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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Great Wall of China and Other Stories
Franz Kafka · 262 pages
"A wondrous engineering feat rarely matched in the history of the world, the 1,500-mile-long Great Wall stretches the whole length of China's northern borders from the shores of the Pacific to the Gobi Desert in central Asia. It is so prominent on earth that astronauts say it is the only manmade structure they can see with the naked eye from space. Originally, the 2,000-year-old Great Wall was co
Lucky Alan and Other Stories
Jonathan Lethem · 157 pages
"Jonathan Lethem's third collection of stories uncovers a father's nervous breakdown at SeaWorld in "Pending Vegan"; a foundling child rescued from the woods during a blizzard in "Traveler Home"; a political prisoner in a hole in a Brooklyn street in "Procedure in Plain Air"; and a crumbling, haunted "blog" on a seaside cliff in "The Dreaming Jaw, The Salivating Ear." Each of these locates itself
City of Saints and Madmen
Jeff VanderMeer · 456 pages
Leaving the Sea
Ben Marcus · 273 pages
A collection of life-affirming tales includes the dystopian "Rollingwood," in which a divorced father struggles with employment while caring for an ailing infant; and the title story, in which a narrator's marriage and sanity unravel in a single breathless sentence.
St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
Karen Russell · 256 pages
A San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune Best Book of the YearIn these ten glittering stories, debut author Karen Russell takes us to the ghostly and magical swamps of the Florida Everglades. Here wolf-like girls are reformed by nuns, a family makes their living wrestling alligators in a theme park, and little girls sail away on crab shells. Filled with stunning inventiven
Dangerous Laughter
Steven Millhauser · 250 pages
Thirteen darkly comic stories, Dangerous Laughter is a mesmerizing journey that stretches the boundaries of the ordinary world.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Tunneling to the Center of the Earth: Stories
Kevin Wilson · 208 pages
Kevin Wilson's characters inhabit a world that moves seamlessly between the real and the imagined, the mundane and the fantastic. "Grand Stand-In" is narrated by an employee of a Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider -- a company that supplies "stand-ins" for families with deceased, ill, or just plain mean grandparents. And in "Blowing Up On the Spot," a young woman works sorting tiles at a Scrabbl
Stories and Texts for Nothing
Samuel Beckett · 140 pages
Daydreams of Angels
Heather O'Neill
Heather O'Neill's distinctive style and voice fill these charming, sometimes dark, always beguiling stories. From "The Robot Baby," in which we discover what happens when a robot feels emotion for the very first time, to "Heaven," about a grandfather who died for a few minutes when he was nine and visited the pearly gates, to "The Little Wolf-Boy of Northern Quebec," in which untamed children run
Almost No Memory
Lydia Davis · 208 pages
Lydia Davis's new collection, Almost No Memory, is a richly inventive array of playful philosophical investigations, involuted domestic disputes, and fables of the dark fantastic. With wittily restrained intensity, she again portrays the contemplative self caught in the paradoxical world. In "Pastor Elaine's Newsletter," a harried mother studies a Bible passage; in "Foucault and Pencil," a troubl
The Melancholy of Anatomy
Shelley Jackson · 179 pages
The Iraqi Christ
Hassan Blasim · 140 pages
This collection of stories explores the chaos of post-invasion Baghdad. A soldier with the ability to predict the future finds himself blackmailed by a suicide bomber into swapping places. A composer of crossword puzzles survives a car-bomb, only to find himself haunted by the spirit of one of its victims. A victim of looting flees armed robbers but falls into a deep hole, at the bottom of which s
Tenth of December
George Saunders · 272 pages
In the taut opener, “Victory Lap,” a boy witnesses the attempted abduction of the girl next door and is faced with a harrowing choice: Does he ignore what he sees, or override years of smothering advice from his parents and act? In “Home,” a combat-damaged soldier moves back in with his mother and struggles to reconcile the world he left with the one to which he has returned. And in the title stor
Memories of the Future
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
Written in Soviet Moscow in the 1920s—but considered too subversive even to show to a publisher—the seven tales included here attest to Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's boundless imagination, black humor, and breathtaking irony: a man loses his way in the vast black waste of his own small room; the Eiffel Tower runs amok; a kind soul dreams of selling "everything you need for suicide"; an absentminded p
The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory
Jorge Luis Borges · 167 pages
Interzone
William S. Burroughs · 194 pages
While living in Tangiers in the 1950s, Burroughs wrote "a startling collection of short stories, autobiographical sketches, letters, and diary entries, all of which showcase his trademark mordant humor, while delineating the addictions to drugs and sex that are the central metaphors of his work."--Cover, Penguin ed.
The Fun Parts
Sam Lipsyte · 229 pages
Presents a collection of stories featuring such characters as a deranged male birth doula, an aerobics instructor trying to save her soul, and a doomsday hustler.
Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh: A Novel
Mo Yan · 220 pages