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The Other City

Michal Ajvaz · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

Angela Carter · 224 pages

Desiderio, an employee of the city under a bizarre reality attack from Doctor Hoffman's mysterious machines, has fallen in love with Albertina, the Doctor's daughter. But Albertina, a beautiful woman made of glass, seems only to appear to him in his dreams. Meeting on his adventures a host of cannibals, centaurs and acrobats, Desiderio must battle against unreality and the warping of time and spac

Magical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary FictionAbsurdist Humor
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Sexing the Cherry

Jeanette Winterson · 167 pages

Set in 17th-century England this is a novel of magical fantasy that celebrates the power of imagination as it juggles the readers perception of history and reality. A novel about love and sex; lies and truths; and 12 dancing princesses who lived happily ever after, but not with their husbands.

Magical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary FictionAbsurdist Humor
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In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

Matt Bell · 312 pages

Escaping the busy confusion of his homeland and moving to an almost-uninhabited lake shore where he plans on living simply and raising a family, a man descends into rage, obsession, and an abstract sense of reality when his wife suffers multiple miscarriages.

Magical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary FictionMale Lead
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Baltasar and Blimunda

Jose Saramago · 351 pages

Magical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary FictionMale Lead
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All Fires the Fire

Julio Cortazar · 157 pages

Magical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary FictionAbsurdist Humor
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Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Salman Rushdie · 304 pages

"From Salman Rushdie, one of the great writers of our time, comes a spellbinding novel that blends history, mythology, and a timeless love story. A lush modern fairytale in which our world has been plunged into an age of unreason, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is a breathtaking achievement and an enduring testament to the power of storytelling" -- Provided by publisher. "Once u

Magical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary FictionSatire
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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 RealismLyrical ProseLiterary FictionAbsurdist Humor
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The Crane Wife

Patrick Ness · 310 pages

George Duncan is an American living and working in London. He is divorced, the owner of a small print shop, and lonelier than he realizes. One night he is woken by an extraordinary sound coming from his garden. Impossibly, a great white crane has tumbled to earth, shot through its wing by a giant arrow. Unexpectedly moved, George pulls out the arrow and frees the crane, and from the moment he watc

Magical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary FictionMale Lead
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The Girl With Glass Feet

Ali Shaw · 288 pages

Strange things are happening on the remote & snowbound archipelago of St Hauda's Land. Unusual winged creatures flit around icy bogland; albino animals hide themselves in the snow-glazed woods; jellyfish glow in the ocean's depths - and Ida MacLaird is slowly turning into glass.

Magical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary FictionMale Lead
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Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Haruki Murakami · 362 pages

From the bestselling author of Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-up Bird Chronicles comes this superb collection of twenty-four stories that generously expresses Murakami's mastery of the form. From the surreal to the mundane, these stories exhibit his ability to transform the full range of human experience in ways that are instructive, surprising, and relentlessly entertaining. Here are animated cr

Magical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary FictionMale Lead
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The Bedlam Stacks

Natasha Pulley · 352 pages

"In 1859, ex-East India Company smuggler Merrick Tremayne is trapped at home in Cornwall after sustaining an injury that almost cost him his leg. When the India Office recruits Merrick for an expedition to fetch quinine--essential for the treatment of malaria--from deep within Peru, he knows it's a terrible idea. Nearly every able-bodied expeditionary who's made the attempt has died, and he can ba

Magical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary FictionMale Lead
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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 RealismLyrical ProseLiterary FictionAbsurdist Humor
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Daytripper

Fabio Moon, Gabriel Ba · 247 pages

Presents key moments in the life of Brás de Oliva Domingos, a Brazilian writer and sometime journalist, and the son of a prominent author, as if each episode would turn out to be the day in which he was about to die.

Magical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary FictionMale Lead
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The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Neil Gaiman · 208 pages

A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the

Magical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary FictionMale Lead
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The Melancholy of Anatomy

Shelley Jackson · 179 pages

Magical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary FictionAbsurdist Humor
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The Book of Speculation

Erika Swyler · 376 pages

"Simon Watson, a young librarian on the verge of losing his job, lives alone on the Long Island Sound in his family home--a house, perched on the edge of a bluff, that is slowly crumbling toward the sea. His parents are long dead, his mother having drowned in the water his house overlooks. His younger sister, Enola, works for a traveling carnival reading tarot cards, and seldom calls. On a day in

Magical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary FictionMale Lead
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The City and Its Uncertain Walls

Haruki Marukami · 449 pages

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Touch

Alexi Zentner · 272 pages

In Sawgamet, a north woods boomtown gone bust, the cold of winter breaks the glass of the schoolhouse thermometer, and the dangers of working in the cuts are overshadowed by the mysteries and magic lurking in the woods. Stephen, a pastor, is at home on the eve of his mother's funeral, thirty years after the mythic summer his grandfather returned to the town in search of his beloved but long-dead w

Magical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary FictionMale Lead
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Cosmicomics

Italo Calvino · 153 pages

Enchanting stories about the evolution of the universe, with characters that are fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures. "Naturally, we were all there, - old Qfwfq said, - where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?"--Publisher description.

Magical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary FictionAbsurdist Humor
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The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart

Mathias Malzieu · 171 pages

Edinburgh, 1874. Born with a frozen heart, Jack is near death when his mother abandons him to the care of Dr. Madeleine--witch doctor, midwife, protector of orphans--who saves Jack by placing a cuckoo clock in his chest. And it is in her orphanage that Jack grows up among tear-filled flasks, eggs containing memories, and a man with a musical spine.

Magical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary FictionMale Lead
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Winter's Tale

Mark Helprin · 673 pages

Peter Lake--orphan, thief, mechanic extraordinaire--and Athansor, a flying Brooklyn milkhorse, establish a reign of love and justice in New York City in the year 2000.

Magical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary FictionMale Lead
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The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

Aimee Bender · 188 pages

A grief-stricken librarian decides to have sex with every man who enters her library. A half-mad, unbearably beautiful heiress follows a strange man home, seeking total sexual abandon: He only wants to watch game shows. A woman falls in love with a hunchback; when his deformity turns out to be a prosthesis, she leaves him. A wife whose husband has just returned from the war struggles with the hear

Magical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary FictionAbsurdist Humor
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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.

Magical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary FictionMale Lead
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The City and Its Uncertain Walls

村上春樹 · 416 pages

Magical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary FictionMale Lead

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