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Brown Dog

Jim Harrison · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 174 pages

First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Iv

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Billy Liar

Keith Waterhouse · 188 pages

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Women

Charles Bukowski · 297 pages

Low-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at fifty, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life, running three hundred hangovers a year, and maintaining a sex life that woul

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Nobody's Fool

Richard Russo · 549 pages

In 1750, without warning or apparent reason, the mineral springs of the colonial resort town of Bath, New York, ran dry. A little more than two hundred years later, after numerous warnings and for too many reasons, Sully, the unluckiest man in this unlucky town, isn't doing too hot either. He's broke, out of a job, and the owner of a dead pickup truck. The good news? Sully has the dumbest man in N

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Joe College

Tom Perrotta · 313 pages

For many Ivy League college students, spring break means a raucous road trip to a spot in the sun. For Danny, a Yale junior, the spring of 1982 means two weeks in central New Jersey behind the wheel of his dad's lunch truck, the *Roach Coach*. But Danny can use the time with the coffee urn to try to make sense of a love life that's gotten a little complicated.There's loyal and patient hometown hon

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Mother Night

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. · 202 pages

Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense. American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of gray with a verdict that will haunt us all.

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Animal's People

Indra Sinha · 374 pages

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The Scheme For Full Employment

Magnus Mills · 256 pages

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The Overcoat

Nikolai Gogol · 52 pages

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The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes

Anonymous · 131 pages

The story of the young and constantly hungry protagonist, Lazaro, whose worldly education on the road through a series of masters presents a sly, often comical critique of 16th-century Spain.

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No One Writes to the Colonel

Gabriel Garcia Marquez · 170 pages

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A Patchwork Planet

Anne Tyler · 288 pages

One of five Anne Tyler novels reissued in stunning new jacketsBarnaby Gaitlin is a loser - just short of thirty he's the black sheep of a philanthropic Baltimore family. Once upon a time he had a home, a loving wife, a little family of his own; now he has an ex-wife, a 9-year old daughter with attitude, a Corvette Sting Ray that's a collector's item but unreliable, and he works as hired muscle for

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The Legend of The Holy Drinker

Joseph Roth · 74 pages

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Wolf Hall

Hilary Mantel · 653 pages

In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII's court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king's favor and ascend to the heights of political power England is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him.

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The Never-Open Desert Diner

James Anderson · 286 pages

Ben Jones is an honorable but down-on-his luck truck driver on a lonely Utah highway. His life takes a sudden turn into violence, mystery and longing upon finding a beautiful woman playing a cello in an isolated house in the high desert.

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The Shipping News

Annie Proulx · 337 pages

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Shipping News is a celebration of Annie Proulx's genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing

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Cheese

Willem Elsschot · 134 pages

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Quiet Days in Clichy

Henry Miller · 131 pages

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The Breast

Philip Roth · 89 pages

After he is transformed into a 155-pound female breast, college professor David Kepesh struggles to rationalize his condition by proving he is insane.

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Roadside Picnic

Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky · 160 pages

[Comment by Hari Kunru in The Guardian][1]: > Soviet-era Russian science fiction deserves a wider audience in English. The Strugatsky brothers collaborated on numerous novels and stories, the best known of which is this, partly because it was filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky as Stalker, in 1977. The novel takes place 10 years after a mysterious alien visitation, which seems to have no rational explan

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The Eye

Vladimir Nabokov · 107 pages

Nabokov's fourth novel, The Eye is as much a farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Nabokov's protagonist, Smurov, is a lovelorn, excruciatingly self-conscious Russian emigre living in prewar Berlin, who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer even greater indignities in the afterlife.

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Varamo

Cesar Aira · 89 pages

"Varamo concerns a day in the life of a hapless government employee. After being paid by the ministry in counterfeit money, our unfortunate bureaucrat, Varamo, wanders around all night, then sits down and writes the most celebrated masterwork of modern Central American poetry, The Song of the Virgin Boy. What is odd is that Varamo, at fifty years old, 'hadn't previously written one sole verse, nor

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The Aspern Papers

Henry James · 108 pages

With a decaying Venetian villa as a backdrop, an anonymous narrator relates his obsessive quest for the personal documents of a deceased Romantic poet, one Jeffrey Aspern. Led by his mission into increasingly unscrupulous behavior, he is ultimately faced with relinquishing his heart's desire or attaining it at an overwhelming price.

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Stern Men

Elizabeth Gilbert · 289 pages

The "wonderful first novel about life, love, and lobster fishing" (USA Today) from the #1 bestselling writerIn 2000, Elizabeth Gilbert's Stern Men debuted to phenomenal critical attention. Now, Penguin is publishing a new edition of Gilbert's wise and charming novel for the millions of readers who devoured Eat, Pray, Love and remain hungry for more. Off the coast of Maine, Ruth Thomas is born into

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