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🧲 Books like this

Cosmicomics

Italo Calvino · 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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❤️

Willful Creatures

Aimee Bender · 224 pages

Aimee Bender's Willful Creatures conjures a fantastical world in which authentic love blooms. This is a place WHERE a boy with keys for fingers is a hero, a woman's children are potatoes, and a little boy with an iron for a head is born to a family of pumpkin heads. With her singular mix of surrealism, musical prose, and keenly felt emotion, Bender once again proves herself to be a masterful chron

Absurdist HumorMagical RealismShort StoriesWhimsical
❤️

Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions

Neil Gaiman · 352 pages

"En las manos maestras de Neil Gaiman, la magia es mucho más que un mero juego de engaños. La destreza y el poder de invención de este gran fabulador transforman el entorno cotidiano en un mundo hechizado por sucesos sombríos y extraños, en el que una anciana puede comprar el Santo Grial en una tienda de segunda mano, unos asesinos se anuncian en los clasificados de un periódico bajo la rúbrica ±C

Magical RealismShort StoriesAbsurdist HumorWhimsical
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Still Life with Woodpecker

Tom Robbins · 277 pages

- List item Still Life with Woodpecker is a sort of a love story that takes place inside a pack of Camel cigarettes. It reveals the purpose of the moon, explains the difference between criminals and outlaws, examines the conflict between social activism and romantic individualism, and paints a portrait of contemporary society that includes powerful Arabs, exiled royalty, and pregnant cheerleade

Absurdist HumorWhimsicalMagical RealismLyrical Prose
❤️

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.

Magical RealismShort StoriesAbsurdist HumorWhimsical
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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

Absurdist HumorShort StoriesMagical RealismLiterary Fiction
❤️

Museum of the Weird

Amelia Gray · 171 pages

Magical RealismShort StoriesAbsurdist HumorWhimsical
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Pretty Monsters: Stories

Kelly Link · 408 pages

Kelly Link has lit up adult literary publishing—and Viking is honored to publish her first YA story collection. Through the lens of Link’s vivid imagination, nothing is what it seems, and everything deserves a second look. From the multiple award-winning “The Faery Handbag,” in which a teenager’s grandmother carries an entire village (or is it a man-eating dog?) in her handbag, to the near-future

Magical RealismShort StoriesAbsurdist HumorWhimsical
❤️

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

Magical RealismAbsurdist HumorLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
❤️

Foam of the Daze: L'Ecume Des Jours

Boris Vian · 207 pages

The world of Mood Indigo is a stained-glass cartoon kind of a place, where the piano dispenses cocktails, the kitchen mice dance to the sound of sunbeams, and the air is three parts jazz. Colin is a wealthy young aristocrat, a slim, innocent creature who loves easily. The instant he sees Chloe, bass drums thump inside his shirt, and soon the two are married. Typically generous, Colin gives a quart

Magical RealismWhimsicalAbsurdist HumorLiterary Fiction
🙂

The Barnum Museum

Steven Millhauser · 237 pages

Magical RealismShort StoriesLyrical ProseWhimsical
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Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories

Kevin Wilson · 208 pages

Kevin Wilson's characters inhabit a world that moves seamlessly between the real and the imagined, the mundane and the fantastic. "Grand Stand-In" is narrated by an employee of a Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider -- a company that supplies "stand-ins" for families with deceased, ill, or just plain mean grandparents. And in "Blowing Up On the Spot," a young woman works sorting tiles at a Scrabbl

Magical RealismShort StoriesAbsurdist HumorWhimsical
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The Cyberiad

Stanislaw Lem · 295 pages

OMG I can't believe there's no description for this - but then I can because this book defies description. Stanislaw Lem is a genius and your minds will be expanded to bursting when you begin this journey into a world where machines are the dominant species. It is hugely entertaining, inventive, witty, and above all, laugh out loud funny. The book concerns two "constructors" - Trurl and Klaupaciou

Absurdist HumorWhimsicalShort StoriesScience Fiction
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All Fires the Fire

Julio Cortazar · 157 pages

Magical RealismShort StoriesLyrical ProseAbsurdist Humor
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Absurdist HumorShort StoriesMagical RealismWhimsical
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Light Boxes

Shane Jones · 158 pages

After a god-like spirit punishes a town for flying by making it perpetually live out its days in the month of February, children go missing and adults fall into deep depression, but a small contingent of townsfolk fight back, waging war on February.

Magical RealismAbsurdist HumorWhimsicalLyrical Prose
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May We Shed These Human Bodies

Amber Sparks · 150 pages

Magical RealismShort StoriesLyrical ProseWhimsical
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Einstein's Dreams

Alan Lightman · 192 pages

PhysicsMagical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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Nights at the Circus

Angela Carter · 294 pages

American journalist Jack Walser travels with an enchanted circus that feature literate chimpanzees, tragic clowns, idealist brigands, a structuralist Siberian shaman, and a six-foot, two-inch blond aerialist who is part swan and part woman.

Magical RealismWhimsicalLyrical ProseAbsurdist Humor
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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

Magical RealismAbsurdist HumorWhimsicalLiterary Fiction
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Daydreams of Angels

Heather O'Neill

Heather O'Neill's distinctive style and voice fill these charming, sometimes dark, always beguiling stories. From "The Robot Baby," in which we discover what happens when a robot feels emotion for the very first time, to "Heaven," about a grandfather who died for a few minutes when he was nine and visited the pearly gates, to "The Little Wolf-Boy of Northern Quebec," in which untamed children run

Magical RealismShort StoriesAbsurdist HumorWhimsical
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Eyes of a Blue Dog

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Magical RealismShort StoriesLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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The Melancholy of Anatomy

Shelley Jackson · 179 pages

Magical RealismShort StoriesLyrical ProseAbsurdist Humor
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The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory

Jorge Luis Borges · 167 pages

Magical RealismShort StoriesAbsurdist HumorLiterary Fiction
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The Fictions Of Bruno Schulz

Bruno Schulz · 304 pages

Magical RealismShort StoriesLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction

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