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🧲 Books like this

Absurdistan

Gary Shteyngart · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
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The Sellout

Paul Beatty · 304 pages

A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's *The Sellout* showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality―the black Chinese restaurant. Born

Satirical HumorSatireDark ComedyAbsurdist Humor
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The Bonfire of the Vanities

Tom Wolfe · 690 pages

Satirical HumorSatireWealthy ProtagonistDark Comedy
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American Psycho

Bret Easton Ellis · 399 pages

Wealthy ProtagonistSatireDark ComedySatirical Humor
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Pym

Mat Johnson · 353 pages

Satirical HumorSatireDark ComedyCultural Identity
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Fight Club

Chuck Palahniuk · 208 pages

A man who struggles with insomnia meets a colorful extremist, and they create a secret organization together. Chuck Palahniuk showed himself to be his generation’s most visionary satirist in this, his first book. Fight Club’s estranged narrator leaves his lackluster job when he comes under the thrall of Tyler Durden, an enigmatic young man who holds secret after-hours boxing matches in the base

Satirical HumorSatireAbsurdist HumorDark Comedy
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Dead Souls

Nikolai Gogol · 548 pages

Satirical HumorSatireDark ComedyAbsurdist Humor
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Interior Chinatown

Charles Yu · 288 pages

SatireSatirical HumorAbsurdist HumorDark Comedy
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Money

Martin Amis · 368 pages

An anti-hero to beat them all, John Self is a dissipated connoisseur of self-gratification. Addicted to porn, fast-food and money, he lives a culture-less high-life in New York and London, groping his way through a world of all-day hangovers, barely remembered debaucheries and desires that are both pointless and insatiable. In this hilariously grotesque black comedy Amis explores the back streets

Satirical HumorSatireDark ComedyWealthy Protagonist
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Cat's Cradle

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. · 229 pages

Cat's Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut's satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet's ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers, Cat's Cr

Satirical HumorSatireAbsurdist HumorDark Comedy
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Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

Christopher Moore · 440 pages

The birth of Jesus has been well chronicled, as have his glorious teachings, acts, and divine sacrifice after his thirtieth birthday. But no one knows about the early life of the Son of God, the missing years -- except Biff, the Messiah's best bud, who has been resurrected to tell the story in the divinely hilarious yet heartfelt work "reminiscent of Vonnegut and Douglas Adams" (Philadelphia Inqui

Satirical HumorSatireAbsurdist HumorDark Comedy
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CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

George Saunders · 179 pages

George Saunders has seen the future of America and it is funny. Bleak, yes, and sad and toxic and greedy - and very, very weird - but funny, too. With today's malls and theme parks and ecological disasters as their foundation, these stories build a tomorrow inhabited by fat executives in despair, genetic mutants in servitude, virtual-reality merchants in Chapter 11, and American Dreamers everywher

Satirical HumorSatireAbsurdist HumorDark Comedy
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White Noise

Don DeLillo · 326 pages

The trials and tribulations of a profesor of Hitler studies.

Satirical HumorSatireDark ComedyAbsurdist Humor
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Forrest Gump

Winston Groom · 240 pages

A man named Forest Gump sits at a bus stop and tells everyone about his life. It starts in a doctor's office when he gets leg braces. Then he goes to school where he meets Jenny, and his entire school career and football. Then it goes on to college football. then to Vietnam where he meets bubba. then bubba dies and forest saves a whole platoon. After the war forest gets a medal of honor and runs a

Satirical HumorSatireAbsurdist HumorDark Comedy
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Candide

Voltaire · 134 pages

Brought up in the household of a powerful Baron, Candide is an open-minded young man, whose tutor, Pangloss, has instilled in him the belief that 'all is for the best'. But when his love for the Baron's rosy-cheeked daughter is discovered, Candide is cast out to make his own way in the world. And so he and his various companions begin a breathless tour of Europe, South America and Asia, as an

Satirical HumorSatireAbsurdist HumorDark Comedy
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The Magic Christian

Terry Southern · 148 pages

This is a prescient description of Donald Trump and the current American political fiasco, obviously written either with the use of a Time Machine or while in a prescient trance.

Wealthy ProtagonistSatireSatirical HumorAbsurdist Humor
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Catch-22

Joseph Heller · 463 pages

*Catch-22* is like no other novel. It has its own rationale, its own extraordinary character. It moves back and forth from hilarity to horror. It is outrageously funny and strangely affecting. It is totally original. Set in the closing months of World War II in an American bomber squadron off Italy, *Catch-22* is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian, who is frantic and furious because thousan

Satirical HumorSatireAbsurdist HumorDark Comedy
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Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace · 1,088 pages

A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connec

SatireDark ComedySatirical HumorAbsurdist Humor
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Portnoy's Complaint

Philip Roth · 288 pages

Though is caused outrage and controversy at the time of its publication Roth’s comic novel of sexual obsession and frustration is now widely regarded as one of the best novels of the twentieth century.

SatireDark ComedySatirical HumorCultural Identity
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Satirical HumorSatireDark ComedyAbsurdist Humor
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The Secret Life of Saeed

Emile Habiby · 192 pages

SatireSatirical HumorDark ComedyCultural Identity
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Let the Games Begin

Niccolo Ammaniti · 356 pages

The world might be in the throes of a global recession but when an author on the brink of despair, an enigmatic musician, a supermodel, and a Satanic sect meet with the cream of Italian high society at the home of a Roman property tycoon, the world outside the mansion's walls is soon forgotten. There's going to be one hell of a party. And you've got a VIP ticket.

SatireSatirical HumorDark ComedyAbsurdist Humor
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The Sympathizer

Viet Thanh Nguyen · 384 pages

Follows a Viet Cong agent as he spies on a South Vietnamese army general and his compatriots as they start a new life in 1975 Los Angeles.

Satirical HumorCultural IdentityDark ComedySatire
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A Confederacy of Dunces

John Kennedy Toole · 400 pages

A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero is one Ignatius J. Reilly, "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures."

Satirical HumorSatireAbsurdist HumorDark Comedy
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Look Who's Back

Timur Vermes · 379 pages

He's back. Berlin, Summer 2011. Adolf Hitler wakes up on a patch of ground, alive and well. Things have changed - no Eva Braun, no Nazi party, no war. Hitler barely recognizes his beloved Fatherland, filled with immigrants and run by a woman. And he's führious. People certainly recognize him, albeit as a flawless impersonator who refuses to break character. The unthinkable, the inevitable happens,

Satirical HumorSatireDark ComedyAbsurdist Humor
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