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The Recognitions

William Gaddis · 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
❤️

The Bonfire of the Vanities

Tom Wolfe · 690 pages

Dense ProseSprawling EpicDark ComedyEnsemble Cast
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Ulysses

James Joyce · 736 pages

Written over a seven-year period, from 1914 to 1921, this book has survived bowdlerization, legal action and controversy. The novel deals with the events of one day in Dublin, 16th June 1904, now known as "Bloomsday". The principal characters are Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly. Ulysses has been labelled dirty, blasphemous and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge Jo

Sprawling EpicDense ProseReligious IdentityClassics
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The Fountainhead

Ayn Rand · 727 pages

The Fountainhead is a 1943 novel by Ayn Rand. It was Rand's first major literary success and brought her fame and financial success. More than 6.5 million copies of the book have been sold worldwide.

Artist ProtagonistDense ProseSprawling EpicNew York City
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Dead Souls

Nikolai Gogol · 548 pages

Con ArtistsDense ProseDark ComedyEnsemble Cast
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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

Sprawling EpicDense ProseSatireEnsemble Cast
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V.

Thomas Pynchon · 492 pages

Having just been released from the Navy, Benny Profane is content to lead a slothful existence with his friends, where the only real ambition is to perfect the art of "schlemihlhood," or being a dupe, and where "responsibility" is a dirty word. Among his pals--called the Whole Sick Crew--is Slab, an artist who can't seem to paint anything other than cheese danishes. But Profane's life changes dram

Dense ProseSatireDark ComedySprawling Epic
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Middlemarch

George Eliot · 795 pages

Eliot’s epic of 19th century provincial social life, set in a fictitious Midlands town in the years 1830-32, has several interlocking storylines blended effortlessly together to form a fully coherent narrative. Its main themes are the status of women, social expectations and hypocrisy, religion, political reform and education. It has often been called the greatest novel in the English language.

Dense ProseSprawling EpicReligious IdentityEnsemble Cast
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Moby-Dick or, The Whale

Herman Melville · 420 pages

A classic of the sea, telling of the pursuit of Moby Dick, the white whale who defied capture.

Dense ProseSprawling EpicEnsemble CastLiterary Fiction
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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

SatireReligious IdentitySprawling EpicEnsemble Cast
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Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra · 503 pages

*Don Quijote de la Mancha* es una novela escrita por el español Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Publicada su primera parte con el título de *El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha* a comienzos de 1605, es la obra más destacada de la literatura española y una de las principales de la literatura universal. En 1615 apareció su continuación con el título de *Segunda parte del ingenioso caballero

Sprawling EpicSatireDense ProseEnsemble Cast
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Earthly Powers

Anthony Burgess · 656 pages

Anthony Burgess has long been regarded as one of the most original and daring writers of our time. In Earthly Powers, Burgess has writtena book rich with astonishing powers and surprising events.

Sprawling EpicDense ProseReligious IdentityLiterary Fiction
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One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel Garcia Marquez · 422 pages

Tells the story of the Buendia family, set against the background of the evolution and eventual decadence of a small South American town.

Sprawling EpicDense ProseDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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The Instructions

Adam Levin · 1,028 pages

Levin creates a world driven equally by moral fervor and slapstick comedy. Expelled from multiple Jewish day-schools for acts of violence and backtalk, Gurion ends up in the Cage, a special lockdown program for the most hopeless cases of Aptakisic Junior High. Separated from his scholarly followers, Gurion becomes a leader with righteous aims building to a revolution of troubling intensity.

Sprawling EpicSatireDense ProseReligious Identity
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The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt · 817 pages

"The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind....Donna Tartt has delivered an extraordinary work of fiction."--Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review Composed with the skills of a master, The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present day America and a drama of enthra

Con ArtistsDense ProseSprawling EpicArtist Protagonist
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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

Con ArtistsSatireEnsemble CastDark Comedy
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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

SatireReligious IdentityDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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Faggots

Larry Kramer · 384 pages

It is a portrayal of 1970s New York's very visible gay community in a time before AIDS. Graphically sexual and one of the best-selling gay novels of all time, Faggots is the story of Fred Lemish, who at thirty-nine has built up his body into a fatless state of being in Great Shape. Finally he is ready to find Mr. Right. But from the Everhard Baths, to the Pines on Fire Island, to that place of m

SatireEnsemble CastDark ComedyDense Prose
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The Golden Calf

Ilya Ilf, Evgeny Petrov · 340 pages

"Золотой телёнок" - продолжение легендарного романа "Двенадцать стульев", в котором по воле авторов "воскрес" их любимый герой - обаятельный и находчивый аферист Остап Бендер. На этот раз, мечтая взять разом пятьсот тысяч "на блюдечке с голубой каемочкой" и уехать в Рио-де-Жанейро, Бендер решает отобрать часть состояния у подпольного миллионера Корейко... Какой из "400 сравнительно честных способ

Con ArtistsSatireSprawling EpicClassics
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Michael Chabon · 639 pages

The novel begins in 1939 with the arrival of 19-year-old Josef "Joe" Kavalier as a refugee in New York City, where he comes to live with his 17-year-old cousin Sammy Klayman. Joe escaped from Prague with the help of his teacher Kornblum by hiding in a coffin along with the inanimate Golem of Prague, leaving the rest of his family, including his younger brother Thomas, behind. Besides having a shar

Artist ProtagonistSprawling EpicDense ProseLiterary Fiction
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The Vatican Cellars

Andre Gide · 237 pages

Con ArtistsSatireClassicsEnsemble Cast
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The Way We Live Now

Anthony Trollope · 502 pages

From a review of the Anthony Trollope canon in The Economist (2020/04/08 edition): *“The Way We Live Now” (1875) is as much a portrait of the last few decades as it is of the high Victorian age, and every bit as addictive as HBO’s hit series “Succession”. The novel’s anti-hero, Augustus Melmotte, is one of the great portraits of the businessman as ogre—a “horrid, big, rich scoundrel”, “a bloated

Sprawling EpicSatireDense ProseEnsemble Cast
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Underworld

Don DeLillo · 827 pages

Nick Shay and Kiara Sax knew each other once, intimately and they meet again in the Sahara desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, she is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence. Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep clear detail and in stadium sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the overarching conflict of Th

Sprawling EpicDense ProseEnsemble CastNew York City
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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

SatireEnsemble CastDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman

Louis de Bernieres · 394 pages

Despite Cardinal Guzman's efforts, life flourishes in Cochadebajo, with its improbable population of ex-soldiers, former guerrillas, unfrocked priests, reformed (though by no means inactive) prostitutes, a contingent of puzzled conquistadors, and an army of prodigious cats who smell of beer and dream of chocolate. Celebrating the ancient spirits of the land, and given to stupendous fiestas, Cochad

SatireReligious IdentityEnsemble CastDark Comedy

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