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Bad Behavior: Stories

Mary Gaitskill · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

Nine Stories

J.D. Salinger · 208 pages

First published short story volume by the author of Catcher In The Rye.

Short StoriesSparse ProseNew York CityDry Humor
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Homesick for Another World

Ottessa Moshfegh · 304 pages

Features stories, in which the flesh is weak; the timber is crooked; people are cruel to each other, and stupid, and hurtful, but beauty comes from strange sources. In this book, the author shows us uncomfortable things, and makes us look at them forensically - until we find, suddenly, that we are really looking at ourselves.

Short StoriesSparse ProseDry HumorLiterary Fiction
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Speedboat

Renata Adler · 177 pages

"It has been more than thirty-five years since Renata Adler's Speedboat, Winner of the Ernest Hemingway Award for Best First Novel, charged through the literary establishment, blasting genre walls and pointing the way for a newly liberated way of writing. This unclassifiable work is simultaneously novel, memoir, commonplace book, confession, and critique. It is the story of every man and woman cur

Sparse ProseDry HumorNew York CityLiterary Fiction
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The Collected Stories Of Grace Paley

Grace Paley · 392 pages

Contains all stories from "The little disturbances of man", "Enormous changes at the last minute" and "Later the same day".

Short StoriesNew York CityDry HumorLiterary Fiction
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The Bed Moved

Rebecca Schiff · 139 pages

"A New Yorker, trying not to be jaded, accompanies a cash-strapped pot grower to a "Clothing Optional Resort" in California. A nerdy high schooler has her first sexual experience at geology camp. A young woman fundraises for a social-media savvy cancer patient whose circle of supporters grows increasingly obsessive. A college student, the night of her father's funeral, watches an old video of her

Short StoriesSparse ProseDry HumorLiterary Fiction
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Can't and Won't: Stories

Lydia Davis · 304 pages

A fifth collection by the author of the National Book Award finalist, Varieties of Disturbance, includes pithy one-liners, exploratory observations and letters of complaint, including "A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates," in which a professor is stymied by her choices.

Sparse ProseShort StoriesDry HumorLiterary Fiction
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Malgudi Days

R.K. Narayan · 250 pages

Introducing this collection of stories, R. K. Narayan describes how in India “the writer has only to look out of the window to pick up a character and thereby a story.” Composed of powerful, magical portraits of all kinds of people, and comprising stories written over almost forty years, Malgudi Days presents Narayan’s imaginary city in full color, revealing the essence of India and of human exper

Short StoriesSparse ProseDry HumorLiterary Fiction
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Reasons to Live

Amy Hempel · 129 pages

This collection of fifteen stories deals with the strategies of emotional survival and offers sharp, brittle, and intelligent looks at staying alive, at how to manage a life truly one's own, and how to resist becoming a victim.

Short StoriesSparse ProseDry HumorLiterary Fiction
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Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout · 288 pages

Olive Kitteridge: indomitable, compassionate and often unpredictable. A retired schoolteacher in a small coastal town in Maine, as she grows older she struggles to make sense of the changes in her life. She is a woman who sees into the hearts of those around her, their triumphs and tragedies. We meet her stoic husband, bound to her in a marriage both broken and strong, and a young man who aches

Short StoriesSparse ProseDry HumorLiterary Fiction
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The Collected Stories

William Trevor · 1,261 pages

William Trevor is one of the renowned figures in contemporary literature, described as 'the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language' by the New Yorker and acclaimed for his haunting and profound insights into the human heart. Here is the ultimate collection of his short fiction, with dozens of tales spanning his career and ranging from the moving to the macabre, the humorou

Short StoriesSparse ProseDry HumorLiterary Fiction
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The Pugilist at Rest

Thom Jones · 240 pages

14 stories grouped into four parts: the horrors of Vietnam; men at war with women; the difficulties of divorce, mental defects, and the ravages of cancer; and battling epilepsy and alcoholism.

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Short StoriesSparse ProseLiterary FictionDark
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Chemistry

Weike Wang · 224 pages

"A novel about a young Chinese woman whose graduate studies in chemistry go off track and lead her to discover the truths about her goals and desires"-- Three years into her graduate studies at a demanding Boston university, our unnamed narrator finds her one-time love for chemistry is more hypothesis than reality. Tormented by her failed research, there's another, nonscientific question looming:

Sparse ProseDry HumorLiterary FictionNew York City
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Venus Drive: Stories

Sam Lipsyte · 192 pages

Short StoriesSparse ProseDry HumorLiterary Fiction
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Shoplifting from American Apparel

Tao Lin · 112 pages

Set mostly in Manhattan--although also featuring Atlantic City, Brooklyn, GMail Chat, and Gainsville, Florida--this autobiographical novella, spanning two years in the life of a young writer with a cultish following, has been described by the author as "A shoplifting book about vague relationships," "2 parts shoplifting arrest, 5 parts vague relationship issues," and "An ultimately life-affirming

New York CitySparse ProseDry HumorLiterary Fiction
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Pieces for the Left Hand

J. Robert Lennon · 213 pages

A collection of 100 short pieces-- some not even a page long-- full of subtle humor and surprising incidents. They are grouped into seven themes.

Short StoriesSparse ProseDry HumorLiterary Fiction
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The Dinner Party and Other Stories

Joshua Ferris · 251 pages

These eleven stories by Joshua Ferris, many of which were first published in The New Yorker, are at once thrilling, strange, and comic. The modern tribulations of marriage, ambition, and the fear of missing out as the temptations flow like wine and the minutes of life tick down are explored with the characteristic wit and insight that have made Ferris one of our most critically acclaimed novelists

Short StoriesDry HumorNew York CityLiterary Fiction
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The Collected Stories

Richard Yates · 496 pages

Short StoriesSparse ProseLiterary FictionNew York City
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Dept. of Speculation

Jenny Offill · 185 pages

"Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all. Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband, postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that in

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The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

Breece D'J Pancake · 192 pages

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Rust and Bone

Craig Davidson · 256 pages

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The Angel Esmeralda

Don DeLillo · 234 pages

Collects nine stories written between 1979 and 2011 that chronicle three decades of American life from the perspective of a range of characters, including a pair of nuns in the South Bronx and two astronauts orbiting the Earth.

Short StoriesSparse ProseNew York CityLiterary Fiction
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In the Garden of the North American Martyrs

Tobias Wolff · 175 pages

Among the characters you'll find in this collection of twelve stories by Tobias Wolff are a teenage boy who tells morbid lies about his home life, a timid professor who, in the first genuine outburst of her life, pours out her opinions in spite of a protesting audience, a prudish loner who gives an obnoxious hitchhiker a ride, and an elderly couple on a golden anniversary cruise who endure the off

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Steps

Jerzy Kosinski · 142 pages

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