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The Castle of Crossed Destinies

Italo Calvino · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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City of Saints and Madmen

Jeff VanderMeer · 456 pages

Frame StoryNonlinear NarrativeAbsurdist HumorShort Stories
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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

Frame StoryNonlinear NarrativeAbsurdist HumorLiterary Fiction
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Life A User's Manual

Georges Perec · 583 pages

Represents an exploration of the relationship between imagination and reality as seen through the eyes of the dying Serge Valene, an inhabitant of a large Parisian apartment block.

Frame StoryNonlinear NarrativeAbsurdist HumorDense Prose
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Pale Fire

Vladimir Nabokov · 301 pages

A 999 line poem in heroic couplets, divided into 4 cantos, was composed--according to Nabokov's fiction--by John Francis Shade, an obsessively methodical man, during the last 20 days of his life.

Frame StoryNonlinear NarrativeDense ProseAbsurdist Humor
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Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings

Jorge Luis Borges · 260 pages

Labyrinths is a collection of short stories and essays by the writer Jorge Luis Borges. It was translated into English, published soon after Borges won the International Publishers' Prize with Samuel Beckett. It includes, among other stories, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", "The Garden of Forking Paths", and "The Library of Babel", three of Borges' most famous stories. Stories [Tlön, Uqbar, O

Nonlinear NarrativeFrame StoryShort StoriesDense Prose
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At Swim-Two-Birds

Flann O'Brien · 232 pages

Frame StoryNonlinear NarrativeAbsurdist HumorLiterary Fiction
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Lost in the Funhouse

John Barth · 201 pages

Absurdist HumorNonlinear NarrativeDense ProseShort Stories
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The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Laurence Sterne · 526 pages

Laurence Sterne's great masterpiece of bawdy humour and rich satire defies any attempt to categorize it. Part novel, part digression, its gloriously disordered narrative interweaves the birth and life of the unfortunate 'hero' Tristram Shandy, the eccentric philosophy of his father Walter, the amours and military obsessions of Uncle Toby, and a host of other characters.

Absurdist HumorNonlinear NarrativeDense ProseFrame Story
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Metamorphoses

Ovid · 394 pages

Frame StoryNonlinear NarrativeDense ProseShort Stories
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The Letter Killers Club

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky · 123 pages

"Writers are professional killers of conceptions. The logic of the Letter Killers Club, a secret society of "conceivers" who commit nothing to paper on principle, is strict and uncompromising. Every Saturday they meet in a fire-lit room hung with blank black bookshelves to present their "pure and unsubstantiated" conceptions: a rehearsal of Hamlet hijacked by an actor who vanishes with the role; t

Frame StoryDense ProseAbsurdist HumorLiterary Fiction
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Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra · 503 pages

*Don Quijote de la Mancha* es una novela escrita por el español Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Publicada su primera parte con el título de *El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha* a comienzos de 1605, es la obra más destacada de la literatura española y una de las principales de la literatura universal. En 1615 apareció su continuación con el título de *Segunda parte del ingenioso caballero

Frame StoryAbsurdist HumorDense ProseLiterary Fiction
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Heart of Darkness and Other Tales

Joseph Conrad · 285 pages

Set in an atmosphere of mystery and menace, "Heat of Darkness" tells the story of Marlow's journey up the Congo River to meet the remarkable Mr. Kurtz. It reveals Conrad at the height of his powers as a writer of great vividness, intensity, and sophistication. "An Outpost of Progress" is also set in central Africa and offers a fiercely sardonic view of European imperialism. "Karain", with its Mala

Frame StoryShort StoriesDense ProseLiterary Fiction
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Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie · 548 pages

Frame StoryNonlinear NarrativeDense ProseLiterary Fiction
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The Golden Notebook

Doris Lessing · 576 pages

The story of the inner and outer life of Anna, a young writer, single mother and member of the Communist Party, struggling with crises both in her domestic and political life, this book was hailed as a landmark by the Women's Movement.

Frame StoryNonlinear NarrativeDense ProseLiterary Fiction
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Pricksongs & Descants

Robert Coover · 256 pages

Nonlinear NarrativeAbsurdist HumorDense ProseShort Stories
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S. Ship of Theseus.

V. M. Straka, Doug Dorst, J.J. Abrams

Frame StoryNonlinear NarrativeDense ProseLiterary Fiction
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Peace

Gene Wolfe · 264 pages

From back cover: PEACE is the life story of Alden Dennis Weer, an eccentric old man living out his last days and fantasies in an obscure Midwestern town. It is also much more -- an extraordinary combination of the mythic vision of fantasy and the thrilling, disquieting suspense of a mastercrafted ghost story. PEACE will awaken your dreams -- and put you in touch with a magical reality that

Frame StoryNonlinear NarrativeDense ProseLiterary Fiction
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The Spear Cuts Through Water

Simon Jimenez · 525 pages

Frame StoryNonlinear NarrativeDense ProseLiterary Fiction
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The Soft Machine

William S. Burroughs

Absurdist HumorNonlinear NarrativeDense ProseLiterary Fiction
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V.

Thomas Pynchon · 492 pages

Having just been released from the Navy, Benny Profane is content to lead a slothful existence with his friends, where the only real ambition is to perfect the art of "schlemihlhood," or being a dupe, and where "responsibility" is a dirty word. Among his pals--called the Whole Sick Crew--is Slab, an artist who can't seem to paint anything other than cheese danishes. But Profane's life changes dram

Nonlinear NarrativeAbsurdist HumorDense ProseLiterary Fiction
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The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989

Samuel Beckett · 336 pages

Absurdist HumorDense ProseShort StoriesLiterary Fiction
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Sophie's World

Jostein Gaarder · 456 pages

The protagonists are Sophie Amundsen, a 14-year-old girl, and Alberto Knox, her philosophy teacher. The novel chronicles their metaphysical relationship as they study Western philosophy from its beginnings to the present. A bestseller in Norway.

Frame StoryNonlinear NarrativeDense ProseLiterary Fiction
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Slowness

Milan Kundera · 156 pages

After the gravity of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality, Slowness comes as a surprise: it is certainly Kundera's lightest novel, a divertimento, an opera buffa, with, as the author himself says, "not a single serious word in it"; then, too, it is the first of his novels to have been written in French (in the eyes of the French public, turning him definitively into a "French writer")

Nonlinear NarrativeAbsurdist HumorDense ProseLiterary Fiction
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Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. · 186 pages

Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.

Frame StoryAbsurdist HumorNonlinear NarrativeLiterary Fiction
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