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Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

David Eagleman · 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
❤️

God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. · 80 pages

In God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, Kurt Vonnegut skips back and forth between life and afterlife as if the difference between them were rather slight.This fictional adventure, that began as a series of 90-second interludes for WNYC, New York City's public radio station, has evolved over the past year as a strange and lasting work of the imagination. God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian follows on Vonnegut's

AfterlifeShort StoriesAbsurdist HumorLiterary Fiction
❤️
AfterlifeShort StoriesAbsurdist HumorLiterary Fiction
❤️

The Complete Cosmicomics

Italo Calvino · 432 pages

When the moon was closer to the earth, he would once a month, when its orbit made it possible climb a ladder to its scaly surface. He remembers life on the nebulae when matter first began to exist, causing great confusion and destroying his grandmother's pillow. As a child, he used the curve of space to play marbles with brand-new atoms. With the rest of his family, he evolved to walk on land only

Absurdist HumorShort StoriesWhimsicalLiterary Fiction
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Ubik

Philip K. Dick · 220 pages

Named one of Time's 100 Best Books, Ubik is a mind-bending, classic novel about the perception of reality from Philip K. Dick, the Hugo Award-winning author of The Man in the High Castle. “From the stuff of space opera, Dick spins a deeply unsettling existential horror story, a nightmare you’ll never be sure you’ve woken up from.”—Lev Grossman, Time Glen Runciter runs a lucrative business — deploy

AfterlifeAbsurdist HumorPhilosophyWhimsical
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The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

Aimee Bender · 188 pages

A grief-stricken librarian decides to have sex with every man who enters her library. A half-mad, unbearably beautiful heiress follows a strange man home, seeking total sexual abandon: He only wants to watch game shows. A woman falls in love with a hunchback; when his deformity turns out to be a prosthesis, she leaves him. A wife whose husband has just returned from the war struggles with the hear

Absurdist HumorShort StoriesWhimsicalLiterary Fiction
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Museum of the Weird

Amelia Gray · 171 pages

Absurdist HumorShort StoriesWhimsicalLiterary Fiction
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Dream Country

Neil Gaiman · 160 pages

Presents four Sandman stories, including "A Midsummer Night's Dream," in which Shakespeare's company, at the instigation of the Lord of Dreams, gives an open-air performance of the play to an audience of fairies.

Short StoriesAfterlifeWhimsicalPhilosophy
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Short StoriesAbsurdist HumorWhimsicalLiterary Fiction
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Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Karen Russell · 256 pages

Six short stories with subjects ranging from a dejected teenager who discovers that the universe is communicating with him through talismanic objects left behind in a seagull's nest to two vampires in a sun-drenched lemon grove who try helplessly to slake their thirst for blood.

Absurdist HumorShort StoriesWhimsicalLiterary Fiction
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The Ghost in Love

Jonathan Carroll · 308 pages

A man falls in the snow, hits his head on a curb, and dies. But something strange occurs: the man doesn't die, and the ghost that's been sent to take his soul to the afterlife is flabbergasted. Going immediately to its boss, the ghost asks, what should I do now? The boss says, we don't know how this happened but we're working on it. We want you to stay with this man to help us figure out what's go

AfterlifeAbsurdist HumorWhimsicalLiterary Fiction
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The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Mitch Albom · 196 pages

The Five People You Meet In Heaven is a 2003 novel by Mitch Albom. It follows the life and death of a ride mechanic named Eddie who is killed in an amusement park accident and sent to heaven, where he encounters five people who had a significant impact on him while he was alive. It was published by Hyperion and remained on the New York Times Best Seller list for 95 weeks.

AfterlifePhilosophyLiterary FictionReligion & Spirituality
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Thief of Time

Terry Pratchett · 384 pages

In Discworld, time is a resource managed by the highly capable Monks of History. Everybody wants more time, which is why on Discworld only the experts can manage it. While everyone always talks about slowing down, one young horologist is about to do the unthinkable. He's going to stop. Well, stop time that is, by building the world's first truly accurate clock. Which means esteemed History Monk Lu

Absurdist HumorPhilosophyWhimsicalReligion & Spirituality
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Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories

