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The War of the Saints

Jorge Amado · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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Mumbo Jumbo

Ishmael Reed · 223 pages

Spanning a dizzying host of genres, from cinema to academia to mythology, Mumbo Jumbo is a lively ride through a key decade of American history the 1920's. In addition to ragtime, blues, and jazz, Reed's allegory draws on the Harlem Renaissance, the Back to Africa movement, and America's occupation of Haiti. His style throughout is as avant-garde and vibrant as the music at its center. From New Or

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The Kingdom of This World

Alejo Carpentier · 150 pages

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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

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Sister Mine

Nalo Hopkinson · 320 pages

Possessing no magic but a beautiful singing voice, Makeda leaves her formerly co-joined twin sister, Abby, to set out on her own for a life of independence, but must reconcile with her sibling after her father goes missing.

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American Street

Ibi Zoboi · 324 pages

When Fabiola's mother is detained upon their arrival to the United States, Fabiola must navigate her loud American cousins, the grittiness of Detroit's west side, a new school, and a surprising romance all on her own.

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Green Grass, Running Water

Thomas King · 395 pages

Strong, Sassy women and hard-luck hardheaded men, all searching for the middle ground between Native American tradition and the modern world, perform an elaborate dance of approach and avoidance in this magical, rollicking tale by Cherokee author Thomas King. Alberta is a university professor who would like to trade her two boyfriends for a baby but no husband; Lionel is forty and still sells tele

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Anansi Boys

Neil Gaiman · 400 pages

Anansi Boys is a fantasy novel by English writer Neil Gaiman. In the novel, "Mr. Nancy" — an incarnation of the West African trickster god Anansi — dies, leaving twin sons, who in turn discover one another's existence after being separated as young children. The novel follows their adventures as they explore their common heritage. Although it is not a sequel to Gaiman's previous novel American God

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The Life of Insects

Victor Pelevin · 169 pages

In a sophisticated display of allegory, fantasy, and philosophical inquiry, Victor Pelevin creates an Ovidian, shape-shifting world that never fails to resonate on various strata with our own. The Life of Insects opens with a trio of investors -- two Russians and one American -- discussing business prospects in the Crimea, when, suddenly, they reveal themselves to be mosquitoes in search of hemogl

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The Puttermesser Papers

Cynthia Ozick · 235 pages

From Cynthia Ozick, a masterful modern-day picaresque - the adventures of a female Don Quixote transplanted in Manhattan. Ruth Puttermesser, yearning for a life of the mind (her idol is George Eliot), finds herself mired in the lowest circles of city bureaucracy. Her love life is hopeless. Her fantasies are more influential than wan reality - she takes Hebrew lessons from an uncle who died before

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The Satanic Verses

Salman Rushdie · 560 pages

One of the most controversial and acclaimed novels ever written, The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie’s best-known and most galvanizing book. Set in a modern world filled with both mayhem and miracles, the story begins with a bang: the terrorist bombing of a London-bound jet in midflight. Two Indian actors of opposing sensibilities fall to earth, transformed into living symbols of what is angelic

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Wizard of the Crow

Ngugi wa Thiong'o · 784 pages

>From the exiled Kenyan novelist, playwright, poet, and literary critic--a magisterial comic novel that is certain to take its place as a landmark of postcolonial African literature.In exile now for more than twenty years, Ngugl wa Thiong'o has become one of the most widely read African writers of our time, the power and scope of his work garnering him international attention and praise. His aim i

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Kissing in Manhattan

David Schickler · 265 pages

David Shickler's much anticipated work of fiction, Kissing in Manhattan, casts a knowing eye on a handful of lonely, love-starved New Yorkers, many of whom are inhabitants of the Preemption, a legendary Gothic apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The surprising ways that the lives of these apartment dwellers intersect, building to an emotional climax in the final piece. In "Jacob's B

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Memories of the Future

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Written in Soviet Moscow in the 1920s—but considered too subversive even to show to a publisher—the seven tales included here attest to Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's boundless imagination, black humor, and breathtaking irony: a man loses his way in the vast black waste of his own small room; the Eiffel Tower runs amok; a kind soul dreams of selling "everything you need for suicide"; an absentminded p

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Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

Mo Yan · 552 pages

Stripped of his possessions and executed as a result of Mao's Land Reform Movement in 1948, benevolent landowner Ximen Nao finds himself endlessly tortured in Hell before he is systematically reborn on Earth as each of the animals in the Chinese zodiac.

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The Man Who Walked Through Walls

Marcel Ayme · 228 pages

Marcel Aym's most celebrated tale provides the title of this collection of ten short stories. The excellent Monsieur Dutilleul is able to penetrate walls, but never exploits his gift until his tyrannical boss drives him to desperate measures. How will the unassuming clerk adjust to a glamorous life of crime?

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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

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Wise Children

Angela Carter · 237 pages

In their heyday on the vaudeville stages of the early twentieth century, Dora Chance and her twin sister, Nora -- unacknowledged the daughters of Sir Melchior Hazard, the greatest Shakespearean actor of his day -- were known as the Lucky Chances, with private lives as colorful and erratic as their careers. But now, at the age of 75, Dora is typing up their life story, and it is a tale indeed the A

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The Blue Mountain

Meir Shalev · 384 pages

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Suddenly, a Knock on the Door

Etgar Keret · 304 pages

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Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Tom Robbins · 366 pages

The whooping crane rustlers are girls. Young girls. Cowgirls, as a matter of fact, all "bursting with dimples and hormones"--and the FBI has never seen anything quite like them. Yet their rebellion at the Rubber Rose Ranch is almost overshadowed by the arrival of the legendary Sissy Hankshaw, a white-trash goddess literally born to hitchhike, and the freest female of them all.Freedom, its prizes a

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A Wild Sheep Chase

Haruki Murakami · 299 pages

It begins simply enough: A twenty-something advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend, and casually appropriates the image for an insurance company's advertisement. What he doesn't realize is that included in the pastoral scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man in black who offers a menacing ultimatum

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Red Earth and Pouring Rain

Vikram Chandra · 580 pages

Vikram Chandra's first novel is a story about exile, about the hunger for experience and the ache for return that mark the beginning and end of all journeys, and about the processes of personal redefinition implicit in such migrations. In a feat of magnificent invention, it links epic history - and the tale of a culture spiraling toward a moment of unspeakable violence - with the fates of three c

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All Fires the Fire

Julio Cortazar · 157 pages

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The Other City

Michal Ajvaz · 168 pages

In this strange and lovely hymn to Prague, Michal Ajvaz repopulates the city of Kafka with ghosts, eccentrics, talking animals, and impossible statues, all lurking on the peripheries of a town so familiar to tourists. *The Other City* is a guidebook to this invisible, "other Prague," overlapping the workaday world: a place where libraries can turn into jungles, secret passages yawn beneath our fee

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