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A Minor Apocalypse

Tadeusz Konwicki · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess · 188 pages

A Clockwork Orange is a dystopian satirical black comedy novel by English writer Anthony Burgess, published in 1962. It is set in a near-future society that has a youth subculture of extreme violence. The teenage protagonist, Alex, narrates his violent exploits and his experiences with state authorities intent on reforming him. The book is partially written in a Russian-influenced argot called "Na

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Mother Night

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. · 202 pages

Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense. American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of gray with a verdict that will haunt us all.

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Survivor

Chuck Palahniuk · 289 pages

Tender Branson, the last surviving member of the Creedish death cult, has commandeered a Boeing 747, emptied of passengers, in order to tell his story to the plane’s black box before it crashes. Brought up by the repressive cult and, like all Creedish younger sons, hired out as a domestic servant, Tender finds himself suddenly famous when his fellow cult members all commit suicide. As media messia

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Forrest Gump

Winston Groom · 240 pages

A man named Forest Gump sits at a bus stop and tells everyone about his life. It starts in a doctor's office when he gets leg braces. Then he goes to school where he meets Jenny, and his entire school career and football. Then it goes on to college football. then to Vietnam where he meets bubba. then bubba dies and forest saves a whole platoon. After the war forest gets a medal of honor and runs a

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The Orphan Master's Son

Adam Johnson · 456 pages

An epic novel and a thrilling literary discovery, The Orphan Master’s Son follows a young man’s journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea. Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother—a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang—and an influential father who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. There the boy is giv

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The Trial

Franz Kafka · 256 pages

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The Zero

Jess Walter · 352 pages

Can a man ever realize that he's been the villain of his own story?The Zero is a groundbreaking novel, a darkly comic snapshot of our times that is already being compared to the works of Franz Kafka and Joseph Heller.From its opening pages—when hero cop Brian Remy wakes up to find he's shot himself in the head—novelist Jess Walter takes us on a harrowing tour of a city and a country shuddering thr

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Omon Ra

Victor Pelevin · 153 pages

Omon Ra, by the gifted Russian writer Victor Pelevin, is a pointed, dead-on-satire of the now-defunct Soviet space program, and a moving account of a cosmonaut's coming-of-age. The story is told in the beguiling voice of its young protagonist, Omon Ra, whose odd name combines a term for the Soviet special forces with the name of the sun god in Egyptian mythology. Ever since he was a boy, Omon has

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Tenth of December

George Saunders · 272 pages

In the taut opener, “Victory Lap,” a boy witnesses the attempted abduction of the girl next door and is faced with a harrowing choice: Does he ignore what he sees, or override years of smothering advice from his parents and act? In “Home,” a combat-damaged soldier moves back in with his mother and struggles to reconcile the world he left with the one to which he has returned. And in the title stor

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Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace · 1,088 pages

A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connec

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The Nuclear Age

Tim O'Brien · 312 pages

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The Man Who Spoke Snakish

Andrus Kivirahk · 400 pages

Set in a fantastical version of medieval Europe, this book follows a young boy, Leemer, who lives with his hunter-gatherer family in the forest and is the last speaker of the ancient tongue of Snakish, a language that allows its speakers to command all animals.

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The Investigation

Philippe Claudel · 236 pages

The Investigator is despatched to a provincial town to find out the truth behind a disturbing spate of suicides amongst employees of the Firm. But from the moment he steps off the train, he finds himself in a world that is alien, unrecognisable, and diabolically complex. From the hostile weather and the fickle hospitality at Hotel Hope to the town's bewildering inhabitants, everything seems to be

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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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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

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Yellow Blue Tibia

Adam Roberts · 326 pages

A group of Soviet authors are shocked to watch the science fiction story they wrote 40 years ago slowly come to life, beginning with Chernobyl.

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Dead Souls

Nikolai Gogol · 548 pages

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The Joke

Milan Kundera · 288 pages

"All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, a quarter century after The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Kundera 's work) as what it truly is: gre

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The Dice Man

Luke Rhinehart · 431 pages

The cult classic that can still change your life...Let the dice decide! This is the philosophy that changes the life of bored psychiatrist Luke Rhinehart - and in some ways changes the world as well. Because once you hand over your life to the dice, anything can happen. Entertaining, humorous, scary, shocking, subversive, The Dice Man is one of the cult bestsellers of our time.

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The Sellout

Paul Beatty · 304 pages

A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's *The Sellout* showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality―the black Chinese restaurant. Born

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Naked Lunch

William S. Burroughs · 304 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

SatireLiterary FictionAbsurdist HumorSurveillance State
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