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 Street
Ann Petry · 435 pages
The Street is a novel published in 1946 by African-American writer Ann Petry . Set in World War II era Harlem, it centers on the life of Lutie Johnson. Petry's novel is a commentary on the social injustices that confronted her character, Lutie Johnson, as a single black mother in this time period. Lutie is confronted by racism, sexism, and classism on a daily basis in her pursuit of the American d
The Women of Brewster Place
Gloria Naylor · 192 pages
The Women of Brewster Place depicts seven courageous black women struggling to survive life's harsh realities. . Each woman has an individual story to tell. Their stories include the trials and tribulations they endured to end up at Brewster Place; Brewster Place is a dead end street that is cut off from the rest of the town. The seven women include: Mattie Michael, Etta Mae Johnson, Kiswana Brown
Poor Folk and Other Early Stories
Fyodor Dostoevsky Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
The Grapes of Wrath and Other Writings 1936-1941: The Grapes of Wrath, The Harvest Gypsies, The Long Valley, The Log from the Sea of Cortez
John Steinbeck · 1,067 pages
This second volume in The Library of America's authoritative edition of John Steinbeck features his acknowledged masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath. Written in an incredibly compressed five-month period, the novel had an electrifying impact upon publication in 1939, unleashing a political storm with its vision of America's dispossessed struggling for survival. It continues to exert a powerful influ
As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner · 250 pages
Written in stream-of-consciousness style with multiple narrators, the story follows a journey wherein the family of a dead woman try to transport her body to her birthplace in Mississippi in accordance with her wishes. When a ford across a river is flooded they are forced to take a roundabout route and it becomes a desperate race to complete their mission before the body begins to decompose.
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy · 457 pages
An intimate portrait of a woman, one of literature's most admirable and tragic heroines...Tess Durbeyfield knows what it is to work hard and expect little. But her life is about to veer from the path trod by her mother and grandmother. When her ne'er-do-well father learns that his family is the last of a long noble line, the d'Urbervilles, he sends Tess on a journey to meet her supposed kin—a jour
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 498 pages
A masterpiece of guilt and redemption that transforms the sordid story of an old woman’s murder into the nineteenth century’s profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel. Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the tsars, is determined to overreach his humanity and assert his untrammeled individual will. When he commits an act of murder and theft, he sets in
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
Alan Sillitoe
The Good Earth
Pearl S. Buck · 316 pages
This tells the poignant tale of a Chinese farmer and his family in old agrarian China. The humble Wang Lung glories in the soil he works, nurturing the land as it nurtures him and his family. Nearby, the nobles of the House of Hwang consider themselves above the land and its workers; but they will soon meet their own downfall. Hard times come upon Wang Lung and his family when flood and drought
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
Sons and Lovers
D.H. Lawrence · 447 pages
Sons and Lovers, a story of working-class England, is D. H. Lawrence’s third novel. It went through various drafts, and was titled “Paul Morel” until the final draft, before being published and met with an indifferent reaction from contemporary critics. Modern critics now consider it to be D. H. Lawrence’s masterpiece, with the Modern Library placing it ninth in its “100 Best English-Language Nove
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Tales of New York
Stephen Crane · 239 pages
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn & Maggie-Now
Betty Smith
The Contract With God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue
Will Eisner · 498 pages
This book joins three works by Will Eisner, all set around Dropsie Avenue in the Bronx (New York). (1) Contract with God (1978), comprising four independent brief stories. (2) A Life Force (1988), which follows events in Dropsie Avenue during the Great Depression years, and (3) Dropsie Avenue (1995), where the story follows the neighborhood from the 1800s (farming community) to high-end suburb,
Martin Eden
Jack London · 411 pages
Jack London's Martin Eden was first published in 1909 and is the story of a young writer's quest for celebrity and love. Much loved by writers who identify with Martin's belief that when he posted a manuscript, 'there was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps,' that automatically ret
No One Writes to the Colonel
Gabriel Garcia Marquez · 170 pages
Dubliners
James Joyce · 226 pages
James Joyce's disillusion with the publication of Dubliners in 1914 was the result of ten years battling with publishers, resisting their demands to remove swear words, real place names and much else, including two entire stories. Although only 24 when he signed his first publishing contract for the book, Joyce already knew its worth: to alter it in any way would 'retard the course of civilisation
Sometimes a Great Notion
Ken Kesey · 628 pages
Sometimes a Great notion is a book about about the Stamper family. A tough crew who keeps getting pushed west by the youngest Stamper's whim after looking out the window. Finally they can not go any further west than a raging river on Oregon coast. Hank and the Father run a Logging operation against all odds to unionize Great characters Biggie Newton and Finally the youngest son Leland returns
Stoner
John Williams · 278 pages
The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow · 536 pages
Augie's nonconformity leads him into an eventful, humorous, and sometimes earthy way of life.
Salvage the Bones
Jesmyn Ward · 274 pages
They heard it on the radio. A hurricane is coming, threatening the town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. Esch's hard-drinking father can feel it in his bones. Esch and her brothers are trying to help prepare, but there are other worries too. Skeetah is watching his prized pit bull, helpless as her new litter dies one by one. Randall, when not preoccupied with basketball, is busy looking after the you
The house by the medlar tree
Giovanni Verga · 272 pages
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Raymond Carver · 159 pages
In his second collection of stories, as in his first, Carver's characters are peripheral people--people without education, insight or prospects, people too unimaginative to even give up. Carver celebrates these men and women.