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We Live in Water

Jess Walter · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
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Rock Springs

Richard Ford · 252 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistShort StoriesBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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Sabrina & Corina

Kali Fajardo-Anstine · 212 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistShort StoriesBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned

Walter Mosley · 208 pages

Socrates Fortlow is Walter Mosley's most compelling character since Easy Rawlins, a tough, brooding ex-convict and is set to be a bold and original new hero.

Working-Class ProtagonistShort StoriesBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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Marcovaldo

Italo Calvino · 192 pages

Short StoriesWorking-Class ProtagonistBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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Nobody's Fool

Richard Russo · 549 pages

In 1750, without warning or apparent reason, the mineral springs of the colonial resort town of Bath, New York, ran dry. A little more than two hundred years later, after numerous warnings and for too many reasons, Sully, the unluckiest man in this unlucky town, isn't doing too hot either. He's broke, out of a job, and the owner of a dead pickup truck. The good news? Sully has the dumbest man in N

Working-Class ProtagonistDark ComedyCharacter-DrivenBittersweet
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This Is How You Lose Her

Junot Diaz · 240 pages

This is a collection of stories that explores the power of love in all its forms, obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love, as it is shaped by passion, betrayal, and the echoes of intimacy.

Short StoriesBittersweetCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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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

Working-Class ProtagonistBittersweetDark ComedyCharacter-Driven
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Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

Raymond Carver · 411 pages

By the time of his early death in 1988, Raymond Carver had established himself as one of the great practitioners of the American short story, a writer who had not only found his own voice but imprinted it in the imaginations of thousands of readers. Where I’m Calling From, his last collection, encompasses classic stories from Cathedral, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and earlier Carve

Working-Class ProtagonistShort StoriesBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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Who do you think you are?

Alice Munro · 224 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistShort StoriesBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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Blueprints for Building Better Girls: Fiction

Elissa Schappell · 304 pages

"From the acclaimed author of Use Me, eight provocative and darkly funny linked stories that explore the commonly shared, but rarely spoken of experiences that build girls into women and women into wives and mothers, mapping America's shifting cultural landscape from the late 1970s to the present day"--

Short StoriesDark ComedyBittersweetCharacter-Driven
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The Collected Stories

Lorrie Moore · 704 pages

"The first one-volume collection of all of Lorrie Moore's short stories, with an introduction by Lauren Groff"-- This career-spanning collection of Moore's work showcases her talent for leavening tragedy with humor, for blending sorrow with subversive wit. The stories are peopled by a variety of lost souls grappling with pain or disappointment. -- adapted from jacket

Short StoriesDark ComedyBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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Pastoralia

George Saunders · 208 pages

"If Americans in the future were to try to send us a message about where our culture is heading, they might simply point to the fiction of George Saunders. Living in a world that's both indelibly original and hauntingly familiar, the characters in these stories bring to life our most absurd tendencies, and allow us to see ourselves in a shocking, uproariously funny new light.". "Here you find p

Working-Class ProtagonistShort StoriesDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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How to Set a Fire and Why

Jesse Ball · 283 pages

"How to Set a Fire and Why is a blistering, singular, devastating novel by Jesse Ball ("A young genius who hits all of the right notes." --Chicago Tribune) about a teenage girl who has lost everything and will burn anything. Lucia has been kicked out of school, again, this time for stabbing a boy in the neck with a pencil. Her father is dead; her mother is in a mental institute; and she's living i

Working-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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The Contract With God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue

Will Eisner · 498 pages

This book joins three works by Will Eisner, all set around Dropsie Avenue in the Bronx (New York). (1) Contract with God (1978), comprising four independent brief stories. (2) A Life Force (1988), which follows events in Dropsie Avenue during the Great Depression years, and (3) Dropsie Avenue (1995), where the story follows the neighborhood from the 1800s (farming community) to high-end suburb,

Working-Class ProtagonistBittersweetCharacter-DrivenShort Stories
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South of No North

Charles Bukowski · 189 pages

Charles Bukowski is one of America's best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in Andernach, Germany, and raised in Los Angeles, where he lived for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944, when he was twenty-four, and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California, on M

Short StoriesWorking-Class ProtagonistDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

David Foster Wallace · 273 pages

David Foster Wallace made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. In his exuberantly acclaimed collection, BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN, he combined hilarity and an escalating disquiet in stories that astonish, entertain, and expand our ideas of the pleasures that fiction can afford.

Short StoriesDark ComedyCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Werewolves In Their Youth

Michael Chabon · 212 pages

Le divorce, l'abandon et la nostalgie sont au coeur des neufs nouvelles qui composent ce recueil, excepté la dernière qui fait un clin d'oeil à la "pulp fiction". L'auteur choisit le ton de la comédie et de l'ironie mordante pour ces récits.

Short StoriesBittersweetCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Last Night at the Lobster

Stewart O'Nan · 146 pages

Stewart O'Nan has been called "the bard of the working class" and has now crafted a frank and funny yet emotionally resonant tale set within a vivid workaday world seldom seen in contemporary fiction. Perched in the far corner of a run-down New England mall, The Red Lobster hasn't been making its numbers and headquarters has pulled the plug. But manager Manny DeLeon still needs to navigate a trick

Working-Class ProtagonistBittersweetCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Selected Stories

Andre Dubus · 496 pages

Short StoriesBittersweetCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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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 StoriesBittersweetCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Miguel Street

V.S. Naipaul · 176 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistShort StoriesBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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No One Writes to the Colonel

Gabriel Garcia Marquez · 170 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenBittersweetLiterary Fiction
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What's Eating Gilbert Grape

Peter Hedges · 335 pages

The coming-of-age of a 24-year-old grocery clerk who has spent his entire life in an Iowa town with a population of 1091.

Working-Class ProtagonistBittersweetDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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The Van

Roddy Doyle · 316 pages

Jimmy Rabbitte is unemployed and rapidly running out of money. His best friend Bimbo has been made redundant at the company where he has worked for many years. The two old friends are out of luck and out of options. That is, until Bimbo finds a dilapidated 'chipper van' and the pair decide to go into business...By the bestselling author of The Commitments and The Snapper, The Van is a tender tale

Working-Class ProtagonistBittersweetDark ComedyLiterary Fiction

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