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Necessary Errors

Caleb Crain · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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Kafka on the Shore

Haruki Murakami · 508 pages

The unlikely alliance between Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old runaway, and the aging Nakata, a man who has never recovered from a wartime affliction, brings dramatic changes to both characters as they embark on a surreal odyssey through a strange, sometimes violent, sometimes fantastical world.

Leaving HomeSlow-PacedSelf-DiscoveryCharacter-Driven
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The Shipping News

Annie Proulx · 337 pages

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Shipping News is a celebration of Annie Proulx's genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing

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The Line of Beauty

Alan Hollinghurst · 469 pages

It is the summer of 1983, and twenty-year-old Nick Guest has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby--whom Nick had idolized at Oxford--and Catherine, highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions, who becomes both a friend to Nick and his uneasy responsibility. As

Slow-PacedSelf-DiscoveryCharacter-DrivenLGBTQ+ Protagonist
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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.

Leaving HomeSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Brooklyn

Colm Toibin · 262 pages

In Ireland in the early 1950s, Eilis Lacey is one of many who cannot find work at home. Thus when a job is offered in America, it is clear to everyone that she must go. Leaving behind her family and country, Eilis heads for unfamiliar Brooklyn, and to a crowded boarding house where the landlady's intense scrutiny and the small jealousies of her fellow residents only deepen her isolation. Slowly, t

Leaving HomeSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenSelf-Discovery
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All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy · 301 pages

*All the Pretty Horses* is a novel by American author Cormac McCarthy published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1992. Its romanticism (in contrast to the bleakness of McCarthy's earlier work) brought the writer much public attention. It was a bestseller, and it won both the U.S. National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Along with *The Crossing* (1994), and C*ities of the Plain* (19

Leaving HomeSlow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Giovanni's Room

James Baldwin · 224 pages

Considered an 'audacious' second novel, GIOVANNI'S ROOM is set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence. This now-classic story of a fated love triangle explores, with uncompromising clarity, the conflicts between desire, conventional morality and sexual identity.

Self-DiscoveryLGBTQ+ ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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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

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The Hours

Michael Cunningham

Slow-PacedSelf-DiscoveryLGBTQ+ ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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Juliet Takes a Breath

Gabby Rivera · 320 pages

Juliet Milagros Palante is leaving the Bronx and headed to Portland, Oregon. She just came out to her family and isn't sure if her mom will ever speak to her again. But Juliet has a plan, sort of, one that's going to help her figure out this whole "Puerto Rican lesbian" thing.

Leaving HomeLGBTQ+ ProtagonistSelf-DiscoveryCharacter-Driven
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The City and Its Uncertain Walls

村上春樹 · 416 pages

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Of Human Bondage

W. Somerset Maugham · 582 pages

Of Human Bondage is a moving exploration of loneliness, obsessive love, and a young man's search for meaning and direction in life. Written in the third person, it tells the story of Philip Carey, a self-conscious orphan with a club-foot who learns medicine. Not only is this a significant work in the Bildungsroman tradition, but its largely autobiographical basis gives it a special interest in vie

Slow-PacedSelf-DiscoveryCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes · 152 pages

By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse. This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a

Slow-PacedSelf-DiscoveryCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Moon Palace

Paul Auster · 307 pages

Marco Fogg, loner and dreamer, is forced from his Manhattan apartment and roams Central Park as a vagrant until he is rescued by gentle Kitty Wu. He ends up as the live-in helper to an invalid old man, the recording of whose life story becomes Marco's obsession.

Leaving HomeCharacter-DrivenSelf-DiscoveryLiterary Fiction
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On the Road

Jack Kerouac · 310 pages

Described as everything from a "last gasp" of romantic fiction to a founding text of the Beat Generation movement, this story amounts to a nonfiction novel (as critics were later to describe some works). Unpublished writer buddies wander from coast to coast in search of whatever they find, eager for experience. Kerouac's spokesman is Sal Paradise (himself) and real-life friend Neal Casady appear

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In One Person

John Irving · 448 pages

A New York Times bestselling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love—tormented, funny, and affecting—and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences. Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character of In One Person, tells the tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a "sexual suspect," a phrase first used by John Ir

Slow-PacedCharacter-DrivenLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

Benjamin Alire Saenz · 368 pages

Fifteen-year-old Ari Mendoza is an angry loner with a brother in prison, but when he meets Dante and they become friends, Ari starts to ask questions about himself, his parents, and his family that he has never asked before.

Character-DrivenLGBTQ+ ProtagonistSlow-PacedSelf-Discovery
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The Namesake

Jhumpa Lahiri · 304 pages

"With a new afterword from Jhumpa Lahiri, a new edition of the contemporary classic. Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world--conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, c

Slow-PacedSelf-DiscoveryCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Judas

Amos Oz · 320 pages

"Winner of the International Literature Prize, the new novel by Amos Oz is his first full-length work since the best-selling A Tale of Love and Darkness. Jerusalem, 1959. Shmuel Ash, a biblical scholar, is adrift in his young life when he finds work as a caregiver for a brilliant but cantankerous old man named Gershom Wald. There is, however, a third, mysterious presence in his new home. Atalia Ab

Slow-PacedSelf-DiscoveryCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Prague

Arthur Phillips · 384 pages

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The Ambassadors

Henry James, Harry Levin · 431 pages

Chad Newsome has gone to Paris. He is charmed by Old World fascinations and caught up in the leisurely craft and bohemian direction of European worldliness. An older woman of rank and adventurous but subtle skill, Madame de Vionnet, strokes his ego and does her best to keep Chad in Paris indefinitely. Chad's mother lives in Woollett, Mass., and wants her son to return to run the family business. M

Slow-PacedSelf-DiscoveryCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Golem and the Jinni

Helene Wecker · 512 pages

In The Golem and the Jinni, a chance meeting between mythical beings takes readers on a dazzling journey through cultures in turn-of-the-century New York. Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay, brought to life to by a disgraced rabbi who dabbles in dark Kabbalistic magic and dies at sea on the voyage from Poland. Chava is unmoored and adrift as the ship arrives in New York harbor in 1899.

Slow-PacedSelf-DiscoveryCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Bridge of Sighs

Richard Russo · 544 pages

Louis Charles Lynch (also known as Lucy) is sixty years old and has lived in Thomaston, New York, his entire life. He and Sarah, his wife of forty years, are about to embark on a vacation to Italy. Lucy's oldest friend, once a rival for his wife's affection, leads a life in Venice far removed from Thomaston. Perhaps for this reason Lucy is writing the story of his town, his family, and his own lif

Slow-PacedSelf-DiscoveryCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction

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