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🧲 Books like this

The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God & Other Stories

Etgar Keret · 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
❤️

The Nimrod Flipout: Stories

Etgar Keret, Institute for Translation of Hebrew Literature · 176 pages

Magical RealismAbsurdist HumorShort StoriesDark Comedy
❤️
Absurdist HumorShort StoriesMagical RealismDark Comedy
❤️

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.

Short StoriesMagical RealismAbsurdist HumorDark Comedy
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The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray

Jorge Amado · 70 pages

"Along with The Discovery of America by the Turks, two masterworks by the greatest Brazilian novelist of the twentieth century, published for the centennial of his birth. Widely considered the greatest work by the foremost Brazilian author of the twentieth century, The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray comes to Penguin Classics in a new translation by the dean of Portuguese-language translators,

Magical RealismAbsurdist HumorDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
❤️

Dangerous Laughter

Steven Millhauser · 250 pages

Thirteen darkly comic stories, Dangerous Laughter is a mesmerizing journey that stretches the boundaries of the ordinary world.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Short StoriesMagical RealismDark ComedyAbsurdist Humor
❤️

The 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

Absurdist HumorDark ComedyMagical RealismLiterary Fiction
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Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions

Neil Gaiman · 352 pages

"En las manos maestras de Neil Gaiman, la magia es mucho más que un mero juego de engaños. La destreza y el poder de invención de este gran fabulador transforman el entorno cotidiano en un mundo hechizado por sucesos sombríos y extraños, en el que una anciana puede comprar el Santo Grial en una tienda de segunda mano, unos asesinos se anuncian en los clasificados de un periódico bajo la rúbrica ±C

Magical RealismShort StoriesAbsurdist HumorDark Comedy
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In Persuasion Nation

George Saunders · 234 pages

Talking candy bars, baby geniuses, disappointed mothers, castrated dogs, interned teenagers, and moral fables-all in this hilarious and heartbreaking collection. The best work yet from an author hailed as the heir to Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon.

Absurdist HumorShort StoriesDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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Centuries of June

Keith Donohue · 342 pages

In this black comedy Jack attempts to tell the story of how he ended up on the floor with a hole in his head. But he keeps getting interrupted by a series of suspects--eight women lying in the bedroom just down the hall. Each woman (including his wife) tells a story drawn from five centuries of American myth and legend.

Magical RealismDark ComedyAbsurdist HumorLiterary Fiction
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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

Short StoriesAbsurdist HumorMagical RealismLiterary Fiction
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The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

Franz Kafka · 271 pages

This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he thought worthy of publication. It includes 'Metamorphosis', his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; 'Meditation', a collection of his earlier studies; 'The Judgement', written in a single night of frenzied creativity; 'The Stoker', the first chapter of a novel s

Short StoriesMagical RealismDark ComedyAbsurdist Humor
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The Fun Parts

Sam Lipsyte · 229 pages

Presents a collection of stories featuring such characters as a deranged male birth doula, an aerobics instructor trying to save her soul, and a doomsday hustler.

Dark ComedyShort StoriesAbsurdist HumorLiterary Fiction
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Wise Children

Angela Carter · 237 pages

In their heyday on the vaudeville stages of the early twentieth century, Dora Chance and her twin sister, Nora -- unacknowledged the daughters of Sir Melchior Hazard, the greatest Shakespearean actor of his day -- were known as the Lucky Chances, with private lives as colorful and erratic as their careers. But now, at the age of 75, Dora is typing up their life story, and it is a tale indeed the A

Magical RealismDark ComedyAbsurdist HumorLiterary Fiction
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The Elephant Vanishes

Haruki Murakami

Magical RealismShort StoriesAbsurdist HumorLiterary Fiction
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The Man Who Walked Through Walls

Marcel Ayme · 228 pages

Marcel Aym's most celebrated tale provides the title of this collection of ten short stories. The excellent Monsieur Dutilleul is able to penetrate walls, but never exploits his gift until his tyrannical boss drives him to desperate measures. How will the unassuming clerk adjust to a glamorous life of crime?

Magical RealismShort StoriesAbsurdist HumorLiterary Fiction
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Museum of the Weird

Amelia Gray · 171 pages

Magical RealismShort StoriesAbsurdist HumorLiterary Fiction
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Everything Is Illuminated

Jonathan Safran Foer · 288 pages

A young man arrives in the Ukraine, clutching in his hand a tattered photograph. He is searching for the woman who fifty years ago saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Unfortunately, however, he is aided in his quest by Alex, a translator with an uncanny ability to mangle English into new forms; a 'blind' old man haunted by memories of the war; and an undersexed guide dog named Sammy Davis, Jr, J

Magical RealismAbsurdist HumorDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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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

Magical RealismAbsurdist HumorDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

Alissa Nutting · 188 pages

"Fiction. Winner of the 6th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, chosen Ben Marcus. In this darkly hilarious debut collection, misfit women and girls in every strata of society are investigated through various ill-fated jobs. One is the main course of dinner, another the porn star contracted to copulate in space for a reality TV show. They become futuristic ant farms, get knocked up by the st

Dark ComedyShort StoriesAbsurdist HumorLiterary Fiction
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The Miniature Wife and Other Stories

Manuel Gonzales · 304 pages

A collection of short works set in a range of fantastical settings explores such themes as disproportional guilt, the reinvention of self, and the powerful urges to defend and provide for loved ones.

Magical RealismShort StoriesAbsurdist HumorLiterary Fiction
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The Acid House

Irvine Welsh · 256 pages

In the title piece an acid head and a newborn infant exchange consciousness with sardonically unexpected results, Snuff is on a man who videotapes his own suicide, and in Vat 69 a woman keeps her husband's head alive in a jar.

Absurdist HumorShort StoriesDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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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

Dark ComedyShort StoriesAbsurdist HumorLiterary Fiction
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No One Belongs Here More Than You

Miranda July · 214 pages

This collection of short stories introduces the possibility of a moment that can change everything. Whether writing about a middle-aged woman's obsession with Prince William, or an aging factory worker who has never been in love, the result is startling, sexy and tender by turns.

Short StoriesAbsurdist HumorDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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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

Absurdist HumorShort StoriesMagical RealismLiterary Fiction

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