactic empires.

My list: 24 of 143 genres on the wheel

Your own go on the wheel with the genres.

    More options

    The wheel shows a new part of the list on every spin.

    The wheel shows 24 of 143 genres. Every spin picks from all 143.

    Results

      No spins yet.

      On the wheel

        Next step Got a shortlist? Put it on your own wheelWriting a story? Spin where it happens

        All 143 genres

        Romance 9

        • Amish romance Christian fiction with Amish characters. The trade calls the books bonnet rippers, after the bonnets on the covers.
        • Chivalric romance Tales in prose and verse of knights-errant on marvel-filled quests, a favorite of Europe's noble courts from the high Middle Ages on.
        • Contemporary romance Love stories published since 1945 and set in the years they were written. No other romance sub-genre is bigger.
        • Historical romance Love stories set in the past, sold to a mass-market readership.
        • Paranormal romance Romantic love with elements beyond scientific explanation, from vampires and shapeshifters to ghosts.
        • Regency romance Set in Britain's Regency years, 1811 to 1820, or close to them, and written to its own rules of plot and style.
        • Romantasy Also called romantic fantasy: a fantasy in which the plot depends on the love story.
        • Romantic suspense A romance in which the leads must solve a mystery or an intrigue, with their relationship at the heart of the story.
        • Time-travel romance A love story in which somebody lands in an era that is not their own. A happy ending is not guaranteed.
        Show all 143 genres (134 more)

        Horror and Gothic 10

        • Comedy horror Horror played for laughs, or comedy with real frights. It comes as black comedy, as parody and as spoof.
        • Cosmic horror Also called Lovecraftian horror: dread of things too vast and strange to understand, with little interest in gore.
        • Dark fantasy Fantasy that borrows the dread and darkness of horror fiction. Some shelves label it fantasy horror.
        • Ghost story A story with a ghost in it, or one that turns on whether ghosts might be real. Often linked to a haunted place, object or person.
        • Gothic fiction Fear, gloom and haunted places. The label was first given to a novel published in 1764.
        • Psychological horror Horror that works on mental and emotional states, often through characters who cannot be trusted or who are coming apart.
        • Southern Gothic Gothic gloom transplanted to the American South, with cruelty and poverty among its recurring themes.
        • Vampire literature Fiction concerned mainly with vampires, a stock figure of Gothic fiction since a tale published in 1819.
        • Weird fiction Strange tales from around 1900 that drop the usual ghosts, vampires and werewolves or reinvent them completely.
        • Zombie apocalypse Society collapses under swarms of zombies, and only a few survivors or small bands are left.

        Folk tales and old forms 9

        • Epic poetry A long story told in verse about larger-than-life heroes and their encounters with gods and other superhuman powers.
        • Fable A brief tale, in verse or prose, where animals, plants or objects behave like people and the ending delivers a moral.
        • Fairy tale A short folk story with magic, enchantments and imaginary beings. Also known as a wonder tale or household tale.
        • Legend A folk story about people, set in real history and told as something that may truly have happened.
        • Myth Stories that a society treats as foundational. Scholars use the word without judging whether the story is true.
        • Nonsense verse Playful, rhythmic rhyming verse that does not have to make sense. The limerick is its most familiar form.
        • Parable A short, didactic story with human characters that illustrates a lesson or principle.
        • Saga Prose histories and stories written mostly in Iceland. The best known tell of Viking voyages and feuding Icelandic families.
        • Urban legend Modern folklore: odd, funny or scary tales passed on as things that really happened, almost never with any proof.

        Nonfiction 11

        • Autobiography A life story told by the person who lived it. The word itself dates from 1797.
        • Biography One person's life written by someone else, covering how they lived through events as well as the bare facts.
        • Cookbook Recipes with step-by-step instructions, often with notes on technique and ingredients.
        • Creative nonfiction Factually accurate narratives written with the figurative techniques of literature.
        • Diaries and journals A life set down in dated entries, each written soon after the day or period it describes.
        • Essay A short piece in which the writer argues a point of view. The formal kind is serious and organized; the informal kind is personal.
        • Memoir Nonfiction built on the author's own memories, usually narrowed to one period of a life or a career.
        • Popular history History written for general readers: strong on story, character and color, lighter on academic argument.
        • Self-help Written to instruct readers on solving personal problems. The name comes from an 1859 bestseller.
        • Travel literature The travelogue and its relatives: travel memoirs, nature writing, outdoor writing and guide books.
        • True crime Nonfiction that examines a real crime, the people affected by it and the perpetrator's motives.

