What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorMother Night
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. · 202 pages
Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense. American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of gray with a verdict that will haunt us all.
The Lacuna
Barbara Kingsolver · 528 pages
In her most accomplished novel, Barbara Kingsolver takes us on an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Lacuna is a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities.Born in the United States, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico-from a coastal
Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller · 321 pages
A stream-of-consciousness story of a poverty-stricken young American, living in Paris.
The Joke
Milan Kundera · 288 pages
"All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, a quarter century after The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Kundera 's work) as what it truly is: gre
The Land of Green Plums
Herta Muller · 242 pages
Ways of Going Home
Alejandro Zambra · 139 pages
The Letter Killers Club
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky · 123 pages
"Writers are professional killers of conceptions. The logic of the Letter Killers Club, a secret society of "conceivers" who commit nothing to paper on principle, is strict and uncompromising. Every Saturday they meet in a fire-lit room hung with blank black bookshelves to present their "pure and unsubstantiated" conceptions: a rehearsal of Hamlet hijacked by an actor who vanishes with the role; t
Pushkin Hills
Sergei Dovlatov · 160 pages
"An unsuccessful writer and an inveterate alcoholic, Boris Alikhanov has recently divorced his wife Tatyana, and he is running out of money. The prospect of a summer job as a tour guide at the Pushkin Hills Preserve offers him hope of regaining some balance in life as his wife makes plans to emigrate to the West with their daughter Masha, but during Alikhanov's stay in the rural estate of Mikhaylo
The Aspern Papers
Henry James · 108 pages
With a decaying Venetian villa as a backdrop, an anonymous narrator relates his obsessive quest for the personal documents of a deceased Romantic poet, one Jeffrey Aspern. Led by his mission into increasingly unscrupulous behavior, he is ultimately faced with relinquishing his heart's desire or attaining it at an overwhelming price.
Love and Garbage
Ivan Klima · 240 pages
The Moment
Douglas Kennedy · 535 pages
**Thomas Nesbitt is a divorced American writer in the midst of a rueful middle age.** Living a very private life in Maine — in touch with only his daughter and still trying to reconcile himself to the end of a long marriage that he knew was flawed from the outset — he finds his solitude disrupted by the arrival, one wintry morning, of a box postmarked Berlin. The name accompanying the return addre
Pereira Maintains
Antonio Tabucchi · 194 pages
In the sweltering summer of 1938 in Portugal, a country under the fascist shadow of Spain, a mysterious young man arrives at the doorstep of Dr Pereira. So begins an unlikely alliance that will result in a devastating act of rebellion. This is Pereira's testimony.
Howl and Other Poems
Allen Ginsberg · 44 pages
"The prophetic poem that launched a generation when it was first published in 1956 is here presented in a commemorative 40th Anniversary Edition." "When the book arrived from its British printers, it was seized almost immediately by U.S. Customs, and shortly thereafter the San Francisco police arrested its publisher and editor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, together with the City Lights Bookstore manager
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Dai Sijie · 184 pages
A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf · 129 pages
A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on 24 October 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers of and characters in fiction, the m
Rock 'n' Roll
Tom Stoppard · 128 pages
"Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll is an electrifying collision of the romantic and the revolutionary. It is 1968 and the world is ablaze with rebellion, accompanied by a sound track of the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. Clutching his prized collection of rock albums, Jan, a Cambridge graduate student, returns to his homeland of Czechoslovakia just as Soviet tanks roll into Prague. When security forces
Sweet Tooth
Ian McEwan · 374 pages
An Anglican bishop's daughter gets in over her head with British Intelligence in this John le Carre-esque caper from the author of *Atonement*. Brash, bookish Serena just might make a perfect spy-if she can keep her heart under wraps.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 174 pages
First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Iv
The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov · 412 pages
The battle of competing translations, a new publishing phenomenon which began with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, now offers two rival American editions of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. Mirra Ginsburg's (Grove Press) version is pointedly grotesque: she delights in the sharp, spinning, impressionistic phrase. Her Bulgakov reminds one of the virtuoso effects encountered in Za
Beijing Coma
Ma Jian · 586 pages
Dai Wei lies in a coma after he was shot in the head at the Tiananmen Square protest ten years earlier. As the minute-by-minute chronicling of the lead-up to his shooting becomes even more intense, the reader is caught in a gripping, emotional journey where the boundaries between life and death are increasingly blurred.
The Silence and the Roar
Nihad Sirees · 154 pages
An unnamed Middle Eastern country resembling Syria is celebrating the twenty-year anniversary of the reigning despot. Desperate to get away from the noise and the zombie-like masses, author Fathi Chin leaves his house to visit his mother. En route, he stops to help a student who is being beaten by the police. Fathi's ID papers are confiscated and he is forced to return home and told to report to t
Amnesia
Peter Carey · 384 pages
When Gaby Baillieux releases the Angel Worm into Australia's prison computer system, hundreds of asylum-seekers walk free. And because the Americans run the prisons, the doors of some five thousand jails in the United States also open. Is this a mistake, or a declaration of cyber war? And does it have anything to do with the largely forgotten Battle of Brisbane between American and Australian forc