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Spaceman Blues

Brian Francis Slattery · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

The Luster of Lost Things

Sophie Chen Keller · 324 pages

"A fablelike debut for readers of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Rebecca Makkai's The Borrower, in which a boy with an uncanny ability to find lost objects must embark on his most important search yet in order to save his mother's enchanted dessert shop, the only place he's ever called home. There's only one place in the world that lonely twelve-year-old Walter

New York CityMissing PersonLiterary FictionMagical Realism
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The Puttermesser Papers

Cynthia Ozick · 235 pages

From Cynthia Ozick, a masterful modern-day picaresque - the adventures of a female Don Quixote transplanted in Manhattan. Ruth Puttermesser, yearning for a life of the mind (her idol is George Eliot), finds herself mired in the lowest circles of city bureaucracy. Her love life is hopeless. Her fantasies are more influential than wan reality - she takes Hebrew lessons from an uncle who died before

New York CityAbsurdist HumorMagical RealismLiterary Fiction
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Kissing in Manhattan

David Schickler · 265 pages

David Shickler's much anticipated work of fiction, Kissing in Manhattan, casts a knowing eye on a handful of lonely, love-starved New Yorkers, many of whom are inhabitants of the Preemption, a legendary Gothic apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The surprising ways that the lives of these apartment dwellers intersect, building to an emotional climax in the final piece. In "Jacob's B

New York CityAbsurdist HumorMagical RealismLiterary Fiction
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Dance Dance Dance

Haruki Murakami · 393 pages

Missing PersonAbsurdist HumorMagical RealismLiterary Fiction
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The Art of Hearing Heartbeats

Jan-Philipp Sendker · 336 pages

When a successful New York lawyer suddenly disappears without a trace, neither his wife nor his daughter Julia has any idea where he might be--until they find a love letter he wrote many years ago to a Burmese woman they have never heard of. Intent on solving the mystery and coming to terms with her father's past, Julia decides to travel to the village where the woman lived. There she uncovers a t

Missing PersonNew York CityMagical RealismLiterary Fiction
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Senlin Ascends

Josiah Bancroft · 368 pages

"The Tower of Babel is the greatest marvel of the Silk Age. Immense as a mountain, the ancient Tower holds unnumbered ringdoms, warring and peaceful, stacked one on the other like the layers of a cake. It is a world of geniuses and tyrants, of airships and steam engines, of incredible animals and mysterious machines. While honeymooning in the Tower of Babel, Thomas Senlin loses his wife. A mild-ma

Missing PersonAbsurdist HumorLiterary FictionScience Fiction
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Magruder's Curiosity Cabinet

H.P. Wood · 363 pages

"After Kitty Armstrong's mother vanishes from their Coney Island hotel in 1904, Kitty finds herself alone, hungry, penniless, and far away from her native England. The last people she'd expect to help her are the cast of characters at Magruder's Curiosity Cabinet, a museum of oddities that is home to a handful of freaks. But even the unusual inhabitants of Magruder's may not be a match for the ins

New York CityMissing PersonMagical Realism
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Lives of the Monster Dogs

Kirsten Bakis · 291 pages

Here is a first novel like no other: a spellbinding tale that both creates its own fully realized world perspective and provides an incisive look at the ways that humans and animals resemble each other. A group of elegant monster dogs in top hats, tails, and bustle skirts become instant celebrities when they come to New York in 2008. Refugees from a town whose residents had been utterly isolated

New York CityScience FictionMagical RealismLiterary Fiction
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Lowboy

John Wray · 258 pages

In the tunnels beneath New York a young man is missing. With each passing minute he heads deeper underground, further from the world of light and reason and closer to the moment of his great surrender. Above ground Ali Lateef of the NYPD is assigned the case. The boy's mother Violet is reluctant to help and Emily, Lowboy's girlfriend and only confidante, appears to have vanished too. Can Lateef fi

New York CityMissing PersonLiterary Fiction
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Three Moments of an Explosion

China Mieville · 406 pages

A provocative new collection of short stories by the New York Times best-selling and Hugo Award-winning author of Kraken explores a range of styles and forms to explore an alternate universe where nature provocatively renders the human race an endangered species.

Absurdist HumorScience FictionLiterary FictionMagical Realism
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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

Absurdist HumorScience FictionMagical RealismLiterary Fiction
🙂

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

Absurdist HumorMissing PersonLiterary FictionMagical Realism
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The Facades

Eric Lundgren · 224 pages

Written with boundless intelligence and razor-sharp wit, The Facades is a comic andexistential mystery that unfolds at the urgent pace of a thriller.

Missing PersonAbsurdist HumorLiterary Fiction
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The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

Angela Carter · 224 pages

Desiderio, an employee of the city under a bizarre reality attack from Doctor Hoffman's mysterious machines, has fallen in love with Albertina, the Doctor's daughter. But Albertina, a beautiful woman made of glass, seems only to appear to him in his dreams. Meeting on his adventures a host of cannibals, centaurs and acrobats, Desiderio must battle against unreality and the warping of time and spac

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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

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Ice Haven

Daniel Clowes · 89 pages

A comic-strip novel about a group of misfit dreamers who inhabit the small town of Ice Haven.

Missing PersonAbsurdist HumorLiterary Fiction
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The Muralist

B.A. Shapiro · 337 pages

When Alizée Benoit, a young American painter working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), vanishes in New York City in 1940, no one knows what happened to her. Not her Jewish family living in German-occupied France. Not her arts patron and political compatriot, Eleanor Roosevelt. Not her close-knit group of friends and fellow WPA painters, including Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Kr

New York CityMissing PersonLiterary Fiction
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Secret Rendezvous

Kobo Abe · 192 pages

Missing PersonAbsurdist HumorLiterary Fiction
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The Unlimited Dream Company

J.G. Ballard · 221 pages

"A remarkable piece of invention, a flight from the world of the familiar and the real into the exotic universe of dream and desire." ― New York Times Book Review When a light aircraft crashes into the Thames at Shepperton, the young pilot who struggles to the surface minutes later seems to have come back from the dead. Within hours everything in the dormitory suburb is transformed. Vultures invad

Absurdist HumorScience FictionMagical RealismLiterary Fiction
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Grimus

Salman Rushdie · 318 pages

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Wilt

Tom Sharpe · 220 pages

Wilt is given to elaborate and vindictive fantasies about his wife, the massive, domineering Eva. But when Eva becomes a Missing Person, following an embarrassing incident at a party they both attend, the police want to question Wilt.

Missing PersonAbsurdist HumorLiterary Fiction
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All the Names

Jose Saramago · 260 pages

Missing PersonAbsurdist HumorLiterary Fiction
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The Zero

Jess Walter · 352 pages

Can a man ever realize that he's been the villain of his own story?The Zero is a groundbreaking novel, a darkly comic snapshot of our times that is already being compared to the works of Franz Kafka and Joseph Heller.From its opening pages—when hero cop Brian Remy wakes up to find he's shot himself in the head—novelist Jess Walter takes us on a harrowing tour of a city and a country shuddering thr

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The Girl in Times Square

Paullina Simons · 640 pages

Missing PersonNew York CityLiterary Fiction

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