Kevin Wilson · 208 pages

Kevin Wilson's characters inhabit a world that moves seamlessly between the real and the imagined, the mundane and the fantastic. "Grand Stand-In" is narrated by an employee of a Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider -- a company that supplies "stand-ins" for families with deceased, ill, or just plain mean grandparents. And in "Blowing Up On the Spot," a young woman works sorting tiles at a Scrabbl

Short StoriesAbsurdist HumorWhimsicalLiterary Fiction
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Daydreams of Angels

Heather O'Neill

Heather O'Neill's distinctive style and voice fill these charming, sometimes dark, always beguiling stories. From "The Robot Baby," in which we discover what happens when a robot feels emotion for the very first time, to "Heaven," about a grandfather who died for a few minutes when he was nine and visited the pearly gates, to "The Little Wolf-Boy of Northern Quebec," in which untamed children run

Short StoriesAbsurdist HumorWhimsicalLiterary Fiction
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Heroes in Hell

Gregory Benford, Chris Morris, C.J. Cherryh, Nancy Asire · 274 pages

AfterlifeShort StoriesAbsurdist Humor
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420 Characters

Lou Beach · 169 pages

"HE DISMOUNTED at the dead end of the canyon, took a shovel and walked to a spot near a cottonwood and began to dig. When he was knee deep in the hole an arrow passed behind his head. He felt the air move and thought it a daring bird. The second arrow found its mark in his neck and the life seeped from him and he folded, inches from some letters and a lock of hair. Lou Beach began his writing car

Short StoriesAbsurdist HumorWhimsicalLiterary Fiction
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Hell

Robert Olen Butler · 236 pages

Hatcher McCord is an evening newscaster who has found himself in Hell and is struggling to explain his bad fortune. He's far from the only one to suffer this fate--in fact, he's surrounded by an outrageous cast of characters, including William Shakespeare, Humphrey Bogart, Richard M. Nixon, Jezebel, Judas Iscariot, Pope Boniface VIII, J. Edgar Hoover, and a panoply of present-day figures who will

AfterlifeAbsurdist HumorLiterary Fiction
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A Short Stay in Hell

Steven L. Peck · 104 pages

An ordinary family man, geologist, and Mormon, Soren Johansson has always believed he’ll be reunited with his loved ones in an eternal hereafter. Then, he dies. Soren wakes to find himself cast by a God he has never heard of into a Hell whose dimensions he can barely grasp: a vast library he can only escape from by finding the book that contains the story of his life. In this haunting existenti

AfterlifePhilosophyLiterary Fiction
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Bobok

Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 48 pages

AfterlifeShort StoriesAbsurdist Humor
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Still Life with Woodpecker

Tom Robbins · 277 pages

- List item Still Life with Woodpecker is a sort of a love story that takes place inside a pack of Camel cigarettes. It reveals the purpose of the moon, explains the difference between criminals and outlaws, examines the conflict between social activism and romantic individualism, and paints a portrait of contemporary society that includes powerful Arabs, exiled royalty, and pregnant cheerleade

Absurdist HumorPhilosophyWhimsicalLiterary Fiction
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A Wild Sheep Chase

Haruki Murakami · 299 pages

It begins simply enough: A twenty-something advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend, and casually appropriates the image for an insurance company's advertisement. What he doesn't realize is that included in the pastoral scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man in black who offers a menacing ultimatum

Absurdist HumorWhimsicalPhilosophyLiterary Fiction
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Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day

Ben Loory · 210 pages

"This collection of wry and witty, dark and perilous contemporary fables and tales is populated by people--and monsters and aliens and animals and inanimate objects--motivated by and grappling with the fears and desires that unite us all."--P. [2] of cover.

Short StoriesAbsurdist HumorWhimsicalLiterary Fiction
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The Third Policeman

Flann O'Brien · 200 pages

The Third Policeman is Flann O'Brien's brilliantly dark comic novel about the nature of time, death, and existence. Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures in a two-dimensional police station where, through the theories of the scientist/philosopher de Selby, he is introduced to "Atomic Theory" and its relation to bicycles,

AfterlifeAbsurdist HumorLiterary Fiction
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Amphigorey

Edward Gorey · 204 pages

Collects fifteen works by the U.S. artist and author Edward Gorey, providing a journey into a macabre world. --

Absurdist HumorWhimsicalShort StoriesLiterary Fiction
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