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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorPale 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.
Mulligan Stew
Gilbert Sorrentino · 446 pages
Mulligan Stew takes as its subject the comic possibilities of the modern literary imagination. As avant-garde novelist Antony Lamont struggles to write a "new wave murder mystery," his frustrating emotional and sexual life wreaks havoc on his work-in-progress. As a result, his narrative (the very book we are reading) turns into a literary "stew": an uproariously funny melange of journal entries,
The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye
A.S. Byatt · 277 pages
A collection of fairy tales for adults. The title novella is on a middle-aged Englishwoman attending a writers' conference in Turkey. She picks up an antique bottle and as she is washing it a djinn appears, offering to grant her three wishes. She asks for a younger body, then requests he make love to her.
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Italo Calvino · 260 pages
"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel...Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." —from If On A Winter's Night a Traveler Italo Calvino's stunning classic imagines a novel capable of endless possibilities in an intricately crafted, spellbinding story about writing and reading. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a feat of striking in
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
The Arabian Nightmare
Robert Irwin · 281 pages
Mason & Dixon
Thomas Pynchon · 773 pages
Told from the focal point of one Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke – a clergyman of dubious orthodoxy – who attempts to entertain and divert his extended family on a cold December evening (partly for amusement, and partly to keep his coveted status as a guest in the house). Claiming to have accompanied Mason and Dixon throughout their journeys, Cherrycoke tells a tale intermingling Mason and Dixon's biographi
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.
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
The Penelopiad
Margaret Atwood · 199 pages
Homer's Odyssey is not the only version of the story. Mythic material was originally oral, and also local -- a myth would be told one way in one place and quite differently in another. I have drawn on material other than the Odyssey, especially for the details of Penelope's parentage, her early life and marriage, and the scandalous rumors circulating about her. I've chosen to give the telling of t
City of Saints and Madmen
Jeff VanderMeer · 456 pages
My Life as a Fake
Peter Carey · 288 pages
"In Melbourne in the late 1940s, a young conservative Australian poet named Christopher Chubb decides to teach his country a lesson about pretension and authenticity. Choosing as his target the most avant-garde of the literary magazines, he submits for publication the entire oeuvre of one Bob McCorkle, a working-class poet of raw power and sexual frankness, conveniently dead at twenty-four and ent
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
A Midsummer Night's Dream
William Shakespeare · 122 pages
One night two young couples run into an enchanted forest in an attempt to escape their problems. But these four humans do not realize that the forest is filled with fairies and hobgoblins who love making mischief. When Oberon, the Fairy King, and his loyal hobgoblin servant, Puck, intervene in human affairs, the fate of these young couples is magically and hilariously transformed. Like a classic f
The Inferno
Dante Alighieri · 288 pages
Dante, after becoming lost on the path of life, is led by Virgil into Hell to begin his journey back to the light of God.
Ulysses
James Joyce · 736 pages
Written over a seven-year period, from 1914 to 1921, this book has survived bowdlerization, legal action and controversy. The novel deals with the events of one day in Dublin, 16th June 1904, now known as "Bloomsday". The principal characters are Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly. Ulysses has been labelled dirty, blasphemous and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge Jo
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.