AmongReaders.com Add a tiny library
📚 AmongReaders — track what you read, talk chapter by chapter without spoilers, and read with friends. Free.Join AmongReadersSign in

🧲 Books like this

Can't and Won't: Stories

Lydia Davis · 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

Include books by the same author
❤️

Bad Behavior: Stories

Mary Gaitskill · 203 pages

Powerful stories of dislocation, longing and desire which depict a disenchanted and rebellious urban fringe generation that is groping for human connection. (Or, more simply put, the angst of people-who-wear-black.)

Sparse ProseShort StoriesDry HumorLiterary Fiction
❤️

Nine Stories

J.D. Salinger · 208 pages

First published short story volume by the author of Catcher In The Rye.

Sparse ProseShort StoriesDry HumorLiterary Fiction
❤️

Malgudi Days

R.K. Narayan · 250 pages

Introducing this collection of stories, R. K. Narayan describes how in India “the writer has only to look out of the window to pick up a character and thereby a story.” Composed of powerful, magical portraits of all kinds of people, and comprising stories written over almost forty years, Malgudi Days presents Narayan’s imaginary city in full color, revealing the essence of India and of human exper

Sparse ProseShort StoriesDry HumorLiterary Fiction
❤️

Homesick for Another World

Ottessa Moshfegh · 304 pages

Features stories, in which the flesh is weak; the timber is crooked; people are cruel to each other, and stupid, and hurtful, but beauty comes from strange sources. In this book, the author shows us uncomfortable things, and makes us look at them forensically - until we find, suddenly, that we are really looking at ourselves.

Short StoriesSparse ProseDry HumorLiterary Fiction
❤️

Bed

Tao Lin · 278 pages

Contains nine short stories by American author Tao Lin, which feature characters who struggle with laziness, boredom, exhaustion, and other emotions and situations.

Sparse ProseShort StoriesDry HumorLiterary Fiction
❤️

The Collected Stories

William Trevor · 1,261 pages

William Trevor is one of the renowned figures in contemporary literature, described as 'the greatest living writer of short stories in the English language' by the New Yorker and acclaimed for his haunting and profound insights into the human heart. Here is the ultimate collection of his short fiction, with dozens of tales spanning his career and ranging from the moving to the macabre, the humorou

Sparse ProseShort StoriesDry HumorLiterary Fiction
❤️

Pieces for the Left Hand

J. Robert Lennon · 213 pages

A collection of 100 short pieces-- some not even a page long-- full of subtle humor and surprising incidents. They are grouped into seven themes.

Short StoriesSparse ProseDry HumorLiterary Fiction
❤️

Reasons to Live

Amy Hempel · 129 pages

This collection of fifteen stories deals with the strategies of emotional survival and offers sharp, brittle, and intelligent looks at staying alive, at how to manage a life truly one's own, and how to resist becoming a victim.

Short StoriesSparse ProseDry HumorLiterary Fiction
❤️

In the Garden of the North American Martyrs

Tobias Wolff · 175 pages

Among the characters you'll find in this collection of twelve stories by Tobias Wolff are a teenage boy who tells morbid lies about his home life, a timid professor who, in the first genuine outburst of her life, pours out her opinions in spite of a protesting audience, a prudish loner who gives an obnoxious hitchhiker a ride, and an elderly couple on a golden anniversary cruise who endure the off

Short StoriesSparse ProseDry HumorLiterary Fiction
❤️

The Bed Moved

Rebecca Schiff · 139 pages

"A New Yorker, trying not to be jaded, accompanies a cash-strapped pot grower to a "Clothing Optional Resort" in California. A nerdy high schooler has her first sexual experience at geology camp. A young woman fundraises for a social-media savvy cancer patient whose circle of supporters grows increasingly obsessive. A college student, the night of her father's funeral, watches an old video of her

Short StoriesSparse ProseDry HumorLiterary Fiction
❤️

Venus Drive: Stories

Sam Lipsyte · 192 pages

Short StoriesSparse ProseDry HumorLiterary Fiction
❤️

Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout · 288 pages

Olive Kitteridge: indomitable, compassionate and often unpredictable. A retired schoolteacher in a small coastal town in Maine, as she grows older she struggles to make sense of the changes in her life. She is a woman who sees into the hearts of those around her, their triumphs and tragedies. We meet her stoic husband, bound to her in a marriage both broken and strong, and a young man who aches

Short StoriesSparse ProseDry HumorLiterary Fiction
🙂

The Nimrod Flipout: Stories

Etgar Keret, Institute for Translation of Hebrew Literature · 176 pages

Sparse ProseShort StoriesLiterary FictionFunny
🙂

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

Sparse ProseShort StoriesLiterary Fiction
🙂

How We Are Hungry

Dave Eggers · 224 pages

Sparse ProseShort StoriesLiterary Fiction
🙂

Lizard

Banana Yoshimoto · 180 pages

Sparse ProseShort StoriesLiterary Fiction
🙂

Last Night: Stories

James Salter · 132 pages

A superbly accomplished new collection explores the acclaimed author's signature themes: love, honor, sacrifice, friendship, and abandon. In these taut, powerful stories, Salter portrays men and women in their most intimate moments.

Sparse ProseShort StoriesLiterary Fiction
🙂

Dusk and Other Stories

James Salter, Philip Gourevitch · 157 pages

Sparse ProseShort StoriesLiterary Fiction
🙂

Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine

Diane Williams · 131 pages

"The very short stories of Diane Williams have been aptly called 'folk tales that hammer like a nail gun,' and these forty new ones are sharper than ever. They are unsettling, yes, frequently revelatory, and more often than not downright funny."--Publisher website.

Sparse ProseShort StoriesLiterary Fiction
🙂

Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall

Kazuo Ishiguro · 221 pages

One of the most celebrated writers of our time gives us his first cycle of short fiction: five brilliantly etched, interconnected stories in which music is a vivid and essential character.A once-popular singer, desperate to make a comeback, turning from the one certainty in his life . . . A man whose unerring taste in music is the only thing his closest friends value in him . . . A struggling sing

Sparse ProseShort StoriesLiterary Fiction
🙂

Stories

Anton Chekhov · 348 pages

Called the greatest of short story writers, Chekhov changed the genre itself with his spare, impressionistic depictions of Russian life and the human condition.

Sparse ProseShort StoriesLiterary Fiction
🙂

The Voice Imitator

Thomas Bernhard · 114 pages

Sparse ProseShort StoriesLiterary Fiction
🙂

Great Dream of Heaven

Sam Shepard · 186 pages

"In these eighteen stories, Sam Shepard taps the same wellsprings that have made him one of our most acclaimed - and distinctly American - playwrights: sex and regret, the yearning for a frontier that has been subdivided out of existence, the comic gulf of misapprehension between men and women, and the even deeper gulf that separates men from their true selves.". "A fascinated boy watches the gri

Sparse ProseShort StoriesLiterary Fiction
🙂

A Stranger in this World

Kevin Canty · 180 pages

A Stranger in This World marks the debut of a powerful new talent. With a voice akin to those of Denis Johnson and Richard Ford, westerner Kevin Canty is a versatile and intelligent writer whose stories both shock and transfix. In this extraordinary collection, he portrays - with frightening calm - the unpredictable darkness of everyday life. Canty describes territory we all know well, but with a

Sparse ProseShort StoriesLiterary Fiction

In the works

To be read SpinnerCan’t pick your next book? Spin your Want to read.Blind date with a bookPick a mood, unwrap a surprise.Add a tiny librarySnap a little free library and its books.