What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov · 412 pages
The battle of competing translations, a new publishing phenomenon which began with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, now offers two rival American editions of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. Mirra Ginsburg's (Grove Press) version is pointedly grotesque: she delights in the sharp, spinning, impressionistic phrase. Her Bulgakov reminds one of the virtuoso effects encountered in Za
Life and Death are Wearing Me Out
Mo Yan · 552 pages
Stripped of his possessions and executed as a result of Mao's Land Reform Movement in 1948, benevolent landowner Ximen Nao finds himself endlessly tortured in Hell before he is systematically reborn on Earth as each of the animals in the Chinese zodiac.
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
Wizard of the Crow
Ngugi wa Thiong'o · 784 pages
>From the exiled Kenyan novelist, playwright, poet, and literary critic--a magisterial comic novel that is certain to take its place as a landmark of postcolonial African literature.In exile now for more than twenty years, Ngugl wa Thiong'o has become one of the most widely read African writers of our time, the power and scope of his work garnering him international attention and praise. His aim i
The Satanic Verses
Salman Rushdie · 560 pages
One of the most controversial and acclaimed novels ever written, The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie’s best-known and most galvanizing book. Set in a modern world filled with both mayhem and miracles, the story begins with a bang: the terrorist bombing of a London-bound jet in midflight. Two Indian actors of opposing sensibilities fall to earth, transformed into living symbols of what is angelic
Choke
Chuck Palahniuk · 304 pages
Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be "saved" by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor's life, go on to send checks to support him. When he's not pulling this
Jitterbug Perfume
Tom Robbins · 342 pages
Jitterbug Perfume is an epic. Which is to say, it begins in the forests of ancient Bohemia and doesn't conclude until nine o'clock tonight (Paris time).It is a saga, as well. A saga must have a hero, and the hero of this one is a janitor with a missing bottle.The bottle is blue, very, very old, and embossed with the image of a goat-horned god. If the liquid in the bottle actually is the secret ess
Mumbo Jumbo
Ishmael Reed · 223 pages
Spanning a dizzying host of genres, from cinema to academia to mythology, Mumbo Jumbo is a lively ride through a key decade of American history the 1920's. In addition to ragtime, blues, and jazz, Reed's allegory draws on the Harlem Renaissance, the Back to Africa movement, and America's occupation of Haiti. His style throughout is as avant-garde and vibrant as the music at its center. From New Or
Memories of the Future
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
Written in Soviet Moscow in the 1920s—but considered too subversive even to show to a publisher—the seven tales included here attest to Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's boundless imagination, black humor, and breathtaking irony: a man loses his way in the vast black waste of his own small room; the Eiffel Tower runs amok; a kind soul dreams of selling "everything you need for suicide"; an absentminded p
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.
The Time Regulation Institute
Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar · 330 pages
Duluth
Gore Vidal · 214 pages
Duluth est une sorte de Dallas, ville US typique où tout semble se prêter à la réalisation d'un feuilleton. Gore Vidal a longtemps écrit pour la télévision : ici, sa plume fait naître une cité mi-réelle, mi-fictionnelle, où les habitants, une fois morts, réapparaissent de l'autre côté du petit écran. Un scénario sur la middle-class américaine et les dessous de la télévision...
The Great American Novel
Philip Roth · 398 pages
A novel narrated by octogenarian ex-sportswriter Word Smith, who plans to write the "Great American Novel" and also to tell the tragic and hilarious story of the Ruppert Mundys - the only homeless baseball team ever to play in the big league, who have disappeared from all official histories.
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman · 400 pages
Armageddon only happens once, you know. They don't let you go around again until you get it right. According to the Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch - the world's only totally reliable guide to the future, written in 1655, before she exploded - the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. Just after tea... People have been predicting the end of the world al
La Place de l'Étoile
Patrick Modiano · 185 pages
Modiano's debut novel is a sardonic, often grotesque satire of France during the Nazi occupation. We are immediately plunged into the hallucinatory imagination of Raphael Schlemilovitch, a young Jewish man, torn between self-aggrandisement and self-loathing, who may be the heir to a Venezuelan fortune, may have lived during the Nazi Occupation, may have rubbed shoulders with the most notorious col
The Poor Mouth: A Bad Story about the Hard Life
Flann O'Brien · 128 pages
The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden
Jonas Jonasson · 400 pages
In a tiny shack in the largest township in South Africa, Nombeko Mayeki is born. Put to work at five years old and orphaned at ten, she quickly learns that the world expects nothing more from her than to die young, be it from drugs, alcohol, or just plain despair. But Nombeko has grander plans. She learns to read and write, and at just fifteen, using her cunning and fearlessness, she makes it out
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra · 503 pages
*Don Quijote de la Mancha* es una novela escrita por el español Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Publicada su primera parte con el título de *El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha* a comienzos de 1605, es la obra más destacada de la literatura española y una de las principales de la literatura universal. En 1615 apareció su continuación con el título de *Segunda parte del ingenioso caballero
The Flying Inn
G.K. Chesterton · 289 pages
Like many of Chesterton's works, The Flying Inn is a humorous, satirical romp that conceals beneath a playful exterior important and thoughtful philosophical insights on religion, the nature of the state, political oversight and authority, and the roots of human liberty. The rollicking story follows the adventures of two friends-- one a humble English innkeeper and the other a boisterous Irish
Cocksure
Mordecai Richler · 221 pages
It was outright satire at the time it was written. Now, I'm inclined to think it was more of a forecast of the society we see being created.