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 authorThe Great Indian Novel
Shashi Tharoor · 423 pages
Writing in English, Shasi Tharoor has produced a stunning novel that is at once ambitious, daring, boldly satirical, and outrageously funny. The two structural pillars of his astonishing work are the national epic, the *Mahabharata,* and the Indian struggle in this century for independence from Great Britain.
Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics
Anonymous, Joe Klein · 384 pages
A Man of the People
Chinua Achebe · 149 pages
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
The Jokers
Albert Cossery · 145 pages
The jokers are the government, and the biggest joker of all is the governor, a bug-eyed, strutting, rapacious character of unequaled incompetence who presides over the nameless Middle Eastern city where this effervescent comedy by Albert Cossery is set. The jokers are also the revolutionaries, no less bumbling and no less infatuated with the trappings of power than the government they oppose. And
The Boys Omnibus Vol. 1
Garth Ennis · 354 pages
A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Mohammed Hanif · 323 pages
Ali Shigri, Pakistan Air Force pilot and Silent Drill Commander of Fury Squadron, is determined to understand what or who pushed his father to commit suicide--and to avenge his death. His father, one of Zia ul-Haq's colonels, may or may not have been involved in the conspiracies and coincidences leading to the mysterious 1988 plane crash that killed Pakistan's dictator General Zia ul-Haq. His sear
What a Carve Up!
Jonathan Coe · 512 pages
A brilliant noir farce, a dystopian vision of Britain, a family history and the story of an obsession. Michael is a lonely, rather pathetic writer, obsessed by the film, 'What A Carve Up!' in which a mad kinfeman cuts his way through the inhabitants of a decrepit stately pile as the thunder rages. Inexplicably he is commissioned to write the family history of the Winshaws, an upper class Yorkshire
Elmer Gantry
Sinclair Lewis · 434 pages
Elmer Gantry is one of the Sinclair Lewis's most famous novels. Considered scandalous in its day, it is a vicious satire of preachers and those they fool. Gantry has no redeeming features but is seen by the gullible public as a man who speaks the truth about God. Of course he could just as easily have been a lawyer or a politician and the heart of Lewis's satire is how easily people believe what t
In the Pond
Ha Jin · 178 pages
Set in the northern provincial commune town of Dismount Fort, In the Pond tells the story of Shao Bin, a worker at the Harvest Fertilizer plant who aims above his station. Passed over on the list to receive a larger apartment, while those in favor with the party are selected ahead of him, Shao Bin chafes at his powerlessness until he hits upon a solution: placing a satirical cartoon in the provinc
The Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe · 690 pages
Hocus Pocus
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. · 302 pages
A small, exclusive college in upstate New York is nestled along the frozen shores of Lake Mohiga ... and directly across from a maximum-security prison. The two institutions manage to coexist peacefully, until 10,000 prisoners break out and head directly for the college.
Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift · 256 pages
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
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
Bleak House
Charles Dickens · 815 pages
As the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually being devoured by legal costs; Esther Summerson, a ward of court, whose parentage is a source of deepening mystery; the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn; the determined sleuth Inspector Bucket; and even Jo, t
The Orphan Master's Son
Adam Johnson · 456 pages
An epic novel and a thrilling literary discovery, The Orphan Master’s Son follows a young man’s journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea. Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother—a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang—and an influential father who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. There the boy is giv
The Zero
Jess Walter · 352 pages
Can a man ever realize that he's been the villain of his own story?The Zero is a groundbreaking novel, a darkly comic snapshot of our times that is already being compared to the works of Franz Kafka and Joseph Heller.From its opening pages—when hero cop Brian Remy wakes up to find he's shot himself in the head—novelist Jess Walter takes us on a harrowing tour of a city and a country shuddering thr
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
Day of the Oprichnik
Vladimir Sorokin · 208 pages
Omon Ra
Victor Pelevin · 153 pages
Omon Ra, by the gifted Russian writer Victor Pelevin, is a pointed, dead-on-satire of the now-defunct Soviet space program, and a moving account of a cosmonaut's coming-of-age. The story is told in the beguiling voice of its young protagonist, Omon Ra, whose odd name combines a term for the Soviet special forces with the name of the sun god in Egyptian mythology. Ever since he was a boy, Omon has
Love in the Ruins
Walker Percy · 403 pages

