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The Mermaid Girl: A Story

Erika Swyler · 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

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The Palace of Curiosities

Rosie Garland · 352 pages

"Before Eve is born, her mother goes to the circus. She swears she hears the lion sigh, just before it leaps... and nine months later when Eve is born, the story goes, she doesn't cry - she meows and licks her paws. When Abel is pulled from the stinking Thames, and the mudlarks search his pockets to divvy up the treasure, his eyes crack open and he coughs up a stream of black water. But, how has h

Traveling CircusMagical RealismLiterary FictionAtmospheric
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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 RealismLiterary FictionLyrical Prose
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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

Traveling CircusMagical RealismLiterary FictionLyrical Prose
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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 RealismLiterary FictionLyrical Prose
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Madeleine is Sleeping

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum · 276 pages

Traveling CircusMagical RealismLiterary FictionLyrical Prose
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The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder

Henry Miller · 48 pages

Traveling CircusNovellaLiterary Fiction
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In Calabria

Peter S. Beagle · 175 pages

"Claudio Bianchi has lived alone for many years on a hillside in Southern Italy's scenic Calabria. Set in his ways and suspicious of outsiders, Claudio has always resisted change, preferring farming and writing poetry. But one chilly morning, as though from a dream, an impossible visitor appears at the farm. When Claudio comes to her aid, an act of kindness throws his world into chaos. Suddenly he

Magical RealismNovellaLiterary FictionAtmospheric
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Collected Novellas

Gabriel Garcia Marquez · 256 pages

Contains: - Coronel no tiene quien le escriba - [Crónica de una muerte anunciada](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL274574W/Cr%C3%B3nica_de_una_muerte_anunciada) - Hojarasca

NovellaMagical RealismLiterary FictionLyrical Prose
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Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician

Daniel Wallace · 257 pages

From the author of Big Fish comes this haunting, tender story that weaves a tragic secret, a mysterious meeting with the Devil, and a family of charming circus freaks recounting the extraordinary adventures of their friend Henry Walker, the Negro Magician. In the middle of a dusty Southern town, in the middle of the twentieth century, magician Henry Walker entertains crowds at Jeremiah Musgrove's

Traveling CircusMagical RealismLiterary Fiction
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The Strange Library

Haruki Murakami · 92 pages

NovellaMagical RealismLiterary FictionAtmospheric
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The Blue Fox

Sjon · 112 pages

The year is 1883 and the stark Icelandic winter landscape is the backdrop. Follow the priest, Skugga-Baldur, on his hunt for the enigmatic blue fox.

NovellaMagical RealismLiterary FictionAtmospheric
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Nights at the Circus

Angela Carter · 294 pages

American journalist Jack Walser travels with an enchanted circus that feature literate chimpanzees, tragic clowns, idealist brigands, a structuralist Siberian shaman, and a six-foot, two-inch blond aerialist who is part swan and part woman.

Traveling CircusMagical RealismLiterary FictionLyrical Prose
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The Resurrectionist

Jack O'Connell · 318 pages

Sweeney, a druggist, takes a job at the fortresslike Peck Clinic, where he hopes his comatose son will be "resurrected" as other patients there have been, but finds that salvation may instead lie within a comic book.

Traveling CircusMagical RealismLiterary Fiction
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Asleep

Banana Yoshimoto · 178 pages

Already an international bestseller, "Asleep" comprises three novellas of women bewitched into a spiritual sleep. One, mourning a lost lover, finds herself sleepwalking. Another, who has embarked on a relationship with a man whose wife is in a coma, finds herself suddenly unable to stay awake. And a third finds her sleep haunted by a woman she was once pitted against in a love triangle.

NovellaMagical RealismLiterary FictionAtmospheric
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Mr. Vertigo

Paul Auster · 293 pages

In Mr. Vertigo, his dazzling eighth novel, Paul Auster introduces a quintessentially American hero who, early in his life, masters the art of the unimaginable, and then must live out his days long after the magic has been lost and forgotten. It is 1927, the year of Babe Ruth and Charles Lindbergh - and of Walter Claireborne Rawley, a streetwise orphan from Saint Louis who becomes "Walt the Wonder

Traveling CircusMagical RealismLiterary 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 Prose
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The Alchemist

Paulo Coelho · 192 pages

Combining magic, mysticism, wisdom and wonder into an inspiring tale of self-discovery, The Alchemist has become a modern classic, selling millions of copies around the world and transforming the lives of countless readers across generations. Paulo Coelho's masterpiece tells the mystical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure. His ques

Magical RealismNovellaLiterary FictionLyrical Prose
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Enchanted Night

Steven Millhauser · 112 pages

""A hot summer night in southern Connecticut, tide going out and the moon still rising. Laura Engstrom, fourteen years old, sits up in bed and throws the covers off.""--BOOK JACKET. "Others, too, are awakened by a chorus of night voices: Haverstraw, a thirty-nine-year-old failed writer living in his mother's attic; an old woman who lives alone; three teenage boys looking for trouble; a gang of gi

NovellaMagical RealismLiterary FictionAtmospheric
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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 RealismAtmosphericLyrical Prose
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Magical RealismNovellaLiterary FictionLyrical Prose
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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

F. Scott Fitzgerald · 211 pages

Benjamin Button was born an old man, and ages backwards.

NovellaMagical RealismLiterary FictionFantasy
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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.

NovellaMagical RealismLiterary FictionLyrical Prose
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Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti

Genevieve Valentine · 284 pages

"Outside any city still standing, the Mechanical Circus Tresaulti sets up its tents. Crowds pack the benches to gawk at the brass-and-copper troupe and their impossible feats: Ayar the Strong Man, the acrobatic Grimaldi Brothers, fearless Elena and her aerialists who perform on living trapezes. War is everywhere, but while the Circus is performing, the world is magic. That magic is no accident: Bo

Traveling CircusLiterary FictionAtmosphericLyrical Prose
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Kashtanka

Anton Chekhov · 48 pages

Separated from her master while out on a walk, Kashtanka the dog is adopted by a circus clown.

Traveling CircusNovellaLiterary Fiction

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