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Nights at the Circus

Angela Carter · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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Rain Village

Carolyn Turgeon · 320 pages

Young Tessa is a diminutive girl, far too small for farm work and the object of ridicule by both her own family and the other children in their isolated Midwestern community. Her father seems to believe in nothing beyond his crops, certainly not education for his misfit daughter. When a mysterious, entrancing librarian comes to town, full of fabulous stories, earthy wisdom and potions for the love

Traveling CircusMagical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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Madeleine is Sleeping

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum · 276 pages

Traveling CircusMagical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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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 ProseWhimsicalLiterary Fiction
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Touba and the Meaning of Night

Shahrnush Parsipur · 367 pages

From a distinctly Iranian perspective, *Touba and the Meaning of Night* reveals ongoing tension between rationalism and mysticism, tradition and modernity, male and female, East and West. Speaking in an idiom unique to its author and indicative of a new tradition in Persian women's writing, the epic also defies Western stereotypes of Iranian women and Western expectations of Iranian literary form.

Magical RealismFeminismLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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Orlando

Virginia Woolf · 194 pages

In her most exuberant, most fanciful novel, Woolf has created a character liberated from the restraints of time and sex. Born in the Elizabethan Age to wealth and position, Orlando is a young nobleman at the beginning of the story-and a modern woman three centuries later.

FeminismMagical RealismLyrical ProseWhimsical
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Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Tom Robbins · 366 pages

The whooping crane rustlers are girls. Young girls. Cowgirls, as a matter of fact, all "bursting with dimples and hormones"--and the FBI has never seen anything quite like them. Yet their rebellion at the Rubber Rose Ranch is almost overshadowed by the arrival of the legendary Sissy Hankshaw, a white-trash goddess literally born to hitchhike, and the freest female of them all.Freedom, its prizes a

FeminismMagical RealismLiterary FictionWhimsical
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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 RealismFeminismLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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The House of the Spirits

Isabel Allende · 433 pages

"The unforgettable first novel that established Isabel Allende as one of the world's most gifted and imaginative storytellers. The House of the Spirits brings to life the triumphs and tragedies of three generations of the Trueba family. The patriarch Esteban is a volatile, proud man whose voracious pursuit of political power is tempered only by his love for his delicate wife, Clara, a woman with a

Magical RealismFeminismLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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The Weight of Feathers

Anna-Marie McLemore · 314 pages

Lace Paloma and Cluck Corbeau, from feuding families of traveling performers, fall in love.

Traveling CircusMagical RealismLyrical ProseFemale Lead
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The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye

A.S. Byatt · 277 pages

A collection of fairy tales for adults. The title novella is on a middle-aged Englishwoman attending a writers' conference in Turkey. She picks up an antique bottle and as she is washing it a djinn appears, offering to grant her three wishes. She asks for a younger body, then requests he make love to her.

Magical RealismLyrical ProseFeminismLiterary Fiction
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Her Body and Other Parties

Carmen Maria Machado · 248 pages

In this electric and provocative debut, Carmen Maria Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying di

Magical RealismFeminismLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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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

Traveling CircusMagical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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The Lonely Hearts Hotel

Heather O'Neill · 389 pages

The Lonely Hearts Hote is a love story with the power of legend. Two babies are abandoned in a Montreal orphanage in the winter of 1914. Before long, their talents emerge: Pierrot is a piano prodigy; Rose lights up even the dreariest room with her dancing and comedy. As they travel around the city performing clown routines, the children fall in love with each other and dream up a plan for the most

Traveling CircusMagical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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Something Wicked This Way Comes

Ray Bradbury · 293 pages

Few American novels written this century have endured in the heart and memory as has Ray Bradbury's unparalleled literary classic SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES. For those who still dream and remember, for those yet to experience the hypnotic power of its dark poetry, step inside. The show is about to begin. The carnival rolls in sometime after midnight, ushering in Halloween a week early. The

Traveling CircusMagical RealismLyrical ProseWhimsical
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Confession of the Lioness

Mia Couto · 208 pages

Magical RealismFeminismLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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Necklace of Kisses

Francesca Lia Block · 227 pages

Where were the kisses? Weetzie Bat wondered. And so begins a magical journey of discovery. As she turns forty and the relationship with her secret-agent lover-man Max falls apart, Weetzie packs up her lime green and bright orange bikini, orange suede sneakers, and Pucci tunic, jumps in her '65 mint green Thunderbird, and leaves.Weetzie finds herself at the enchanted pink hotel in sparkling Los Ang

Magical RealismWhimsicalLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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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 ProseWhimsicalLiterary Fiction
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The Museum of Extraordinary Things

Alice Hoffman · 384 pages

Coney Island, 1911: Coralie Sardie is the daughter of a self-proclaimed scientist and professor who acts as the impresario of The Museum of Extraordinary Things, a boardwalk freak show offering amazement and entertainment to the masses. An extraordinary swimmer, Coralie appears as the Mermaid alongside performers like the Wolfman, the Butterfly Girl, and a 100 year old turtle, in her father's "mus

Magical RealismTraveling CircusLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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Like Water for Chocolate

Laura Esquivel · 246 pages

Magical RealismLyrical ProseWhimsicalLiterary Fiction
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The Snow Child

Eowyn Ivey · 389 pages

Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-hai

Magical RealismLyrical ProseLiterary FictionWhimsical
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Bailey's Cafe

Gloria Naylor · 229 pages

"Welcome to Bailey's Cafe, the most mythically real eating place you've ever walked into. Presided over by Bailey himself and his helpmate, Nadine, it is a magnet that draws a wide variety of society's detritus, each with her own story to tell." "There is Sadie, whose addiction to alcohol is second only to her mania for cleanliness; and the oddly maternal Eve, whose bordello accepts only fresh flo

Magical RealismFeminismLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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Circus Mirandus

Cassie Beasley · 304 pages

Even though his awful Great-Aunt Gertrudis doesn’t approve, Micah believes in the stories his dying Grandpa Ephraim tells him of the magical Circus Mirandus: the invisible tiger guarding the gates, the beautiful flying birdwoman, and the magician more powerful than any other—the Man Who Bends Light. Finally, Grandpa Ephraim offers proof. The Circus is real. And the Lightbender owes Ephraim a mirac

Traveling CircusMagical RealismWhimsical
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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 FictionWhimsical
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The Melancholy of Anatomy

Shelley Jackson · 179 pages

Magical RealismFeminismLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
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