What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorFranny and Zooey
J.D. Salinger · 202 pages
Franny came out in The New Yorker in 1955, and was swiftly followed in 1957 by Zooey. Both stories are early entries in a narrative series about the Glasses, a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York. In the first story, Franny, a young college girl, arrives in New Haven (Yale) to be with her boyfriend for a football weekend, where they go to a café. The story is essentially an account of
Siddhartha
Hermann Hesse · 130 pages
Hermann Hesse wrote Siddhartha after he traveled to India in the 1910s. It tells the story of a young boy who travels the country in a quest for spiritual enlightenment in the time of Guatama Buddha. It is a compact, lyrical work, which reads like an allegory about the finding of wisdom.
Barabbas
Par Lagerkvist · 149 pages
Barabbas, the thief, was acquitted when Christ was crucified, but he cannot put the thought of that man out of his mind. He finds himself drawn to the Christians who remain.
Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy · 440 pages
Hardy's last work of fiction, Jude the Obscure is also one of his most gloomily fatalistic, depicting the lives of individuals who are trapped by forces beyond their control. Jude Fawley, a poor villager, wants to enter the divinity school at Christminster. Sidetracked by Arabella Donn, an earthy country girl who pretends to be pregnant by him, Jude marries her and is then deserted. He earns a liv
The Spire
William Golding · 224 pages
Told in a stream-of-consciousness narrative, this is a story of obsession. Against the advice of his builder, the Dean of Salisbury Cathedral, slowly dying from tuberculosis, plans the construction of a towering spire atop the cathedral as the culmination of his life’s work but becomes increasingly deranged as the construction faces constant problems due to the sheer grandiosity of the work.
Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
Evelyn Waugh · 370 pages
Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr
Miguel de Unamuno · 116 pages
Go Tell It on the Mountain
James Baldwin · 226 pages
In one of the greatest American classics, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce · 228 pages
Stephen Dedalus grows up in Dublin, feeling different from the other boys. His childhood and adolescence are shaped by bullying, his father's weaknesses and the growing realization that in order to make his way in the world he must reject a conventional life and boecome an artist. Penguin Popular Classics are the perfect introduction to the world-famous Penguin Classics series — which encompass
Wise Blood
Flannery O'Connor · 232 pages
Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his inborn, desperate fate. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Sabbath Lily. In an ironic, malicious gesture o
The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene · 306 pages
Focusing on a British police officer in an unnamed West African colony, this novel attempts to show, along with the socially restricted lives of colonists in Africa, the effects of sin on a devout catholic. After sending his unhappy wife to South Africa at her request the officer begins an affair with a young woman, a survivor of a shipwreck and now widowed but is unable to end the relationship wh
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe · 192 pages
Things Fall Apart is the debut novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, first published in 1958. It depicts pre-colonial life in the southeastern part of Nigeria and the arrival of Europeans during the late 19th century. It is seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, and one of the first to receive global critical acclaim. It is a staple book in schools throughout Africa and is widel
Rabbit, Run
John Updike · 307 pages
*Rabbit, Run* is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his—or any other—generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty—even, in
The Damnation of Theron Ware: Or Illumination
Harold Frederic, Stanton Garner · 352 pages
Theron Ware is a promising young Methodist pastor recently assigned to a congregation is small town in the Adirondack Mountains. His education has been limited and his experiences limited to church society and his strict enforcement of its norms. Theron has a number of experiences that cause him to begin to question the Methodist religion, his role as a minister and the existence of God. His "i
The Color Purple
Alice Walker · 274 pages
The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number seventeenth because of the sometimes explicit content, particula
The Magician of Lublin
Isaac Bashevis Singer · 246 pages
Half Jewish, half gentile, a freethinker who slips easily between worlds, Yasha has an observant Jewish wife, a gentile assistant who travels with him, and a mistress in every town. For Yasha is an escape artist, not only onstage but in life, a man who lives under the spell of his own hypnotic effect on women.
Bless Me, Ultima
Rudolfo Anaya · 252 pages
Ultima, a curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic, comes to Antonio Marez's New Mexico family when he is six years old, and she helps him discover himself in the magical secrets of the pagan past.
Silence
Shusaku Endo · 294 pages
An historical novel by Japanese writer Shusaku Endo telling the story of a young Portuguese missionary in 17th Century Japan. After being smuggled into the country a Jesuit missionary fresh from the seminary finds the Christian population have been forced underground by a government eager to stamp out foreign interference and values. Consequently he quickly finds himself a fugitive in a strange an
The Chosen
Chaim Potok · 284 pages
It's about two jewish boys from different jewish sects with very differing doctrine. The kids meet in the unlikely circumstance of a baseball game, and a terrible accident, that leads them to be lifelong friends
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne · 272 pages
The Screwtape Letters
C.S. Lewis · 158 pages
This Side of Paradise
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 256 pages
This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald's romantic and witty first novel, was written when the author was only twenty-three years old. This semi-autobiographical story of the handsome, indulged, and idealistic Princeton student Amory Blaine received critical raves and catapulted Fitzgerald to instant fame. Now, readers can enjoy the newly edited, authorized version of this early classic of the
Absolute Truths
Susan Howatch · 669 pages