What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Road
Cormac McCarthy · 287 pages
Cormac McCarthy's tenth novel, The Road, is his most harrowing yet deeply personal work. Some unnamed catastrophe has scourged the world to a burnt-out cinder, inhabited by the last remnants of mankind and a very few surviving dogs and fungi. The sky is perpetually shrouded by dust and toxic particulates; the seasons are merely varied intensities of cold and dampness. Bands of cannibals roam the r
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
David Wroblewski · 566 pages
A tale reminiscent of "Hamlet" that also celebrates the alliance between humans and dogs follows speech-disabled Wisconsin youth Edgar, who bonds with three yearling canines and struggles to prove that his sinister uncle is responsible for his father's death.
The Dark
John McGahern · 191 pages
The Dark, John McGaherns second novel, is set in rural Ireland. The themes that McGahern has made his own are adolescence and a guilty, yet uncontrollable sexuality that is contorted and twisted by both a puritanical state religion and a strange, powerful and ambiguous relationship between son and widower father.Against a background evoked with quiet, undemonstrative mastery, McGahern explores wit
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath · 258 pages
The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature, with over two million copies sold in this country. This extraordinary work chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful - but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time. Step by careful step, Sylvia Plath takes us with Esther through a painful month in New York as a contest-winning junior
The Center of Winter
Marya Hornbacher · 326 pages
At the center of winter, in Motley, Minnesota, Arnold Schiller gives in to the oppressive season that reigns outside and also to his own inner demons -- he commits suicide, leaving a devastated family in his wake.Claire Schiller, wife and mother, takes shelter from the emotional storm with her husband's parents but must ultimately emerge from her grief and help her two young children to recover. E
The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, the Accident
Elie Wiesel · 318 pages
The Complete Maus
Art Spiegelman · 296 pages
The definitive edition of the graphic novel acclaimed as “the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust” (Wall Street Journal) and “the first masterpiece in comic book history” (The New Yorker) • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • One of Variety’s “Banned and Challenged Books Everyone Should Read”A brutally moving work of art—widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever writte
Death of a Salesman
Arthur Miller · 139 pages
The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman’s deferred American dream Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupporta
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Tennessee Williams · 158 pages
Members of a neurotic Southern family gather to face the impending death of their patriarch, Big Daddy, and battle over the inheritance of his vast estate.
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
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
Peter Handke · 86 pages
The noted Austrian writer reconstructs and recalls the relationships, objects, daily affairs, dreams, pain, and despair of his mother's fifty-one years in a small village and the final reality of her suicide.
Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace · 1,088 pages
A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connec
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Tales of New York
Stephen Crane · 239 pages
Atticus
Ron Hansen · 256 pages
A father journeys to a town in Mexico in an effort to learn what drove his son to commit suicide. The father is Atticus Cody, a rich Colorado rancher whose son adopted a beatnik lifestyle on the Gulf Coast. As he investigates, Cody receives a big surprise.
Oedipus Rex
Sophocles · 115 pages
Oedipus Rex chronicles the story of Oedipus, a man that becomes the king of Thebes and was always destined from birth to murder his father Laius and marry his mother Jocasta. The play is an example of a classic tragedy, noticeably containing an emphasis on how Oedipus's own faults contribute to the tragic hero's downfall, as opposed to having fate be the sole cause. Over the centuries, Oedipus Rex
Lie Down in Darkness
William Styron · 400 pages
The story is set out in the south. The Loftis family members are waiting for the coffin of their daughter Peyton. The novel goes back in time through flashbacks and recollections uncovering truths and events leading to Peyton's suicide. Lie Down In Darkness is a post-modernist novel, a post-war account of the human state, an age of alienation, decay and meaninglessness. Neither society nor family
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
Nick Flynn · 288 pages
"Nick Flynn met his father when he was twenty-seven years old, working as a caseworker in a homeless shelter in Boston. As a teenager he'd received letters from this stranger father, a self-proclaimed poet and con man doing time in federal prison for bank robbery. Nick, his own life precariously unsettled (his mother committed suicide when he was in his late teens), was living alternatively in a r
House of Sand and Fog
Andre Dubus III · 365 pages
The Book of Aron
Jim Shepard · 272 pages
Aron, the narrator, is an engaging if peculiar young boy whose family is driven from the countryside into the Warsaw Ghetto. As his family is slowly stripped away from him, Aron and a handful of boys and girls risk their lives, smuggling and trading things through the "quarantine walls" to keep their people alive, hunted all the while by blackmailers and by Jewish, Polish, and German police (not t
Girl in Pieces
Kathleen Glasgow · 416 pages
Charlotte Davis is in pieces. At 17 she's already lost more than most people do in a lifetime. But she's learned how to forget. The broken glass washes away the sorrow until there is nothing but calm. You don't have to think about your father and the river. Your best friend, who is gone forever. Or your mother, who has nothing left to give you. Every new scar hardens Charlie's heart just a lit
Finn
Jon Clinch · 312 pages
Dark and turgid as the Old Man in full spate, and as turgid with the dark shapes of things that won't stay dead. Haunted and delicately scribed like dawnmists on the levees. Read this and you will understand why Huck only slept well under under the open sky, why he could never breathe freely in any house, not really.

