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The Magic Wagon

Joe R. Lansdale · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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Geek Love

Katherine Dunn · 355 pages

Here is the unforgettable story of the Binewskis, a circus-geek family whose matriarch and patriarch have bred their own exhibit of human oddities (with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes). Their offspring include Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback O

Traveling CircusDark ComedyFirst Person NarratorDark
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The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno

Ellen Bryson · 352 pages

Restless after ten years with P.T. Barnum's American Museum, Bartholomew Fortuno, the World's Thinnest Man, is asked by the humbug king to discern the activities of a mysterious veiled woman who has captured the obsessions of those she meets.

Traveling CircusHistorical FictionFirst Person NarratorLiterary Fiction
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Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show

Frank Delaney · 427 pages

Traveling CircusFirst Person NarratorHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction
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The Book of Speculation

Erika Swyler · 376 pages

"Simon Watson, a young librarian on the verge of losing his job, lives alone on the Long Island Sound in his family home--a house, perched on the edge of a bluff, that is slowly crumbling toward the sea. His parents are long dead, his mother having drowned in the water his house overlooks. His younger sister, Enola, works for a traveling carnival reading tarot cards, and seldom calls. On a day in

Traveling CircusFirst Person NarratorHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction
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Mr. Vertigo

Paul Auster · 293 pages

In Mr. Vertigo, his dazzling eighth novel, Paul Auster introduces a quintessentially American hero who, early in his life, masters the art of the unimaginable, and then must live out his days long after the magic has been lost and forgotten. It is 1927, the year of Babe Ruth and Charles Lindbergh - and of Walter Claireborne Rawley, a streetwise orphan from Saint Louis who becomes "Walt the Wonder

Traveling CircusHistorical FictionFirst Person NarratorLiterary Fiction
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The Final Confession of Mabel Stark

Robert Hough · 430 pages

Traveling CircusHistorical FictionFirst Person NarratorLiterary Fiction
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The Magician's Lie

Greer Macallister · 320 pages

The Amazing Arden is the most famous female illusionist of her day, renowned for her notorious trick of sawing a man in half on stage. One night in Waterloo, Iowa, with young policeman Virgil Holt watching from the audience, she swaps her trademark saw for a fire ax. Is it a new version of the illusion, or an all-too-real murder? When Arden's husband is found lifeless beneath the stage later that

Traveling CircusFirst Person NarratorHistorical Fiction
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Clown Girl

Monica Drake · 316 pages

Traveling CircusDark ComedyFirst Person NarratorLiterary Fiction
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Diamond

Jacqueline Wilson · 294 pages

Diamond wasn't always a star. Born to penniless parents who longed for a strong, healthy son, she was a dainty, delicate daughter and a bitter disappointment. Discovering an extraordinary gift for acrobatics, Diamond uses her talent to earn a few pennies, but brings shame on her family. When a mysterious, cruel-eyed stranger spots her performing, Diamond is sold and is taken to become an acrobat a

Traveling CircusHistorical FictionFirst Person Narrator
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Water for Elephants

Sara Gruen · 352 pages

As a young man, Jacob Jankowski was tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. It was the early part of the great Depression, and for Jacob, now ninety, the circus world he remembers was both his salvation and a living hell. A veterinary student just shy of a degree, he was put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It was there

Traveling CircusHistorical FictionFirst Person NarratorDark
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The Lonely Hearts Hotel

Heather O'Neill · 389 pages

The Lonely Hearts Hote is a love story with the power of legend. Two babies are abandoned in a Montreal orphanage in the winter of 1914. Before long, their talents emerge: Pierrot is a piano prodigy; Rose lights up even the dreariest room with her dancing and comedy. As they travel around the city performing clown routines, the children fall in love with each other and dream up a plan for the most

Traveling CircusHistorical FictionDarkLiterary Fiction
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The Pilo Family Circus

Will Elliott · 310 pages

Traveling CircusDark ComedyDark
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The Sisters Brothers

Patrick deWitt · 379 pages

Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm's gold-mining claim outside Sacramento, El

Dark ComedyHistorical FictionFirst Person NarratorCowboys
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The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb

Melanie Benjamin · 424 pages

Mid-nineteenth-century little person Mercy Levinia Warren Bump comes of age in the antebellum south before being invited to join the P. T. Barnum circus, through which she meets her future husband, General Tom Thumb, and pursues limitless international opportunities.

Traveling CircusHistorical FictionFirst Person Narrator
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The Carnivorous Carnival

Lemony Snicket · 286 pages

Dear reader, The word "carnivorous," which appears in the title of this book, means "meat-eating," and once you have read such a bloodthirsty word, there is no reason to read any further. This carnivorous volume contains such a distressing story that consuming any of its contents would be far more stomach-turning than even the most imbalanced meal. To avoid causing discomfort, it would be be

Traveling CircusDark ComedyDark
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The Palace of Curiosities

Rosie Garland · 352 pages

"Before Eve is born, her mother goes to the circus. She swears she hears the lion sigh, just before it leaps... and nine months later when Eve is born, the story goes, she doesn't cry - she meows and licks her paws. When Abel is pulled from the stinking Thames, and the mudlarks search his pockets to divvy up the treasure, his eyes crack open and he coughs up a stream of black water. But, how has h

Traveling CircusHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction
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Twilight Eyes

Dean Koontz · 471 pages

Sought by police for murder, slim Mackenzie, a young man both blessed and cursed by "twilight eyes," stalks the diabolical "Others," who feed their twisted needs with human suffering.

Traveling CircusFirst Person NarratorDark
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Church of Marvels

Leslie Parry · 308 pages

"New York, 1895. Sylvan Threadgill, a night soiler cleaning out the privies behind the tenement houses, finds an abandoned newborn baby in the muck. An orphan himself, Sylvan rescues the child, determined to find where she belongs. Odile Church and her beautiful sister, Belle, were raised amid the applause and magical pageantry of The Church of Marvels, their mother's spectacular Coney Island side

Traveling CircusHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction
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Vampire Blood Trilogy

Darren Shan · 512 pages

Traveling CircusFirst Person NarratorDark
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Orphans of the Carnival

Carol Birch · 380 pages

From the Booker short-listed author of Jamrach's Menagerie comes the extraordinary, moving, and unsettling tale of a woman, branded a freak from birth, who becomes an international sensation but longs for genuine human connection London had the best freaks, always had. The Egyptian Hall, the Promenade of Wonders, the Siamese twins, pinheads, midgets, cannibals, giants, living skeletons, the fat, t

Traveling CircusHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction
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Victorian Psycho

Virginia Feito · 206 pages

Dark ComedyFirst Person NarratorHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction
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The Butcher's Hook

Janet Ellis · 368 pages

Dark ComedyHistorical FictionFirst Person NarratorLiterary 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

Dark ComedyFirst Person NarratorHistorical FictionDark
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Anything for Billy

Larry McMurtry · 408 pages

C'est la jeunesse de "Billy the Kid" que nous relate ce roman western qui nous fait visiter l'envers du mythe. Violence et tendresse en un récit qui galope.

Dark ComedyHistorical FictionFirst Person NarratorCowboys

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