AmongReaders.com Add a tiny library
📚 AmongReaders — track what you read, talk chapter by chapter without spoilers, and read with friends. Free.Join AmongReadersSign in

🧲 Books like this

A Permanent Member of the Family

Russell Banks · 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
❤️

Beginners

Raymond Carver · 173 pages

The unedited version of 'What we talk about when we talk about Love" before it would be cut by Carver's editor and mentor.

Short StoriesLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

David Foster Wallace · 273 pages

David Foster Wallace made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. In his exuberantly acclaimed collection, BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN, he combined hilarity and an escalating disquiet in stories that astonish, entertain, and expand our ideas of the pleasures that fiction can afford.

Short StoriesLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️

The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg: Stories

Deborah Eisenberg · 986 pages

Presents a collection of short stories that portray contemporary American life.

Short StoriesLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️

The Safety of Objects

A.M. Homes · 178 pages

Short StoriesLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

Danielle Evans · 240 pages

Fearless, funny, and ultimately tender, Evans's stories offer a bold new perspective on the experience of being young and African-American or mixed-race in modern-day America.

Short StoriesLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️

There's Something I Want You to Do

Charles Baxter · 230 pages

"The ten inter-related stories in [this collection] are held together by a surreally intricate web of cause and effect--one that slowly ensnares both fictional bystanders and ... readers"--Dust jacket flap.

Short StoriesLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️

Minimum of Two

Tim Winton · 153 pages

Short StoriesLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️

You Have a Friend In 10A

Maggie Shipstead · 272 pages

Short StoriesLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️

In the Country

Mia Alvar · 347 pages

"Mia Alvar's ... debut gives us a vivid ... picture of the Filipino diaspora: exiles and emigrants and wanderers uprooting their families to begin new lives in the Middle East and America--and, sometimes, turning back"--

Short StoriesLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️

Hellgoing

Lynn Coady · 223 pages

"With astonishing range and depth, Lynn Coady gives us nine unforgettable new stories. A young nun charged with taking an anorexic out of her religious fanaticism toys with the thin distance between practicality and blashphemy. A strange bond between a teacher and a schoolgirl takes on ever deeper, and stranger, shapes as the years progress. A bride-to-be with a penchant for nocturnal bondage can'

Short StoriesLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️

Honeydew

Edith Pearlman · 278 pages

Presents a collection of short stories full of teenage drug use, anorexia, cruise-ship stowaways, and a widowed nail tech who finds herself falling for a client.

Short StoriesLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️

A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You

Amy Bloom · 181 pages

"Amy Bloom gets more meaning into individual sentences than most authors manage in whole books."--The New YorkerA great short story has the emotional depth and intensity of a poem and the wholeness and breadth of a novel. Amy Bloom writes great short stories. Her first collection, Come to Me, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and here she deepens and extends her mastery of the form. R

Short StoriesLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️

We Live in Water

Jess Walter · 177 pages

"We Live in Water, the first collection of short fiction from New York Times bestselling author Jess Walter, is a suite of diverse, often comic stories about personal struggle and diminished dreams, all of them marked by the wry wit and generosity of spirit that has made him one of our most talked-about writers. In "Thief," a blue-collar worker turns unlikely detective to find out which of his kid

Short StoriesLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️

I Wish Someone Were Waiting for Me Somewhere

Anna Gavalda · 352 pages

"With arresting naturalism and a lively variety of perspectives, Gavalda writes simply of human beings longing to connect. Gavalda, "a gifted literary stylist" (Vogue), has a knack for capturing our inner as well as our outer dialogues with perfect pitch, evoking reflection, pain, and laughter in equal measure. The stories in I Wish Someone Were Waiting for Me Somewhere are as wicked as they are i

Short StoriesLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️

Blueprints for Building Better Girls: Fiction

Elissa Schappell · 304 pages

"From the acclaimed author of Use Me, eight provocative and darkly funny linked stories that explore the commonly shared, but rarely spoken of experiences that build girls into women and women into wives and mothers, mapping America's shifting cultural landscape from the late 1970s to the present day"--

Short StoriesLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️

The Book of Other People

Zadie Smith · 304 pages

The Book of Other People is just that: a book of other people. Open its covers and you'll make a whole host of new acquaintances. Nick Hornby and Posy Simmonds present the ever-diverging writing life of Jamie Johnson; Hari Kunzru twitches open his net curtains to reveal the irrepressible Magda Mandela (at 4:30a.m., in her lime-green thong); Jonathan Safran Foer's Grandmother offers cookies to swee

Short StoriesLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️

The High Places: Stories

Fiona McFarlane · 280 pages

"What a terrible thing at a time like this: to own a house, and the trees around it. Janet sat rigid in her seat. The plane lifted from the city and her house fell away, consumed by the other houses. Janet worried about her own particular garden and her emptied refrigerator and her lamps that had been timed to come on at six. So begins "Mycenae," a story in The High Places, Fiona McFarlane's first

Short StoriesLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️

Half in Love: Stories

Maile Meloy · 176 pages

Short StoriesLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️

How We Are Hungry

Dave Eggers · 224 pages

Short StoriesLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️

Always Happy Hour: Stories

Mary Miller · 244 pages

"Acerbic and ruefully funny, [this book] weaves tales of young women-- deeply flawed and intensely real-- who struggle to get out of their own way. They love to drink and have sex; they make bad decisions with men who either love them too much or too little; and they haunt a Southern terrain of gas stations, public pools, and dive bars. Though each character shoulders the weight of her own bagga

Short StoriesCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary Fiction
❤️

Werewolves In Their Youth

Michael Chabon · 212 pages

Le divorce, l'abandon et la nostalgie sont au coeur des neufs nouvelles qui composent ce recueil, excepté la dernière qui fait un clin d'oeil à la "pulp fiction". L'auteur choisit le ton de la comédie et de l'ironie mordante pour ces récits.

Short StoriesLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️

Selected Stories

Andre Dubus · 496 pages

Short StoriesLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️

Arranged Marriage: Stories

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni · 320 pages

Short StoriesLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️
Short StoriesLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction

In the works

To be read SpinnerCan’t pick your next book? Spin your Want to read.Blind date with a bookPick a mood, unwrap a surprise.Add a tiny librarySnap a little free library and its books.