        Music 11

        • Blues A Deep South tradition created by African Americans around the 1860s. Its best-known pattern is the twelve-bar blues.
        • Classical music Western art music: formal, complex and, since the ninth century, mostly written down.
        • Country music Originated in the United States, known for ballads and dance tunes played on banjos, fiddles and many kinds of guitar.
        • Electronic music Music made with electronic instruments, circuitry or software; a family of genres more than a single one.
        • Experimental music A loose label for music that tests the limits of what a genre, or music itself, is supposed to be.
        • Folk music Covers both the old traditional songs and the newer style that came out of the folk revival of the twentieth century.
        • Hip-hop Created by Afro-Caribbean and African-American New Yorkers in the early 1970s. Rapping became its signature.
        • Jazz Came out of the Black communities of New Orleans around the turn of the twentieth century. Swing, blue notes and improvisation are its hallmarks.
        • Pop music The modern kind dates from the mid-1950s in Britain and the United States. Known for choruses that repeat and hooks that stick.
        • R&B and soul Rhythm and blues emerged in the 1940s in Black American communities; soul followed around 1960.
        • Rock music Grew out of rock and roll, which started in the United States around 1950, and is usually built around the electric guitar.

        Film 12

        • Action film Chases, fights, shootouts, explosions and stunts. What exactly counts as one has been debated by scholars since the 1980s.
        • Animated film Images made by hand or by computer and shown in rapid sequence so that they seem to move.
        • Comedy film Emphasizes humor and is designed to make audiences laugh. One of the oldest film genres, going back to silent slapstick.
        • Crime film Any picture whose plot hinges on a crime, a category scholars admit is hard to pin down.
        • Documentary film Nonfiction on screen, made to record reality in order to teach, inform or keep a historical record.
        • Drama film Screen fiction that aims to be serious first and funny second, if at all. Usually narrowed with a label such as legal, political or teen drama.
        • Horror film Made to frighten, in body or in mind. Monsters, the end of the world and old folk beliefs are regular ingredients.
        • Musical film The characters break into song, and sometimes dance, as part of the story. The form grew out of stage musicals when sound came to cinema.
        • Romance film A love story on screen, where the plot is the couple's road through courtship, dating or marriage.
        • Science fiction film Cinema's take on aliens, spacecraft, robots and time travel, grounded in speculative science. The genre is as old as silent cinema.
        • Thriller film The suspense picture: tension comes from making the audience wait for something it already knows is coming.
        • Western film Most take place on the American frontier, in the forty-odd years from the 1849 Gold Rush in California to the frontier's closing in 1890.

        Literary and everyday life 13

        • Bildungsroman Traces a character's moral and psychological growth from youth to adulthood. The German name combines Bildung, education, and Roman, novel.
        • Biographical novel A real person's life retold as a novel, with events cut or reimagined to suit the story. The form became prominent in the 1930s.
        • Campus novel Also known as the academic novel: the action stays on and around a university, among its professors or students.
        • Family saga Follows one family, or a few linked ones, through the years, often as a way to show history changing around them.
        • Metafiction Fiction that draws attention to its own structure, reminding readers they are reading a fictional work.
        • New adult fiction Heroes and heroines aged 18 to 29, dealing with leaving home, study and career choices. A publisher coined the name in 2009.
        • Novel of manners Closely observes the customs and values of one layered society, and the plot turns on who meets its standards.
        • Philosophical fiction Fiction that spends much of its length on philosophy's questions, such as free will or what a life is for.
        • Postmodern literature Unreliable narrators, stories about stories and nods to other books. It took off among American writers in the 1960s.
        • Realist fiction Ordinary life shown plainly and faithfully, with no exaggeration and nothing supernatural.
        • School story Novels of school life, friendship and loyalty, mostly set in boarding schools in England. Their peak came before 1950.
        • Social novel Shows a social problem of its day, such as prejudice over class, race or gender, by what it does to the characters.
        • Sports fiction The protagonist is typically an athlete and the plot revolves around sports competitions.

        Fantasy 12

        • Cozy fantasy Gentle, low-stakes stories in magical settings, more about friendship, community and daily life than war.
        • Fairytale fantasy Fantasy that borrows its motifs, and sometimes its entire plot, from fairy tales and folklore.
        • Fantasy comedy Comic fantasy: written mainly for laughs, usually in an invented world, with puns and send-ups of other fantasy.
        • Grimdark Bleak, violent speculative fiction in worlds with no moral high ground. The name comes from the tagline of a tabletop war game.
        • High fantasy Also called epic fantasy: epic in setting, characters or plot, and usually set in an invented secondary world.
        • Historical fantasy A mostly realistic story from the past, usually before the 1900s, with magic or other fantastic elements worked in.
        • Isekai A Japanese sub-genre: someone is carried off to another world, by summoning or by reincarnation, and must survive there.
        • Low fantasy Magic breaks into an ordinary, recognisable world, where high fantasy builds a whole new one.
        • Magic realism The everyday world shown realistically, with magical events woven in so that the line between real and unreal blurs.
        • Mythic fiction Draws on the tropes, themes and symbols of myth, legend and fairy tale, usually in a real-world setting.
        • Sword and sorcery Sword-wielding heroes in violent adventures where the battles are personal, not world-ending. It began in the early 1930s.
        • Urban fantasy Magic and the supernatural loose in a modern city. The term has been used this way since the 1970s.

