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🧲 Books like this

Death and the Penguin

Andrey Kurkov · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

Mother Night

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. · 202 pages

Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense. American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of gray with a verdict that will haunt us all.

Dark ComedySatireWriter ProtagonistDry Humor
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I See You've Called in Dead

John Kenney · 294 pages

Writer ProtagonistDark ComedySatireDry Humor
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The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold: A Conversation Piece

Evelyn Waugh · 216 pages

Gilbert Pinfold, an English writer suffering from a surfeit of sleeping pills, recounts his hallucinatory experiences while embarked on a boat for Ceylon.

Dry HumorWriter ProtagonistDark ComedySatire
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Dry HumorDark ComedySatireOrganized Crime
❤️

The Year of the Hare

Arto Paasilinna · 164 pages

After his car hits a bunny, which ultimately survives, a man decides to quit his job, leave his wife, sell his possessions, and spend a year wandering around the countryside of Finland--with the rabbit as his only companion.

Animal CompanionDry HumorSatireLiterary Fiction
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The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

Machado de Assis · 240 pages

"Acclaimed translators Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson offer this new rendition of Machado de Assis' classic novel. When the Collected Stories of Machado de Assis was published in 2018, it was hailed as a "literary event" by the LARB and as "landmark... heroically translated" by Benjamin Moser of The New Yorker. Now the "accomplished duo," (Sam Sacks, WSJ) returns with a fresh translation

Dry HumorDark ComedySatireLiterary Fiction
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The Information

Martin Amis · 493 pages

There aren't many ways for one writer to hurt another. Even if the literary world were as hopelessly corrupt as some people like to think it is, a writer cannot seriously damage a rival. This is the unwelcome conclusion reached by Richard Tull, failed novelist, when he contemplates the agonizing success of his best friend (and worst enemy), Gwyn Barry. A scathing review, a scurrilous profile? Such

Dark ComedySatireWriter ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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White Noise

Don DeLillo · 326 pages

The trials and tribulations of a profesor of Hitler studies.

Dry HumorDark ComedySatireLiterary Fiction
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Sick Puppy

Carl Hiaasen · 464 pages

When Palmer Stoat notices the black pickup truck following him on the highway, he fears his precious Range Rover is about to be carjacked. But Twilly Spree, the man tailing Stoat, has vengeance, not sport-utility vehicles, on his mind. Idealistic, independently wealthy and pathologically short-tempered, Twilly has dedicated himself to saving Florida's wilderness from runaway destruction. He favors

Dark ComedyAnimal CompanionSatireDry Humor
❤️

Fight Club

Chuck Palahniuk · 208 pages

A man who struggles with insomnia meets a colorful extremist, and they create a secret organization together. Chuck Palahniuk showed himself to be his generation’s most visionary satirist in this, his first book. Fight Club’s estranged narrator leaves his lackluster job when he comes under the thrall of Tyler Durden, an enigmatic young man who holds secret after-hours boxing matches in the base

SatireDark ComedyDry HumorLiterary Fiction
❤️

Up in the Air

Walter Kirn · 311 pages

Ryan Bingham's job as a Career Transition Counselor--he fires people--has kept him airborne for years. Although he has come to despise his line of work, he has come to love the culture of what he calls "Airworld," finding contentment within pressurized cabins, anonymous hotel rooms, and a wardrobe of wrinkle-free slacks. With a letter of resignation sitting on his boss's desk, and the hope of a jo

Dry HumorSatireDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
🙂

Cakes and Ale

W. Somerset Maugham · 255 pages

For Alroy Kear the task is sample: write the authorized biography of the eminently respectable Victorian novelist Edward Driffield and make it a bestseller. What he doesn't reckon on is the truth.

Dry HumorWriter ProtagonistSatireLiterary Fiction
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What a Carve Up!

