What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Sound of the Mountain
Yasunari Kawabata · 276 pages
"By day Ogata Shingo, an elderly Tokyo businessman, is troubled by small failures of memory. At night he associates the distant rumble he hears from the nearby mountain with the sounds of death. In between are the complex relationships that were once the foundations of Shingo's life: his trying wife; his philandering son; and his beautiful daughter-in-law, who inspires in him both pity and the sti
Waiting for the Barbarians
J.M. Coetzee · 165 pages
For decades the Magistrate has run the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement, ignoring the impending war between the barbarians and the Empire, whose servant he is. But when the interrogation experts arrive, he is jolted into sympathy for the victims, and into a quixotic act of rebellion which lands him in prison.
Some Prefer Nettles
Jun'ichiro Tanizaki · 202 pages
The City and Its Uncertain Walls
村上春樹 · 416 pages
Memoirs of a Geisha
Arthur Golden · 456 pages
A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel tells with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha.Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha. It begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a n
Gertrude
Hermann Hesse, Hilda Rosner · 237 pages
In this fictional memoir, the renowned composer Kuhn recounts his tangled relationships with two artists--his friend Heinrich Muoth, a brooding, self-destructive opera singer, and the gentle, self-assured Gertrude Imthor. Kuhn is drawn to Gertrude upon their first meeting, but Gertrude falls in love with Heinrich, to whom she is introduced when Kuhn auditions them for the leads in his new opera. H
Grendel
John Gardner · 174 pages
The first and most terrifying monster in English literature, from the great early epic Beowulf, tells his own side of the story in this frequently banned book. This classic and much lauded retelling of Beowulf follows the monster Grendel as he learns about humans and fights the war at the center of the Anglo Saxon classic epic. This is the book William Gass called "one of the finest of our contem
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.
Silence
Shusaku Endo · 294 pages
An historical novel by Japanese writer Shusaku Endo telling the story of a young Portuguese missionary in 17th Century Japan. After being smuggled into the country a Jesuit missionary fresh from the seminary finds the Christian population have been forced underground by a government eager to stamp out foreign interference and values. Consequently he quickly finds himself a fugitive in a strange an
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.
The Three-Cornered World
Soseki Natsume · 184 pages
The story of an artist who retreats to a country resort hotel and becomes involved in a series of mysterious encounters.
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 182 pages
Here is a novel, glamorous, ironical, compassionate – a marvelous fusion into unity of the curious incongruities of the life of the period – which reveals a hero like no other – one who could live at no other time and in no other place. But he will live as a character, we surmise, as long as the memory of any reader lasts. "There was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to
The Lake
Banana Yoshimoto · 188 pages
While *The Lake* shows off many of the features that have made Banana Yoshimoto famous—a cast of vivid and quirky characters, simple yet nuanced prose, a tight plot with an upbeat pace—it’s also one of the most darkly mysterious books she’s ever written. It tells the tale of a young woman who moves to Tokyo after the death of her mother, hoping to get over her grief and start a career as a grap
A Separate Peace
John Knowles · 196 pages
Gene Forrester looks back fifteen years to a World War II year in which he and his best friend were roommates in a New hampshire boarding school.
Amok and Other Stories
Stefan Zweig · 130 pages
The Magus
John Fowles · 632 pages
A startlingly original novel about a young English graduate who takes a position as a teacher at a private school on a small Greek island. Bored and lonely he spends his free hours wandering alone until he meets a wealthy and mysterious neighbour. Soon he finds himself a victim of this man’s increasingly bizarre psychological games and obsessed with a young woman who may or may not be a willing pa
The Gun
Fuminori Nakamura
"On a nighttime walk along a Tokyo riverbank, a young man named Nishikawa stumbles on a dead body, besides which is lying a gun. From the moment Nishikawa makes the decision to take the gun, the world around him blurs. Knowing he possesses the gun brings an intoxicating sense of purpose to his dull university life. But Nishikawa's personal entanglements are becoming unexpectedly complicated: he fi
Bless Me, Ultima
Rudolfo Anaya · 252 pages
Ultima, a curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic, comes to Antonio Marez's New Mexico family when he is six years old, and she helps him discover himself in the magical secrets of the pagan past.
The Dharma Bums
Jack Kerouac · 204 pages
The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The basis for the novel's semi-fictional accounts are events occurring years after the events of On the Road. The main characters are the narrator Ray Smith, based on Kerouac, and Japhy Ryder, based on the poet and essayist Gary Snyder, who was instrumental in Kerouac's introduction to Buddhism in the mid-1950s. The book co
Under the Autumn Star
Knut Hamsun, Oliver Stallybrass, Gunnvor Stallybrass · 112 pages
In Under the Autumn Star, Nobel prize-winning author Knut Hamsun writes a novel magically permeated with the air and light of fall. The narrator, Knut Pedersen (Hamsun's real name) first joins forces with Grindhusen, a man blessed with the faith that "something will turn up," and later with Lars Falkenberg, whose dubious talents include the tuning of pianos. Knut and Lars fetch up as workmen on t
Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories
Ryunosuke Akutagawa · 119 pages
A collection of short stories from Ryunosuke Akutagawa, one of Japan's foremost stylists, a master of the modern idiom enriched by a deep knowledge of both the classics and the contemporary literature of Japan, China, and the West.
No One Writes to the Colonel
Gabriel Garcia Marquez · 170 pages