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Laughter in the Dark

Vladimir Nabokov · 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

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❤️

The Memory Keeper's Daughter

Kim Edwards · 408 pages

Kim Edwards's stunning family drama evokes the spirit of Sue Miller and Alice Sebold, articulating every mother's silent fear: what would happen if you lost your child and she grew up without you? In 1964, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins, he immediately recognizes that one of them has Down Syndrome and makes a split-second decision that will haunt all their lives fo

InfidelityTragicDisabled ProtagonistArtist Protagonist
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The Day of the Locust

Nathanael West · 167 pages

Following the tale of Tod Hackett - a brilliant young artist who is brought to an LA studio as a set designer - 'The Day of the Locust' is an exposure of the sordid reality beneath the surface of Hollywood.

Film MakingArtist ProtagonistDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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Doctor Zhivago

Boris Pasternak · 542 pages

***This epic tale about the effects of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath on a bourgeois family was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987.*** One of the results of its publication in the West was Pasternak's complete rejection by Soviet authorities; when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 he was compelled to decline it. ***The book quickly became an international be

Artist ProtagonistInfidelityTragicLiterary Fiction
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A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara · 736 pages

Disabled ProtagonistTragicArtist ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Ken Kesey · 311 pages

An international bestseller and the basis for a hugely successful film, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was one of the defining works of the 1960s. A mordant, wickedly subversive parable set in a mental ward, the novel chronicles the head-on collision between its hell-raising, life-affirming hero Randle Patrick McMurphy and the totalitarian rule of Big Nurse. McMurphy swaggers into

Disabled ProtagonistTragicDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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The Bonfire of the Vanities

Tom Wolfe · 690 pages

InfidelityDark ComedyTragicLiterary Fiction
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Loving Frank

Nancy Horan · 380 pages

I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction

InfidelityArtist ProtagonistTragicDark
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A Handful of Dust

Evelyn Waugh · 265 pages

Tony Last is an aristocrat whose attachment to an ideal feudal past is so profound that he is blind to his wife Brenda's boredom with the stately rhythms of country life. She sets herself up in a London flat and pursues an affair with the social-climbing idler John Beaver. Tragedy forces the collapse of their relationship to accelerate, and Tony seeks solace in a foolhardy search for El Dorado.

InfidelityDark ComedyTragicDark
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The Awakening

Kate Chopin · 190 pages

The Awakening is a novel by Kate Chopin, first published in 1899. Set in New Orleans and on the Louisiana Gulf coast at the end of the 19th century, the plot centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle between her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century American South. It is one of the earliest American novels that

InfidelityArtist ProtagonistTragicLiterary Fiction
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Who Is Rich?

Matthew Klam · 328 pages

"The long-awaited first novel from the acclaimed author of Sam the Cat is a provocative and hilarious satire of love, sex, money, and politics in our new gilded age--for readers of The Nix and This Is Where I Leave You"-- "Two people, who are married to other people, meet at a conference for artists and writers in a charming seaside village much like Provincetown. Rich, a formerly sort-of-famous

InfidelityArtist ProtagonistDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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Don't Move

Margaret Mazzantini · 320 pages

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Angle of Repose

Wallace Stegner · 569 pages

Wallace Stegner's Pultizer Prize-winning novel is a story of discovery—personal, historical, and geographical. Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier. But his research reveals even more about his own life than he's willing to admit.

Artist ProtagonistDisabled ProtagonistInfidelityTragic
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The Bee Sting

Paul Murray · 645 pages

TragicDark ComedyInfidelityLiterary Fiction
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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Tennessee Williams · 158 pages

Members of a neurotic Southern family gather to face the impending death of their patriarch, Big Daddy, and battle over the inheritance of his vast estate.

InfidelityTragicDark ComedyDark
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The Dressmaker

Rosalie Ham · 296 pages

Exotic Tilly, a talented and beautiful misfit, returns from Europe to the small Victorian town of Dungatar to nurse her mad old mother. Her reappearance after twnety years is met with suspicion and malice from the eccentric locals until they discover her startling dressmaking skills.

Artist ProtagonistTragicDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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The Light That Failed

Rudyard Kipling · 260 pages

So we settled it all when the storm was done As comf'y as comf'y could be; And I was to wait in the barn, my dears, Because I was only three; And Teddy would run to the rainbow's foot, Because he was five and a man; And that's how it all began, my dears, And that's how it all began. - Big Barn Stories.

TragicDisabled ProtagonistArtist ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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Damage

Josephine Hart · 186 pages

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Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Edward Albee · 242 pages

George, a disillusioned academic, and Martha, his caustic wife, have just come home from a faculty party. When a handsome young professor and his mousy wife stop by for a nightcap, an innocent night of fun and games quickly turns dark and dangerous. Long-buried resentment and rage are unleashed as George and Martha turn their rapier-sharp wits against each other, using their guests as pawns in the

Dark ComedyInfidelityTragicDark
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The End of the Affair

Graham Greene · 217 pages

"This is a record of hate far more than of love," writes Maurice Bendrix in the opening passages of The End of the Affair, of which he is the narrator. And it is a strange hate indeed that compels him to set down the retrospective account of his adulterous love affair with Sarah Miles - a hate bred of a passion that ultimately lost out to God. Now, a year after Sarah's death, Bendrix seeks to exor

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Revolutionary Road

Richard Yates · 346 pages

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The World According to Garp

John Irving · 568 pages

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Her Lover

Albert Cohen · 992 pages

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The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko

Scott Stambach · 336 pages

"The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko is comic and staggeringly tragic, often both in a single sentence ... A grittier, Eastern European, more grown-up The Fault in Our Stars."--Eowyn Ivey, author of The Snow Child. Seventeen-year-old Ivan Isaenko is a life-long resident of the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children in Belarus. Born deformed, yet mentally keen with a frighteningly sharp wit, strong

Disabled ProtagonistDark ComedyTragicLiterary Fiction
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The Bird Artist

Howard Norman · 289 pages

Howard Norman's The Bird Artist, the first book of his Canadian trilogy, begins in 1911. Its narrator, Fabian Vas is a bird artist: He draws and paints the birds of Witless Bay, his remote Newfoundland coastal village home. In the first paragraph of his tale Fabian reveals that he has murdered the village lighthouse keeper, Botho August. Later, he confesses who and what drove him to his crime--a m

InfidelityArtist ProtagonistLiterary FictionDark

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