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🧲 Books like this

East Is East

T.C. Boyle · 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
❤️

Fear and Trembling

Amelie Nothomb · 138 pages

"According to ancient Japanese protocol, foreigners deigning to approach the emperor were to adopt a tone of fear and trembling. Terror and self-abasement conveyed respect. Amelie, our well-intentioned and eager young Western heroine in this new novel by Amelie Nothomb, goes to Japan to spend a year working at the Yumimoto Corporation. Returning to the land where she was born is the fulfillment of

Immigrant ProtagonistSatireJapanDark Comedy
❤️

The Satanic Verses

Salman Rushdie · 560 pages

One of the most controversial and acclaimed novels ever written, The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie’s best-known and most galvanizing book. Set in a modern world filled with both mayhem and miracles, the story begins with a bang: the terrorist bombing of a London-bound jet in midflight. Two Indian actors of opposing sensibilities fall to earth, transformed into living symbols of what is angelic

Immigrant ProtagonistSatireDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
❤️

White Teeth

Zadie Smith · 480 pages

One of the most talked about fictional debuts of recent years, WHITE TEETH is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike. Dealing - among many other things - with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle, it is a life-affirming, riotous

Immigrant ProtagonistSatireLiterary FictionDark Comedy
❤️

The Making of Zombie Wars

Aleksandar Hemon · 307 pages

"The seriously, seriously funny roller-coaster ride of sex and violence that Aleksandar Hemon has long promised Script idea #142: Aliens undercover as cabbies abduct the fiance;e of the main character, who has to find a way to a remote planet to save her. Title: Love Trek. Script idea #185: Teenager discovers his girlfriend's beloved grandfather was a guard in a Nazi death camp. The boy's grandpar

Immigrant ProtagonistSatireDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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Interior Chinatown

Charles Yu · 288 pages

SatireImmigrant ProtagonistDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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Galápagos

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. · 295 pages

Observed by a ghost of the Vietnam War for one million years, the descendants of survivors of a cruise to the Galapagos Archipielago prove Darwin's Theory of Evolution. The ghost of a shipbuilder tells the story of an ill-fated cruise to the Galapagos Islands.

IslandSatireDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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Welcome to Braggsville

T. Geronimo Johnson · 384 pages

"From the PEN/Faulkner finalist and critically acclaimed author of Hold it 'Til it Hurts comes a dark and socially provocative southern-fried comedy about four liberal UC Berkeley students who stage a mock lynching during a Civil War reenactment--a fierce, funny, tragic work from a bold new writer"--

SatireAmerican SouthDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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The Sympathizer

Viet Thanh Nguyen · 384 pages

Follows a Viet Cong agent as he spies on a South Vietnamese army general and his compatriots as they start a new life in 1975 Los Angeles.

Immigrant ProtagonistSatireDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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Pygmy

Chuck Palahniuk · 241 pages

The Manchurian Candidate meets South Park--Chuck Palahniuk's finest novel since the generation-defining Fight Club."Begins here first account of operative me, agent number 67 on arrival Midwestern American airport greater _____ area. Flight _____. Date _____. Priority mission top success to complete. Code name: Operation Havoc."Thus speaks Pygmy, one of a handful of young adults from a totalitaria

Immigrant ProtagonistSatireDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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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

Immigrant ProtagonistDark ComedyLiterary FictionWriter Protagonist
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Hell

Yasutaka Tsutsui · 190 pages

JapanSatireDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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Absurdistan

Gary Shteyngart · 333 pages

"Absurdistan is not just a hilarious novel, but a record of a particular peak in the history of human folly. No one is more capable of dealing with the transition from the hell of socialism to the hell of capitalism in Eastern Europe than Shteyngart, the great-great grandson of one Nikolai Gogol and the funniest foreigner alive."--Aleksandar HemonFrom the critically acclaimed, bestselling author o

Immigrant ProtagonistSatireLiterary FictionDark Comedy
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Wolf Whistle

Lewis Nordan · 290 pages

Based on the author's childhood memories of the murder of Emmett Till, the story of a Mississippi white-trash girl who teaches fourth grade at the Arrow Catcher Elementary School is the story of righteous racism and violence and the 1950s American Southern ethic at work.

SatireAmerican SouthDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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A Confederacy of Dunces

John Kennedy Toole · 400 pages

A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero is one Ignatius J. Reilly, "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures."

American SouthSatireDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

Mark Dunn · 208 pages

An epistolary novel set on a fictional island off the South Carolina coastline, Ella Minnow Pea brings readers to the hometown of Nevin Nollop, inventor of the pangram "The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog." Deified for his achievement in life, Nevin has been honored in death with a monument featuring his famous phrase. One day, however, the letter Z falls from the monument, and some of the

SatireIslandDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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A Tale for the Time Being

Ruth Ozeki · 432 pages

In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying. But before she ends it all, she plans to document the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century. A diary is Nao's only solace. Across the Pacific a novelist living on a remote island discovers artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchb

JapanImmigrant ProtagonistLiterary FictionWriter Protagonist
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Two Caravans

Marina Lewycka · 314 pages

Immigrant ProtagonistDark ComedySatireLiterary Fiction
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Worst. Person. Ever.

Douglas Coupland · 317 pages

A razor-sharp portrait of a morally bankrupt and gleefully wicked modern man, Worst. Person. Ever. is Douglas Coupland's gloriously filthy, side-splittingly funny and unforgettable new novel. Meet Raymond Gunt. A decent chap who tries to do the right thing. Or, to put it another way, the worst person ever: a foul-mouthed, misanthropic cameraman, trailing creditors, ex-wives and unhappy homeless pe

IslandSatireLiterary FictionDark Comedy
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England, England

Julian Barnes · 272 pages

A brilliant piece of satire' ObserverAs every schoolboy knows, you can fit the whole of England on the Isle of White. Grotesque, visionary tycoon Sir Jack Pitman takes the saying literally and does exactly that. He constructs on the island 'The Project', a vast heritage centre containing everything 'English', from Big Ben to Stonehenge, from Manchester United to the white Cliffs of Dover. The proj

IslandSatireDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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Pachinko

Min Jin Lee · 560 pages

In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision

Immigrant ProtagonistJapanLiterary FictionRacism
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The Wasp Factory

Iain Banks · 184 pages

IslandDark ComedyLiterary FictionSatire
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Corelli's Mandolin

Louis de Bernieres · 437 pages

The Greek island of Cephallonia - peaceful, remote, famed for its beauty, its light, its mythic history - and only just beginning to enter the twentieth century when the tide of World War II rolls onto its shores. This is the setting for Louis de Bernieres's lyrical, heartbreaking, and hilarious chronicle of the days and nights of the island's inhabitants over fifty tumultuous years. "It was an i

SatireDark ComedyIslandLiterary Fiction
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Don't Stop the Carnival

Herman Wouk · 384 pages

An intereating account of living in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, in the 1960s.

Dark ComedyIslandSatireLiterary Fiction
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Yellowface

R F Kuang · 331 pages

White lies. Dark humor. Deadly consequences… Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn’t write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American—in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from R.F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel. Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But At

SatireDark ComedyLiterary FictionRacism

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