        Science fiction 14

        • Afrofuturism Explores where African diaspora culture meets science and technology, most often through science fiction.
        • Alternate history History takes a different turn at some key moment, and the book plays out what might have followed.
        • Climate fiction Cli-fi for short: stories about a changing climate, set now, a few years ahead or in an invented world.
        • Cyberpunk High tech meets low life in a bleak future, where artificial intelligence sits alongside social collapse.
        • Dystopian fiction Set in a society the author wants you to dread, the mirror image of a utopia.
        • Hard science fiction Science fiction that takes care to get the science and the logic right. The label first appeared in a 1957 review.
        • LitRPG A literary role-playing game: the hero's levels, statistics and game rules are part of the story. The term dates from 2013.
        • Military science fiction Science fiction technology put to military use, usually with main characters who serve in a military organization.
        • Post-apocalyptic fiction Life during or after the fall of civilization, brought on by anything from nuclear war or a pandemic to an impact from space.
        • Science fiction comedy Plays the conventions of science fiction, from alien invasions to interstellar travel, for comic effect.
        • Solarpunk Hopeful futures built on renewable energy and sustainable living. Often described as cyberpunk turned inside out.
        • Space opera Big adventures in outer space, played out among interstellar wars, alien civilizations and galactic empires.
        • Space Western Frontier themes and cowboy archetypes moved to outer space, inside a science fiction story.
        • Steampunk Retro-futurism powered by steam: 19th-century industrial machinery pushed far beyond what it ever did, often in a Victorian world.

        Adventure and comedy 11

        • Lost world Explorers find an unknown civilization, or a land where supposedly extinct creatures survive. A late-Victorian invention.
        • Nautical fiction Stories of ships, voyages and the people who live by the sea. Also shelved as naval, sea or maritime fiction.
        • Parody An imitation of a work, author or style, made to comment on it or make fun of it.
        • Picaresque A likeable rogue from the bottom of society gets by on quick wits, one episode after another. The form began in Spain in 1554.
        • Robinsonade Castaways, usually shipwrecked on a deserted island, have to survive on what they can find or make. Named after a novel of 1719.
        • Spy fiction Stories that turn on espionage. The genre took shape in the early 1900s, as the great powers set up modern intelligence agencies.
        • Superhero fiction Costumed heroes, usually with superhuman powers, fight supervillains. Its home is the comic book.
        • Swashbuckler European adventure literature about a heroic swordsman with acrobatic skill, guile and chivalrous ideals.
        • Tall tale Wildly unbelievable events, narrated with a straight face as plain fact. The angler's one that got away is the classic example.
        • Weird West A frontier Western crossed with the supernatural and with science fiction. The term comes from a comic book title of 1972.
        • Wuxia Chinese fiction about the martial artists of ancient China, a literary tradition first and since adapted for opera, comics and the screen. The name means martial arts and chivalry.

        Crime, mystery and thriller 14

        • Caper story The crooks are the main characters, and the reader watches the theft or swindle unfold while the police stay in the background.
        • Cozy mystery Nothing graphic happens on the page, the sleuth is an amateur, and the crime is set in a small, close community.
        • Detective fiction A detective, whether paid, amateur or retired, works a case that is often a murder. The genre dates from the middle of the 1800s.
        • Hardboiled A cynical detective battles organized crime and a corrupt legal system, largely in Prohibition-era America.
        • Historical mystery A whodunit set in a period that was already history when the author wrote it.
        • Legal thriller Crime fiction in which the investigation leads to the courtroom, and the case reshapes the lives of those involved.
        • Locked-room mystery The impossible crime: a murder in a room that, by all appearances, nobody could have got into or out of.
        • Noir fiction Dark crime stories, dark in subject and in mood. The French term roman noir translates as black novel.
        • Nordic noir Scandinavian crime fiction, mostly seen through police eyes, written in plain language against bleak landscapes.
        • Police procedural Stresses an accurate picture of how police officers and detectives investigate, with them as the protagonists.
        • Political thriller Suspense built on a fight for political power. Expect corruption, terrorism or war, and a nation's future resting on one character.
        • Psychological thriller Combines the thriller with psychological fiction, often told through psychologically stressed characters.
        • Techno-thriller Part spy story, part war novel, part science fiction, with pages of precise detail on how the technology works, usually military.
        • Whodunit A plot-driven puzzle over who committed the crime, with the clues laid out so the reader can deduce the answer.

