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The Voice Imitator

Thomas Bernhard · 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
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The Nimrod Flipout: Stories

Etgar Keret, Institute for Translation of Hebrew Literature · 176 pages

Sparse ProseShort StoriesDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. · 80 pages

In God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, Kurt Vonnegut skips back and forth between life and afterlife as if the difference between them were rather slight.This fictional adventure, that began as a series of 90-second interludes for WNYC, New York City's public radio station, has evolved over the past year as a strange and lasting work of the imagination. God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian follows on Vonnegut's

Sparse ProseShort StoriesDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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South of No North

Charles Bukowski · 189 pages

Charles Bukowski is one of America's best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in Andernach, Germany, and raised in Los Angeles, where he lived for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944, when he was twenty-four, and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California, on M

Short StoriesDark ComedySparse ProseLiterary Fiction
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Homesick for Another World

Ottessa Moshfegh · 304 pages

Features stories, in which the flesh is weak; the timber is crooked; people are cruel to each other, and stupid, and hurtful, but beauty comes from strange sources. In this book, the author shows us uncomfortable things, and makes us look at them forensically - until we find, suddenly, that we are really looking at ourselves.

Short StoriesSparse ProseDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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The Pugilist at Rest

Thom Jones · 240 pages

14 stories grouped into four parts: the horrors of Vietnam; men at war with women; the difficulties of divorce, mental defects, and the ravages of cancer; and battling epilepsy and alcoholism.

Short StoriesSparse ProseDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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Venus Drive: Stories

Sam Lipsyte · 192 pages

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Reasons to Live

Amy Hempel · 129 pages

This collection of fifteen stories deals with the strategies of emotional survival and offers sharp, brittle, and intelligent looks at staying alive, at how to manage a life truly one's own, and how to resist becoming a victim.

Short StoriesSparse ProseDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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The Bed Moved

Rebecca Schiff · 139 pages

"A New Yorker, trying not to be jaded, accompanies a cash-strapped pot grower to a "Clothing Optional Resort" in California. A nerdy high schooler has her first sexual experience at geology camp. A young woman fundraises for a social-media savvy cancer patient whose circle of supporters grows increasingly obsessive. A college student, the night of her father's funeral, watches an old video of her

Short StoriesSparse ProseDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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The Book of Proper Names

Amelie Nothomb · 126 pages

"To have an extraordinary life, Lucette believes, one must have and extraordinary name. Horrified by the pedestrian names her husband chooses for their unborn child (Tanguy if it's a boy, Joelle if it's a girl), Lucette does the only honorable thing to save her baby from such an unexceptional destiny - she kills her spouse. While in prison, Lucette gives birth to a daughter to whom she bequeaths t

Sparse ProseDark ComedyLiterary FictionAbsurdist Humor
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Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine

Diane Williams · 131 pages

"The very short stories of Diane Williams have been aptly called 'folk tales that hammer like a nail gun,' and these forty new ones are sharper than ever. They are unsettling, yes, frequently revelatory, and more often than not downright funny."--Publisher website.

Sparse ProseShort StoriesLiterary FictionAbsurdist Humor
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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

Franz Kafka · 95 pages

Metamorphosis (German: Die Verwandlung) is a novella written by Franz Kafka which was first published in 1915. One of Kafka's best-known works, Metamorphosis tells the story of salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself inexplicably transformed into a huge insect (German: ungeheueres Ungeziefer, lit. "monstrous vermin") and subsequently struggles to adjust to this new condition.

Sparse ProseDark ComedyLiterary FictionAbsurdist Humor
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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

Short StoriesSparse ProseLiterary FictionAbsurdist Humor
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A Stranger in this World

Kevin Canty · 180 pages

A Stranger in This World marks the debut of a powerful new talent. With a voice akin to those of Denis Johnson and Richard Ford, westerner Kevin Canty is a versatile and intelligent writer whose stories both shock and transfix. In this extraordinary collection, he portrays - with frightening calm - the unpredictable darkness of everyday life. Canty describes territory we all know well, but with a

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Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread

Chuck Palahniuk · 336 pages

"Stories you'll never forget--just try--from literature's favorite transgressive author. Representing work that spans several years, Make Something Up is a compilation of 21 stories and one novella (some previously published, some not) that will disturb and delight. The absurdity of both life and death are on full display; in "Zombies," the best and brightest of a high school prep school become tr

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The Acid House

Irvine Welsh · 256 pages

In the title piece an acid head and a newborn infant exchange consciousness with sardonically unexpected results, Snuff is on a man who videotapes his own suicide, and in Vat 69 a woman keeps her husband's head alive in a jar.

Short StoriesDark ComedyLiterary FictionAbsurdist Humor
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Dangerous Laughter

Steven Millhauser · 250 pages

Thirteen darkly comic stories, Dangerous Laughter is a mesmerizing journey that stretches the boundaries of the ordinary world.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Short StoriesDark ComedyLiterary FictionAbsurdist Humor
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Bad Behavior: Stories

Mary Gaitskill · 203 pages

Powerful stories of dislocation, longing and desire which depict a disenchanted and rebellious urban fringe generation that is groping for human connection. (Or, more simply put, the angst of people-who-wear-black.)

Sparse ProseShort StoriesLiterary FictionDark
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Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Karen Russell · 256 pages

Six short stories with subjects ranging from a dejected teenager who discovers that the universe is communicating with him through talismanic objects left behind in a seagull's nest to two vampires in a sun-drenched lemon grove who try helplessly to slake their thirst for blood.

Short StoriesDark ComedyLiterary FictionAbsurdist Humor
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Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

Alissa Nutting · 188 pages

"Fiction. Winner of the 6th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, chosen Ben Marcus. In this darkly hilarious debut collection, misfit women and girls in every strata of society are investigated through various ill-fated jobs. One is the main course of dinner, another the porn star contracted to copulate in space for a reality TV show. They become futuristic ant farms, get knocked up by the st

Short StoriesDark ComedyLiterary FictionAbsurdist Humor
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Short StoriesDark ComedyLiterary FictionAbsurdist Humor
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Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout · 288 pages

Olive Kitteridge: indomitable, compassionate and often unpredictable. A retired schoolteacher in a small coastal town in Maine, as she grows older she struggles to make sense of the changes in her life. She is a woman who sees into the hearts of those around her, their triumphs and tragedies. We meet her stoic husband, bound to her in a marriage both broken and strong, and a young man who aches

Short StoriesSparse ProseDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

Zsuzsi Gartner · 216 pages

A collection of satirical and darkly humorous stories set in Vancouver which tackle themes of evolution, manhood, international adoption, real estate, the movie industry, science and faith, art, and terrorism.

Short StoriesDark ComedyLiterary FictionAbsurdist Humor

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