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Malina

Ingeborg Bachmann · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys · 189 pages

Jean Rhys's reputation was made upon publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of citsion's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre". A sensual and protected young woman, the narrator grows up in the lush, natural world of the Caribbean. She is sold into marriage to the cold-hearted and prideful R

Literary FictionLyrical ProseStream of ConsciousnessFirst Person Narrator
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The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath · 258 pages

The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature, with over two million copies sold in this country. This extraordinary work chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful - but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time. Step by careful step, Sylvia Plath takes us with Esther through a painful month in New York as a contest-winning junior

Writer ProtagonistLiterary FictionLyrical ProseUnreliable Narrator
❤️

The Hours

Michael Cunningham

Writer ProtagonistLiterary FictionLyrical ProseFeminism
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The Thirteenth Tale

Diane Setterfield · 424 pages

Sometimes, when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny. Reclusive author Vida Winter, famous for her collection of twelve enchanting stories, has spent the past six decades penning a series of alternate lives for herself. Now old and ailing, she is ready to reveal the truth about her extraordinary existence and the violent and tragic past she has kept secret for so long.

Writer ProtagonistLyrical ProseLiterary FictionEmotional Abuse
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Tropic of Cancer

Henry Miller · 321 pages

A stream-of-consciousness story of a poverty-stricken young American, living in Paris.

Writer ProtagonistLyrical ProseLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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My Name Is Lucy Barton

Elizabeth Strout · 200 pages

"Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn't spoken for many years, comes to see her and a simple hospital visit becomes a portal to the most tender relationship of all--the one between mother and daughter"--

Writer ProtagonistLiterary FictionLyrical ProseEmotional Abuse
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Fates and Furies

Lauren Groff · 400 pages

Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years. At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the env

Writer ProtagonistLiterary FictionLyrical ProseUnreliable Narrator
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The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Rainer Maria Rilke · 192 pages

Writer ProtagonistLiterary FictionLyrical ProseStream of Consciousness
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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

Writer ProtagonistLyrical ProseLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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Pale 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.

Writer ProtagonistLiterary FictionLyrical ProseFirst Person Narrator
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Amulet

Roberto Bolano · 192 pages

Writer ProtagonistLiterary FictionLyrical ProseStream of Consciousness
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All the King's Men

Robert Penn Warren · 490 pages

The story is about Willie Stark, a slick politician of humble birth, who was based on real-life Huey Long, a Louisiana governor, but the real main character is Jack Burden, a reporter who serves to narrate the story and Stark's rise to power.

Writer ProtagonistLyrical ProseLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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In the Dream House

Carmen Maria Machado · 251 pages

Writer ProtagonistLyrical ProseLiterary FictionFeminism
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Bodily Harm

Margaret Atwood · 301 pages

A powerfully and brilliantly crafted novel, Bodily Harm is the story of Rennie Wilford, a young journalist whose life has begun to shatter around the edges. Rennie flies to the Caribbean to recuperate, and on the tiny island of St. Antoine she is confronted by a world where her rules for survival no longer apply. By turns comic, satiric, relentless, and terrifying, Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm

Writer ProtagonistLyrical ProseLiterary FictionUnreliable Narrator
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The Diviners

Margaret Laurence · 467 pages

For Morag Gunn, growing up in a small Canadian prairie town made her a fighter, a cynic, a romantic. A failed marriage, a heartbreaking affair and solitude forced her to develop a special way of being with a life strengthened by dignity and the ability to give and receive love.

Writer ProtagonistLiterary FictionLyrical ProseSlow-Paced
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Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie · 548 pages

Lyrical ProseLiterary FictionWriter ProtagonistFirst Person Narrator
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The Dharma Bums

Jack Kerouac · 204 pages

The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The basis for the novel's semi-fictional accounts are events occurring years after the events of On the Road. The main characters are the narrator Ray Smith, based on Kerouac, and Japhy Ryder, based on the poet and essayist Gary Snyder, who was instrumental in Kerouac's introduction to Buddhism in the mid-1950s. The book co

Writer ProtagonistLyrical ProseLiterary FictionStream of Consciousness
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Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf · 219 pages

Virginia Woolf’s novel chronicles a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a politician’s wife in 1920s London, as she prepares to host a party that evening. The narrative follows Clarissa’s thoughts (and sometimes those of people she meets) as she goes about her errands, and events in the day remind her of her youth and friendships from the past. As the book progresses characters from the past eme

Literary FictionLyrical ProseFeminismDepression
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Circling the Sun

Paula McLain · 366 pages

Writer ProtagonistLiterary FictionLyrical ProseFirst Person Narrator
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A Thousand Acres

Jane Smiley · 377 pages

This powerful twentieth-century reimagining of Shakespeare’s *King Lear* centers on a wealthy Iowa farmer who decides to divide his farm between his three daughters. When the youngest objects, she is cut out of his will. This sets off a chain of events that brings dark truths to light and explodes long-suppressed emotions. Ambitiously conceived and stunningly written, *A Thousand Acres* takes on t

Literary FictionLyrical ProseFirst Person NarratorFeminism
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The House on Mango Street

Sandra Cisneros · 110 pages

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic, acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for he

Lyrical ProseLiterary FictionWriter ProtagonistFirst Person Narrator
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Autofiction

Hitomi Kanehara

Writer ProtagonistLiterary FictionFirst Person NarratorNonlinear Narrative
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Clea

Lawrence Durrell · 287 pages

The fourth and culminating novel in the Alexandria Quartet. Once again past episodes are raked over with a new perspective as the narrator casually begins an affair with the woman of the title, another character from the earlier books.

Writer ProtagonistLiterary FictionLyrical ProseFirst Person Narrator
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Martyr!

Kaveh Akbar · 352 pages

Cyrus Shams is lost. Ever since his mother’s plane was senselessly shot down over the Persian Gulf when he was just a baby, Cyrus has been grappling with her death. Now, newly sober, he is set to learn the truth of her life. When an encounter with a dying artist leads Cyrus towards the mysteries of his past - an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as an Angel of Death, a haun

Writer ProtagonistLiterary FictionLyrical ProseNonlinear Narrative
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