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Ethan Frome and Other Short Fiction

Edith Wharton · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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Kolyma Tales

Varlam Shalamov · 222 pages

Snow and IceBleakSparse ProseTragic
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To Build a Fire

Jack London · 48 pages

A man travels across the Yukon with only a dog as his companion. He believes he has all the skill and preparations ready to survive it.

Snow and IceTragicBleakSparse Prose
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Doctor Zhivago

Boris Pasternak · 542 pages

***This epic tale about the effects of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath on a bourgeois family was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987.*** One of the results of its publication in the West was Pasternak's complete rejection by Soviet authorities; when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 he was compelled to decline it. ***The book quickly became an international be

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A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway · 332 pages

A Farewell to Arms is about a love affair between the expatriate American Henry and Catherine Barkley against the backdrop of the First World War, cynical soldiers, fighting and the displacement of populations. The publication of A Farewell to Arms cemented Hemingway's stature as a modern American writer, became his first best-seller, and is described by biographer Michael Reynolds as "the premier

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Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert · 332 pages

Charles Bovary, médecin de campagne, veuf d'une mégère, fait lors d'une tournée la rencontre du père Rouault et de sa fille, Emma. Après leur mariage, Emma reste insatisfaite et rêve d'une nouvelle vie. Son premier amant lui donne le goût du luxe et fait miroiter un avenir à deux avant de l'abandonner. Une fois remise, Emma continue à faire de folles dépenses, qui peu à peu la mènent à la ruine et

TragicMarriage in TroubleBleakForbidden Love
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The Plague

Albert Camus · 278 pages

The Plague (French: La Peste) is a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1947, that tells the story of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. It asks a number of questions relating to the nature of destiny and the human condition. The characters in the book, ranging from doctors to vacationers to fugitives, all help to show the effects the plague has on a populace.

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Stoner

John Williams · 278 pages

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Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys · 189 pages

Jean Rhys's reputation was made upon publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of citsion's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre". A sensual and protected young woman, the narrator grows up in the lush, natural world of the Caribbean. She is sold into marriage to the cold-hearted and prideful R

TragicMarriage in TroubleBleakClassics
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The Story of an Hour

Kate Chopin · 34 pages

Marriage in TroubleSparse ProseShort StoriesTragic
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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 174 pages

First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Iv

Snow and IceBleakSparse ProseClassics
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Cities of the Plain

Cormac McCarthy · 291 pages

A Texas cowboy falls in love with a Mexican prostitute, only to discover he has a rival, her pimp. The pimp refuses to let her go because he will lose money and the stage is set for a violent confrontation.

TragicBleakForbidden LoveSparse Prose
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Snow Angels

Stewart O'Nan · 320 pages

Western Pennsylvania, 1974. On a snowy winter afternoon, the winter of his parents' breakup, Arthur Parkinson's high school band practice is interrupted by the sound of gunshots. Too close for deer hunting, it is the sound of the murder of Annie Marchand. Once Arthur's babysitter, and the object of his childhood admiration, Annie is a young woman for whom life didn't turn out quite right, who coul

TragicBleakSnow and IceMarriage in Trouble
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The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka · 95 pages

Metamorphosis (German: Die Verwandlung) is a novella written by Franz Kafka which was first published in 1915. One of Kafka's best-known works, Metamorphosis tells the story of salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself inexplicably transformed into a huge insect (German: ungeheueres Ungeziefer, lit. "monstrous vermin") and subsequently struggles to adjust to this new condition.

TragicBleakSparse ProseClassics
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Under the Volcano

Malcolm Lowry · 375 pages

It is the Day of the Dead. The fiesta in full swing. In the shadow of Popocatepeti ragged children beg coins to buy skulls made of chocolate...and the ugly pariah dogs roam the streets. Geoffrey Firmin, HM ex-consul, is drowning himself in liquor and Mescal, while his ex-wife and half brother look on powerless to help him. As the day wears on, it becomes apparent that Geoffrey must die. It is his

TragicBleakMarriage in TroubleClassics
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The Pearl

John Steinbeck · 118 pages

Based on a Mexican folktale, this is the story of a great pearl found by a poor fisherman, the sorrow it brought to his family, and how it was lost again.

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Close Range

Annie Proulx · 287 pages

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes comes one of the most celebrated short-story collections of our time. Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in these breathtaking tales of loneliness, quick violence, and the wrong kinds of love. Each of the stunning portraits in Close Range reveals characters fierc

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The Family of Pascual Duarte

Camilo Jose Cela, Anthony Kerrigan · 198 pages

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The Spy Who Came In from the Cold

John le Carre · 240 pages

*The Spy Who Came in from the Cold* is a 1963 Cold War spy novel by the British author John le Carré. It depicts Alec Leamas, a British intelligence officer, being sent to East Germany as a faux defector to sow disinformation about a powerful East German intelligence officer. It serves as a sequel to le Carré's previous novels *Call for the Dead* and *A Murder of Quality,* which also featured the

BleakSparse ProseTragicClassics
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All Quiet on the Western Front

Erich Maria Remarque · 236 pages

This is the testament of Paul Bäumer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army of World War I. These young men become enthusiastic soldiers, but their world of duty, culture, and progress breaks into pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches. Through years of vivid horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the hatred that meaninglessly pits young men of the s

TragicBleakSparse ProseClassics
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Master and Man

Leo Tolstoy · 104 pages

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Nineteen Eighty-Four

George Orwell

A great modern classic of Negative Utopia, with chilling implications for our own time.

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The Easter Parade

Richard Yates · 225 pages

Even as little girls, Sarah and Emily are very different from each other. Emily looks up to her wiser and more stable older sister and is jealous of her relationship with their absent father, and later her seemingly golden marriage. The path she chooses for herself is less safe and conventional and her love affairs never really satisfy her. Although the bond between them endures, gradually the dis

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The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories

Charlotte Perkins Gilman · 70 pages

Marriage in TroubleTragicShort StoriesClassics
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Thérèse Raquin

Emile Zola · 253 pages

Thérèse Raquin [teʁɛz ʁakɛ̃] is an 1868 novel by French writer Émile Zola, first published in serial form in the literary magazine L'Artiste in 1867. It was Zola's third novel, though the first to earn wide fame. The novel's adultery and murder were considered scandalous and famously described as "putrid" in a review in the newspaper Le Figaro. Thérèse Raquin tells the story of a young woman, u

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