How it works

Provenance Of recommends books and films based on influence. Name one you love and it looks at what influenced it, then recommends from there: the works that influenced your favorite, and other works that were influenced by the same things.

Name more than one favorite and you get one list for all of them. Every recommendation says which favorite it comes from and what connects the two.

Rating what you read and watch

Under each recommendation you can say you loved it, didn't like it, have already read or seen it, or that it is not for you. Any of these takes it off the list, and the list uses what you say to choose what comes next.

Your list is kept without an account

There is nothing to sign up for. Your list lives at a private address, which the page shows you and will email to you if you ask. Anyone with that address can see and change the list, so treat it like a key. We email only when you ask, and every email has a link to stop them.

Tracing all of a work's influences

For any single book or film you can also trace its influences all the way back: what influenced it, what influenced those, and so on, until each line reaches the oldest surviving literature of its tradition or stops for a stated reason. A film's influences run through film for as long as cinema has existed, then cross into the novels, plays and myths behind it.

Time runs down the page. Each work's page says what it handed down and where it came from itself. Every link is marked by kind (a direct source, a structural model, a stylistic influence, a thematic kinship, or a disputed connection) and by how well it is documented. You can step through every work newest to oldest, or pick one influence and follow that single thread down to antiquity.

What to trust

The recommendations and the influences are written by Claude, Anthropic's model, from the scholarship it has read, and checked before they are shown: every influence must run from an older work to a newer one, and anything that doesn't hold together is thrown out and tried again. They are good at the well-trodden routes and worth checking on the obscure ones. Dates are the usual estimates; for ancient and medieval works they are approximate by nature. Where scholars disagree, we say so.

The links to Amazon

Each work links to an Amazon search for its title and author (for a film, its director), so you land on the editions in print rather than one edition we chose for you. As an Amazon Associate, Provenance Of earns from qualifying purchases; it is how the site pays for the model that writes the recommendations.

We never put Amazon links in email. Privacy.