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Godforsaken Idaho

Shawn Vestal · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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The Complete Stories

Flannery O'Connor · 557 pages

There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime--Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find. O'Connor published her first story, "The Geranium," in 1946, while she was working on her master's degree at the University of Iowa. Arranged chronologically, this collecti

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Dubliners

James Joyce · 226 pages

James Joyce's disillusion with the publication of Dubliners in 1914 was the result of ten years battling with publishers, resisting their demands to remove swear words, real place names and much else, including two entire stories. Although only 24 when he signed his first publishing contract for the book, Joyce already knew its worth: to alter it in any way would 'retard the course of civilisation

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Praying Drunk

Kyle Minor · 196 pages

The characters in Praying Drunk speak in tongues, torture their classmates, fall in love, hunt for immortality, abandon their children, keep machetes beneath passenger seats, and collect porcelain figurines. A man crushes pills on the bathroom counter while his son watches from the hallway; missionaries clumsily navigate an uprising with barbed wire and broken glass; a boy disparages memorized scr

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I Want to Show You More

Jamie Quatro · 206 pages

A collection of short fiction offers a disquieting portrait of infidelity, faith, and family.

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Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories

Isaac Bashevis Singer · 208 pages

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Franny and Zooey

J.D. Salinger · 202 pages

Franny came out in The New Yorker in 1955, and was swiftly followed in 1957 by Zooey. Both stories are early entries in a narrative series about the Glasses, a family of settlers in twentieth-century New York. In the first story, Franny, a young college girl, arrives in New Haven (Yale) to be with her boyfriend for a football weekend, where they go to a café. The story is essentially an account of

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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,

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God Says No

James Hannaham · 303 pages

Gary Gray marries his first girlfriend, a fellow student from Central Florida Christian College who loves Disney World as much as he does. They are nineteen years old, God-fearing, and eager to start a family, but a week before their wedding Gary goes into a waffle house bathroom and lets something happen. God says no is his testimony--the story of a young Black Christian struggling with desire an

Religious IdentityFaith CrisisLiterary FictionDark Comedy
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Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Jeanette Winterson · 176 pages

This is the story of Jeanette, adopted and brought up by her mother as one of God's elect. Zealous and passionate, she seems destined for life as a missionary, but then she falls for one of her converts. At sixteen, Jeanette decides to leave the church, her home and her family, for the young woman she loves.

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Truly Like Lightning

David Duchovny · 445 pages

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The Satanic Verses

Salman Rushdie · 560 pages

One of the most controversial and acclaimed novels ever written, The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie’s best-known and most galvanizing book. Set in a modern world filled with both mayhem and miracles, the story begins with a bang: the terrorist bombing of a London-bound jet in midflight. Two Indian actors of opposing sensibilities fall to earth, transformed into living symbols of what is angelic

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The Recognitions

William Gaddis · 956 pages

Obsessed with seventeenth-century Flemish masterpieces, Wyatt Gwyon forges original artwork amazingly faithful to the spirit and techniques of the time.

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Damascus Gate

Robert Stone · 500 pages

Jerusalem: where earth meets heaven, home to seekers and heretics, hustlers and madmen, dreamers and the faithful of every persuasion. In this holiest and most fractious city, where religion and politics are inextricably bound, a plot unfolds to bomb the sacred Temple Mount. Christopher Lucas, an expatriate American journalist, skeptical and searching, stumbles upon the Temple Mount plot while on

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Frances and Bernard

Carlene Bauer · 209 pages

In the summer of 1957, Frances and Bernard meet at an artists' colony. She finds him faintly ridiculous, but talented. He sees her as aloof, but intriguing. Afterward, he writes her a letter. Soon they are immersed in the kind of fast, deep friendship that can take over-- and change the course of-- lives. They find their way to New York and, for a few whirling years, each other. Can we love anothe

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The Edge of Sadness

Edwin O'Connor · 460 pages

Beautifully written . Very human, deeply spiritual. A book that resonates with life, it's struggles, its day to day routine that leads to introspection and encounters with God through simple people in everyday events, in a struggle for sobriety. All these lead the protagonist to a the edge of darkness. Routine and struggle can do that to you . Instead of an abyss that you expect him plunge into h

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A Perfectly Good Man

Patrick Gale · 416 pages

When 20-year-old Lenny Barnes, paralysed in a rugby accident, commits suicide in the presence of Barnaby Johnson, the much-loved priest of a West Cornwall parish, the tragedy's reverberations open up the fault lines between Barnaby and his nearest and dearest. Their personal stories illuminate Barnaby's ostensibly happy life, and the gulfs of unspoken sadness that separate them all. Across this we

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

Nathan Englander · 215 pages

"The author of the sensational national best seller For the Relief of Unbearable Urges returns with a commanding new collection of short stories: What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank establishes Nathan Englander beyond all doubt as the heir to Roth, Malamud, and Babel. A tour de force. The title story, inspired by Carver's masterpiece, is a comic classic, a provocative portrait of two

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White Teeth

Zadie Smith · 480 pages

One of the most talked about fictional debuts of recent years, WHITE TEETH is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike. Dealing - among many other things - with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle, it is a life-affirming, riotous

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Snow

Orhan Pamuk · 430 pages

Touching, slyly comic, and humming with cerebral suspense—a masterful novel of "political intrigue and philosophy, romance and noir" (Vogue) and the lethal chemistry between secular doubt and Islamic fanaticism from the Nobel Prize winner. An exiled poet named Ka returns to Turkey and travels to the forlorn city of Kars. His ostensible purpose is to report on a wave of suicides among religious

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Job: The Story of a Simple Man

Joseph Roth · 238 pages

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The Rabbi

Noah Gordon · 389 pages

Michael Kind, descendiente de judíos criado en un barrio marginal de Nueva York, se debate entre el antagónico legado recibido por su abuelo y su educador, y el proporcionado por su padre. El abuelo le trasmitió su conciencia de pertenencia a la comunidad judía, mientras que su educador se encargó de la enseñanza religiosa. Como contrapunto a esa instrucción anclada en los orígenes de su pueblo, M

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Glamorous Powers

Susan Howatch · 517 pages

Une visite attendue au roman ##Les belles apparences## et forme le deuxième tome d'une série romanesque inspirée par la pensé religieuse de William Ralph Inge. [SDM].

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The Girl Who Slept with God

Val Brelinski · 368 pages

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The Dark

John McGahern · 191 pages

The Dark, John McGaherns second novel, is set in rural Ireland. The themes that McGahern has made his own are adolescence and a guilty, yet uncontrollable sexuality that is contorted and twisted by both a puritanical state religion and a strange, powerful and ambiguous relationship between son and widower father.Against a background evoked with quiet, undemonstrative mastery, McGahern explores wit

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