Jonathan Coe · 512 pages

A brilliant noir farce, a dystopian vision of Britain, a family history and the story of an obsession. Michael is a lonely, rather pathetic writer, obsessed by the film, 'What A Carve Up!' in which a mad kinfeman cuts his way through the inhabitants of a decrepit stately pile as the thunder rages. Inexplicably he is commissioned to write the family history of the Winshaws, an upper class Yorkshire

Dark ComedyWriter ProtagonistSatireLiterary Fiction
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Redshirts

John Scalzi · 320 pages

Ensign Andrew Dahl has just been assigned to the Universal Union Capital Ship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union since the year 2456. It's a prestige posting, with the chance to serve on "Away Missions" alongside the starship's famous senior officers. Life couldn't be better...until Andrew begins to realize that 1) every Away Mission involves a lethal confrontation with alien forces, 2)

Dry HumorSatireWriter ProtagonistDark Comedy
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The Making of Zombie Wars

Aleksandar Hemon · 307 pages

"The seriously, seriously funny roller-coaster ride of sex and violence that Aleksandar Hemon has long promised Script idea #142: Aliens undercover as cabbies abduct the fiance;e of the main character, who has to find a way to a remote planet to save her. Title: Love Trek. Script idea #185: Teenager discovers his girlfriend's beloved grandfather was a guard in a Nazi death camp. The boy's grandpar

Dark ComedyWriter ProtagonistSatireLiterary Fiction
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Dear Committee Members

Julie Schumacher · 180 pages

"Jason Fitger is a beleaguered professor of creative writing and literature at Payne University, a small and not very distinguished liberal arts college in the Midwest ... His once-promising writing career is in the doldrums, as is his romantic life, in part as the result of his unwise use of his private affairs for his novels ... In short, his life is a tale of woe, and the vehicle this ... novel

Dry HumorSatireWriter ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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How I Became a Famous Novelist

Steve Hely · 320 pages

"This is the story of [Pete] Tarslaw's effort to write the best-sellingest best seller of all time, and what its success costs him in the end."--Page 4 of cover.

SatireWriter ProtagonistDry HumorDark Comedy
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Undermajordomo Minor

Patrick deWitt · 356 pages

Dry HumorDark ComedySatireLiterary Fiction
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Our Man in Havana

Graham Greene · 240 pages

Wormold's daughter had reached an expensive age - so he accepted a mysterious Englishman's offer of extra income. All he has to do is run agents, file reports, and spy. But his fake reports have an alarming tendency to come true.

SatireDry HumorDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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Hollywood

Charles Bukowski · 239 pages

Bukowski's alter ego, Henry Chinaski, returns, revelling in his eternal penchant for booze, women and horse-racing as he makes the precarious journey from poet to screenwriter. Based on Bukowski's experiences when working on the film Barfly, the absurdity and egotism of the film industry are laid bare in this deadpan, touching and funny glimpse into the endless negotiations and back-stabbings of L

Dry HumorWriter ProtagonistSatireLiterary Fiction
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The Ballad of Peckham Rye

Muriel Spark · 144 pages

The welfare worker, Dougal Douglas, causes trouble for the residents of an industrial suburb when he becomes involved in their private lives.

Dark ComedySatireDry HumorLiterary Fiction
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The Mark and the Void

Paul Murray · 469 pages

This is a comic masterpiece about love, art, greed and the banking crisis, from the author of Skippy Dies. Workaholic French banker Claude is so busy making money from Ireland's economic crisis he has no time for romance. Then he meets mysterious writer Paul, who says he wants to put Claude in a book. Next thing Claude knows, he's falling in love with beautiful Greek waitress, Augustina. But can a

SatireWriter ProtagonistDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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Straight White Male

John Niven · 384 pages

SatireWriter ProtagonistDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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Blue Angel

Francine Prose · 314 pages

It's been years since Swenson, a professor in a New England creative writing program, has published a novel.It's been even longer since any of his students have shown promise. Enter Angela Argo, a pierced, tattooed student with a rare talent for writing. Angela is just the thing Swenson needs. And, better yet, she wants his help. But, as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intenti

SatireWriter ProtagonistDark ComedyLiterary Fiction

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