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24 books with the same feel
Hide books by the same authorSodom and Gomorrah
Marcel Proust · 384 pages
"John Sturrock's new translation of Sodom and Gomorrah will introduce a new generation of American readers to the literary riches of Marcel Proust. the fourth volume in this edition of In Search of Lost Time - the first completely new translation of Proust's masterpiece since the 1920s - brings us a more comic and lucid prose than English readers have previously been able to enjoy." "Sodom and Gom
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
Sentimental Education
Gustave Flaubert · 440 pages
"First published in 1869, this deliberately written work follows the ambitions and whims of the young Frédéric Moreau as he travels from his provincial hometown to the enticing metropolis of Paris. Though he survived the Revolution of 1848, Moreau is still prone to all the mistakes and petty concerns of a young man of the middle class: he develops an infatuation for a married woman, Madame Arnoux,
The Adolescent
Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 580 pages
Nineteen-year-old Arkady Dolgonsky has difficulty establishing his personal identity amid the political and social upheavals of nineteenth-century Russia.
All the King's Men
Robert Penn Warren · 490 pages
The story is about Willie Stark, a slick politician of humble birth, who was based on real-life Huey Long, a Louisiana governor, but the real main character is Jack Burden, a reporter who serves to narrate the story and Stark's rise to power.
The Passion According to G.H.
Clarice Lispector · 214 pages
The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector's mystical novel of 1964, concerns a well-to-do Rio sculptress, G.H., who enters her maid's room, sees a cockroach crawling out of the wardrobe, and, panicking, slams the door - crushing the cockroach - and then watches it die. At the end of the novel, at the height of a spiritual crisis, comes the most famous and most genuinely shocking scene in Br
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Patrick Suskind · 272 pages
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • Set in eighteenth-century France, the classic novel that provokes a terrifying examination of what happens when one man’s indulgence in his greatest passion—his sense of smell—leads to murder. In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift—an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors
Nausea
Jean-Paul Sartre · 238 pages
Winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize for Literature, Jean-Paul Sartre, French philosopher, critic, novelist, and dramatist, holds a position of singular eminence in the world of letters. Among readers and critics familiar with the whole of Sartre's work, it is generally recognized that his earliest novel, La Nausée (first published in 1938), is his finest and most significant. It is unquestionably a key
The Golden Bowl
Henry James · 548 pages
A rich American art-collector & his daughter Maggie buy in for themselves & to their greater glory a beautiful young wife & a noble husband. They do not know that Charlotte & Prince Amerigo were formerly lovers, nor that on the eve of the Prince's marriage they had discovered, in an antique shop, a golden bowl with a secret flaw.
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo · 747 pages
In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean--a man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert--Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre.
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway · 251 pages
Hemingway's profile of the Lost Generation captures life among the expatriates on Paris' Left Bank during the 1920s, the brutality of bullfighting in Spain, and the moral and spiritual dissolution of a generation.
Tender Is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 349 pages
A psychiatrist, Dick Diver, treats and eventually marries a wealthy patient, Nicole. Eventually, this marriage destroys him.
The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin · 304 pages
[Comment by Kim Stanley Robinson, on The Guardian's website][1]: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin (1969) > One of my favorite novels is The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K Le Guin. For more than 40 years I've been recommending this book to people who want to try science fiction for the first time, and it still serves very well for that. One of the things I like about it is how
Bleak House
Charles Dickens · 815 pages
As the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually being devoured by legal costs; Esther Summerson, a ward of court, whose parentage is a source of deepening mystery; the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn; the determined sleuth Inspector Bucket; and even Jo, t
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.
Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
Evelyn Waugh · 370 pages
Middlemarch
George Eliot · 795 pages
Eliot’s epic of 19th century provincial social life, set in a fictitious Midlands town in the years 1830-32, has several interlocking storylines blended effortlessly together to form a fully coherent narrative. Its main themes are the status of women, social expectations and hypocrisy, religion, political reform and education. It has often been called the greatest novel in the English language.
The Old Wives' Tale
Arnold Bennett · 588 pages
First published in 1908, The Old Wives' Tale affirms the integrity of ordinary lives as it tells the story of the Baines sisters—shy, retiring Constance and defiant, romantic Sophia—over the course of nearly half a century. Bennett traces the sisters' lives from childhood in their father's drapery shop in provincial Bursley, England, during the mid-Victorian era, through their married lives, to th
Against Nature
Joris-Karl Huysmans · 122 pages
Ailing, neurotic, and bored with the world, the nobleman Des Esseintes retreats to a secluded cottage in the French countryside. Determined to shun all contact with other people—demanding that even his live-in domestics must wear face-covering robes in his presence—he throws himself into an all-out celebration of the ultimate in artificial and unnatural pleasure. Surrendering to religious and prof
The Sportswriter
Richard Ford · 375 pages
In the aftermath of his divorce and the death of his son, Frank Bascombe struggles to come to terms with failure and tries to find consolation in the arms of a new girlfriend. What he hoped would be an idyllic adventure turns into a succession of calamities.
Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller · 321 pages
A stream-of-consciousness story of a poverty-stricken young American, living in Paris.
Wittgenstein's Mistress
David Markson · 240 pages