What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorLife 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.
Memoirs of a Polar Bear
Yoko Tawada · 256 pages
"The Memoirs of a Polar Bear is a novel that stars three generations of talented writers and performers who happen to be polar bears. The Memoirs of a Polar Bear has in spades what Rivka Galchen hailed in The New Yorker as "Yoko Tawada's magnificent strangeness"--Tawada is an author like no other. Three generations (grandmother, mother, son) of polar bears are famous, both as circus performers and
The Book of Chameleons
Jose Eduardo Agualusa · 193 pages
Felix Ventura is a man with an unusual occupation. If your lineage isn't sufficiently distinguished, he'll change that for you. If your family history isn't quite as glorious as you'd like, he can make you a new one. Felix Ventura is a seller of pasts.
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
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore
Benjamin Hale · 578 pages
Bruno Littlemore, the world's first chimpanzee with the ability to speak, tells the story of primatologist Lydia Littlemore's efforts to educate him; his untimely outbursts, which ultimately cost Lydia her job; and the unforgettable road trip that follows.
The White Bone
Barbara Gowdy · 330 pages
If, as many recent nonfiction bestsellers have revealed, animals possess emotions and awareness, they must have stories. In The White Bone, a novel imagined entirely from the perspective of African elephants, the most splendid of nature's creatures, Barbara Gowdy creates a world whole and separate that yet illuminates our own. For years, young Mud and her family have roamed the high grasses, swam
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
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
Flush
Virginia Woolf · 163 pages
A wonderfully creative and whimsical book, the biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel. After spending his youth in the country, Flush was given to the invalid poet Elizabeth Barrett and learned to live a quiet live as her companion. Flush is jealous when Robert Browning captures Miss Barrett's attention, but eventually accepts him and is wildly happy when they all move to Italy.
Only the Animals
Ceridwen Dovey · 252 pages
"The souls of ten animals caught up in human conflicts over the last century, and connected to both famous and little-known writers in surprising ways, tell their astonishing stories of life and death"--
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Diaz · 352 pages
Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he's sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J. R. R. Tolkien and he keeps falling hopelessly in love. Poor Oscar may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku - the curse that has haunted his family for generations. With dazzling energy and insight Díaz immerses us
Timbuktu
Paul Auster · 181 pages
Timbuktu is a 1999 novella by Paul Auster. It is about the life of a dog, Mr Bones, who is struggling to come to terms with the fact that his homeless master is dying. The story, set in the early 1990s, is told through the eyes of Mr Bones, who, although not anthropomorphised, has an internal monologue in English.
Faithful Ruslan
Georgi Vladimov · 216 pages
"Unavailable for over twenty years, this gripping novel--first circulated anonymously in samizdat and now widely hailed as one of the most important works of the Soviet dissident era--tells the story of the guard dogs left behind at an abandoned prison camp in the Siberian gulag, its prisoners now freed. Astonishingly, it is told entirely from the perspective of one of the dogs."--Page 4 of cover.
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands
Jorge Amado · 553 pages
*Dona Flor* is (literally) an adorable woman—with a body made for love, a mind of her own, a cozy disposition, a witty tongue, a kissable face, high moral principles— and she can cook, too. (Her cooking school is all the rage in Salvador.) One wants her to have everything. One wants her to escape from her monumental dragon of a mother into the arms of the best of husbands. One wants her to hav
I Am a Cat
Soseki Natsume · 431 pages
Written over the course of 1904 through 1906, Soseki's comic masterpiece, I Am a Cat, satirizes the follies of upper-middle-class Japanese society during the Meiji era. With acerbic wit and sardonic perspective, it follows the whimsical adventures of a world-weary stray kitten who comments on the follies and foibles of the people around him. The New Yorker called it "a nonchalant string of anecdot
Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife
Sam Savage · 174 pages
*Firmin* is an autobiography of a rat born, "with my eyes wide open", as the 13th child to an alcoholic mother rat with 12 nipples in the basement of a Boston bookshop in Scollay Square on November 9, 1960. As a result, Firmin the runt puts off the pangs of hunger by consuming *Finnegans Wake,* his initial bedding, and acquires the ability to read and think symbolically.
Come, Thou Tortoise
Jessica Grant · 422 pages
Audrey (a.k.a. Oddly) Flowers is living quietly in Oregon with Winnifred, her tortoise, when she finds out her dear father has been knocked into a coma back in Newfoundland. Despite her fear of flying, she goes to him, but not before she reluctantly dumps Winnifred with her unreliable friends. Poor Winnifred. When Audrey disarms an Air Marshal en route to St. John’s we begin to realize there’s s
Yiddish for Pirates
Gary Barwin · 346 pages
"Set in the years around 1492, 'Yiddish for Pirates' tells the story of Moishe, a young man who, enchanted by maps and seeking adventure, leaves the shtetl to join a ship's crews. There he meets Aaron, our ribald yet philosophical parrot narrator who becomes his near-constant companion. With a beakful of Yiddish jokes, this wisecracking bird guides us through a swashbuckling world of exploits on t
The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq
Hassan Blasim · 208 pages