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Leaving the Sea

Ben Marcus · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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Tenth of December

George Saunders · 272 pages

In the taut opener, “Victory Lap,” a boy witnesses the attempted abduction of the girl next door and is faced with a harrowing choice: Does he ignore what he sees, or override years of smothering advice from his parents and act? In “Home,” a combat-damaged soldier moves back in with his mother and struggles to reconcile the world he left with the one to which he has returned. And in the title stor

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The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

Franz Kafka · 271 pages

This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he thought worthy of publication. It includes 'Metamorphosis', his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; 'Meditation', a collection of his earlier studies; 'The Judgement', written in a single night of frenzied creativity; 'The Stoker', the first chapter of a novel s

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Not the End of the World

Kate Atkinson · 278 pages

Arthur is a precocious eight-year-old boy whose mother is a B-list celebrity more concerned with the state of her bank account than with her son's development. Then an enigmatic young nanny named Missy introduces him to a world he never knew existed.

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Slow Learner: Early Stories

Thomas Pynchon · 193 pages

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The Voice Imitator

Thomas Bernhard · 114 pages

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Demons in the Spring

Joe Meno · 272 pages

Features a collection of short stories about the surreal yet dark lives of individuals considered outcasts, misfits, or peculiar to loved ones or the outside world.

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The Iraqi Christ

Hassan Blasim · 140 pages

This collection of stories explores the chaos of post-invasion Baghdad. A soldier with the ability to predict the future finds himself blackmailed by a suicide bomber into swapping places. A composer of crossword puzzles survives a car-bomb, only to find himself haunted by the spirit of one of its victims. A victim of looting flees armed robbers but falls into a deep hole, at the bottom of which s

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Voodoo Heart

Scott Snyder · 288 pages

Scott Snyder's protagonists inhabit a playfully deranged fictional world in which a Wall Street trader can find himself armed with a speargun, guarding a Dumpster outside a pawnshop in Florida; or an employee at Niagara Falls (his job: watching for jumpers) will take off in a car after a blimp in which his girlfriend has escaped. But in Snyder's wondrous imagination there's a thin membrane betwee

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Bliss Montage

Ling Ma · 228 pages

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Gutshot

Amelia Gray · 209 pages

"A searing new collection from the inimitable Amelia Gray. A woman creeps through the ductwork of a quiet home. A medical procedure reveals an object of worship. A carnivorous reptile divides and cauterizes a town. Amelia Gray's curio cabinet expands in Gutshot, where isolation and coupling are pushed to their dark and outrageous edges. These singular stories live and breathe on their own, pulsati

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Time And The Hunter

Italo Calvino · 160 pages

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Hot Pink

Adam Levin · 240 pages

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Daydreams of Angels

Heather O'Neill

Heather O'Neill's distinctive style and voice fill these charming, sometimes dark, always beguiling stories. From "The Robot Baby," in which we discover what happens when a robot feels emotion for the very first time, to "Heaven," about a grandfather who died for a few minutes when he was nine and visited the pearly gates, to "The Little Wolf-Boy of Northern Quebec," in which untamed children run

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All Fires the Fire

Julio Cortazar · 157 pages

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Exotic Pleasures

Peter Carey · 191 pages

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The Universe in Miniature in Miniature

Patrick Somerville · 304 pages

A novel-in-stories travels from suburbs to outer space and revolves around the tale "The Machine of Understanding Other People," in which a Chicago man is given a supernatural helmet that lets him experience the inner worlds of others.

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City of Saints and Madmen

Jeff VanderMeer · 456 pages

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Lucky Alan and Other Stories

Jonathan Lethem · 157 pages

"Jonathan Lethem's third collection of stories uncovers a father's nervous breakdown at SeaWorld in "Pending Vegan"; a foundling child rescued from the woods during a blizzard in "Traveler Home"; a political prisoner in a hole in a Brooklyn street in "Procedure in Plain Air"; and a crumbling, haunted "blog" on a seaside cliff in "The Dreaming Jaw, The Salivating Ear." Each of these locates itself

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Almost No Memory

Lydia Davis · 208 pages

Lydia Davis's new collection, Almost No Memory, is a richly inventive array of playful philosophical investigations, involuted domestic disputes, and fables of the dark fantastic. With wittily restrained intensity, she again portrays the contemplative self caught in the paradoxical world. In "Pastor Elaine's Newsletter," a harried mother studies a Bible passage; in "Foucault and Pencil," a troubl

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Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry

Elizabeth McCracken · 216 pages

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The Melancholy of Anatomy

Shelley Jackson · 179 pages

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Stories and Texts for Nothing

Samuel Beckett · 140 pages

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Unlikely Stories, Mostly

Alasdair Gray · 273 pages

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St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

Karen Russell · 256 pages

A San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune Best Book of the YearIn these ten glittering stories, debut author Karen Russell takes us to the ghostly and magical swamps of the Florida Everglades. Here wolf-like girls are reformed by nuns, a family makes their living wrestling alligators in a theme park, and little girls sail away on crab shells. Filled with stunning inventiven

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