        Main book genres 17

        • Adventure The characters face real danger, and the reader gets the thrill of it.
        • Children's literature Books, stories, poems and magazines made for children, sorted by age from picture books to the brink of young adult.
        • Classic A book accepted as exemplary, usually of some age. The list pairs it with literary fiction, driven by character more than plot.
        • Comedy The comic novel: book-length fiction written to be funny or satirical, even when its subject is a serious one.
        • Coming-of-age Follows a protagonist growing from childhood to adulthood, with more dialogue and inner monologue than action.
        • Crime Built around a crime and, above all, the work of solving it, whether the detective is a professional or an amateur.
        • Fantasy Set in an imaginary universe where magic, the supernatural and magical creatures are common.
        • Historical fiction An invented plot set among real historical events, with attention to the manners and social conditions of the period.
        • Horror Fiction written to frighten, disturb or unsettle. It is usually divided into psychological and supernatural kinds.
        • Mystery Something, usually a murder, goes unexplained until the final pages, and the culprit is normally one of a small set of suspects.
        • Poetry Writing that leans on the sound and rhythm of words to carry more than their plain meaning.
        • Romance A love story that follows a growing relationship and usually ends on a hopeful or happy note.
        • Satire Mocks vices, follies and abuses, hoping to shame people or institutions into doing better.
        • Science fiction Stories that ask what happens when technology, science or biology leaps far ahead of today. Space travel, robots and time travel are its oldest staples.
        • Thriller Named for the feelings it produces: suspense, surprise, anticipation and anxiety, all pushed towards a climax.
        • Western Novels of the American Old West, usually set somewhere between the late 1700s and the late 1800s.
        • Young adult Books for readers of about 12 to 18. Librarians created the category to fill the gap between children's and adult shelves.

        How this list was compiled: Every book genre is an entry in Wikipedia's List of writing genres, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_writing_genres, read on 2026-09-18. The wheel keeps 120 of its several hundred entries: genres a reader can find on a shelf today. Adult genres, scholarly and religious forms, and names whose own article gave no plain definition were left out. The ten book groups are our own arrangement, and a hybrid such as Romantasy, the list's Romantic fantasy entry under its everyday name, sits in both of its groups. The 12 film genres are rows of the genre table in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_genre plus Crime and Documentary from the navigation box below it, and the 11 music families follow the section headings under Classical and Popular in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_music_genres_and_styles, both read on the same date. Each one-line description is in this site's own words and was checked against the opening of that genre's own Wikipedia article, read on 2026-09-18: the facts and dates are the article's, the wording is ours. The line for Romantic suspense was checked against the Romance novel article, and the line for Classic also draws on the list's own note. Licence: own work

        How it works

        This genre wheel is built for readers: 120 book genres in ten groups, from cozy mystery and space opera to memoir and nonsense verse. Start on Main book genres (20). Land on Robinsonade or wuxia and the line under the result says what to ask the librarian for. Film night or playlist? Choose Film or Music, or open the full movie genre wheel (148) or music genre wheel (149).

        Read the full guide

        Plan a reading challenge in one sitting

        On this book genre wheel, choose Main book genres, switch to Elimination and spin 12 times. Each winner leaves the wheel, so you end with 12 different genres, one a month for a year. Press Copy to keep the order: the wheel forgets its spins when you close the page.

        What the wheel of genres looks like on All

        Left on All, the wheel of genres mixes 120 book genres with 12 film and 11 music genres, which suits a quiz round or a writing prompt better than a trip to the bookshop. For reading, pick a group. Crime, mystery and thriller has 16 genres, from whodunit to Nordic noir. Romance has 9, from Regency, set in 1811 to 1820, to romantasy.

        • In a reading slump? Filter to Folk tales and old forms. Fables, parables and nonsense verse are short enough to read the same evening.
        • Writers: spin twice on All and draft the opening page of whatever the two genres make together.
        • Already have a to-read pile? Type the titles into My list, one per line, press Spin only mine and spin those. The list stays in your browser.

        Questions and answers

        Where do the 120 book genres come from?

        Every one is an entry in Wikipedia's list of writing genres, read on 18 September 2026. That list runs to several hundred names. Genres you can find on a shelf today were kept; adult genres, scholarly forms and religious texts were left out. The line under each result is our own sentence, checked against the opening of that genre's Wikipedia article.

        How do I run a genre spin the wheel night at a book club?

        Agree on a group first, such as Literary and everyday life. Switch to Elimination and give every member one spin, so each person lands on a different genre. Read the line under each result aloud, then vote on the genres spun, not on titles. Whoever spun the winner brings three books that fit.

        Why are film and music on a random book genre generator?

        Because people open a genre wheel spinner for film nights and playlists too. The 12 film genres and 11 music families are short by design, and the link under either result leads to the full wheel.

        More tools

        Show 6 more

        Browse Party & Decision Wheels