Books like 'Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice'
Readers who enjoyed Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice by A.S. Byatt also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
contemporary fantasy 20th century magical-realism literary-fiction historical-fiction myths low-fantasy retellings
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The Quite Nice and Fairly Accurate Good Omens Script Book by Neil Gaiman
Rated: 4.65 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsTHE QUITE NICE AND FAIRLY ACCURATE GOOD OMENS SCRIPT BOOK contains much that is new and revelatory and even several scenes that are not actually in the final television series... -
Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
Rated: 4.41 of 5 stars · 27 ratingsJorge Luis Borges has been called the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century. Now for the first time in English, all of Borges' dazzling fictions are gathered into a single volume, brilliantly translated by Andrew Hurley... -
Incarnations Of Immortality by Piers Anthony
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 12 ratings...Categorized as:
myths retellings fantasy fiction young-adult urban-fantasy contemporary psychological -
The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges
Rated: 4.36 of 5 stars · 41 ratingsFull of philosophical puzzles and supernatural surprises, these stories contain some of Borges's most fully realized human characters. With uncanny insight, he takes us inside the minds of an unrepentant Nazi, an imprisoned Mayan priest, fanatical Christian theologians, a woman plotting vengeance on her father’s “killer,” and a man awaiting his assassin in a Buenos Aires guest house... -
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Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins
Rated: 4.23 of 5 stars · 37 ratingsJitterbug Perfume is an epic.Which is to say, it begins in the forests of ancient Bohemia and doesn’t conclude until nine o’clock tonight (Paris time).It is a saga, as well. A saga must have a hero, and the hero of this one is a janitor with a missing bottle.The bottle is blue, very, very old, and embossed with the image of a goat-horned god...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction magical-realism myths 20th-century action-adventure adult book -
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
Rated: 4.32 of 5 stars · 40 ratingsThe award-winning poet Anne Carson reinvents a genre in Autobiography of Red, a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present... -
Cronopios and Famas by Julio Cortázar
Rated: 4.24 of 5 stars · 25 ratings"The Instruction Manual," the first chapter, is an absurd assortment of tasks and items dissected in an instruction-manual format. "Unusual Occupations," the second chapter, describes the obsessions and predilections of the narrator's family, including the lodging of a tiger-just one tiger- "for the sole purpose of seeing the mechanism at work in all its complexity...Categorized as:
literary-fiction low-fantasy magical-realism 20th-century adult anthologies classics contemporary -
Charlotte's Web by E.B. White
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 87 ratingsA gorgeous full-colour large format edition of Charlotte's Web, one of the best-loved animal stories of our time.The unforgettable story of a girl called Fern who loves a little pig called Wilbur. It tells how Charlotte A... -
Perestroika by Tony Kushner
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 28 ratingsThe second half of Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic Angels in America, Perestroika steers the characters introduced in Millennium Approaches from the opportunistic eighties to a new sense of community in the nineties...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction low-fantasy magical-realism 20th-century adult angels audiobook -
Buddha's Little Finger by Victor Pelevin
Rated: 4.28 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsRussian novelist Victor Pelevin is rapidly establishing himself as one of the most brilliant young writers at work today. His comic inventiveness and mind-bending talent prompted Time magazine to proclaim him a "psychedelic Nabokov for the cyber-age...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction low-fantasy magical-realism 20th-century adult audiobook book -
Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsSet in the mythical Polish village of Primeval, a microcosm of the world populated with eccentric, archetypal characters and guarded by four archangels, this novel from Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk chronicles the lives of the inhabitants over the course of the feral 20th century in prose that is forceful, direct, and the stylistic cousin of the magic realism in Gabriel García Márquez's One... -
End of the Game and Other Stories by Julio Cortázar
Rated: 4.32 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsEnd of the game is one of the most important collections of stories of the second half of the 20th century. Engaged in transgressing the laws of conventional narrative, in these eighteen stories Julio Cortázar combines intertextuality, an unpublished use of the colloquial and endless game to bring the reader into a particular universe where nothing is what it seems... -
The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies
Rated: 4.32 of 5 stars · 29 ratingsThe complete volume of Robertson Davies's acclaimed trilogy, featuring Fifth Business, The Manticore, and World of Wonders, with a new foreword by Kelly Link Fifth Business Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and... -
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges
Rated: 4.35 of 5 stars · 23 ratingsHere is a handsome edition of one of Borges' "ficciones," in a translation first published in "Labyrinths" in 1962. It's an important story in the Borges' canon, incorporating most of the author's philosophical and esthetic preoccupations in a typically brief compass... -
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Bestiary: The Selected Stories of Julio Cortázar by Julio Cortázar
Rated: 4.24 of 5 stars · 36 ratingsA collection of masterful short stories in Julio Cortazar's sophistocated, powerful and gripping style.A grieving family home becomes the site of a terrifying invasion. A frustrated love triangle, brought together by a plundered Aztec idol, spills over into brutality. A lodger’s inability to stop vomiting bunny rabbits inspires a personal confession...Categorized as:
literary-fiction low-fantasy magical-realism 20th-century adult anthologies classics contemporary -
Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories by Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsOne of our most imaginative and accomplished writers, Angela Carter left behind a dazzling array of work: essays, citicism, and fiction. But it is in her short stories that her extraordinary talents—as a fabulist, feminist, social critic, and weaver of tales—are most penetratingly evident...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction magical-realism myths retellings 20th-century adult anthologies -
Collected Stories by Gabriel García Márquez
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsCollected here are twenty-six of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's most brilliant and enchanting short stories, presented in the chronological order of their publication in Spanish from three volumes: Eyes of a Blue Dog, Big Mama's Funeral, and The Incredible and Sad Tale of lnnocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult anthologies classics colombia contemporary -
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
Rated: 4.12 of 5 stars · 89 ratingsCharlie Bucket's wonderful adventure begins when he finds one of Mr. Willy Wonka's precious Golden Tickets and wins a whole day inside the mysterious chocolate factory... -
Dialogues with Leucò by Cesare Pavese
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsA series of dialogues between mythological figures, treating the question of human destiny as the personal content of myths. In his foreword, Pavese elaborates on his method in the Dialogues: "What is more acutely disturbing than to see familiar scenes troubled into new life? . . . A true revelation, I am convinced, can only emerge from stubborn concentration on a single problem... -
The October Country by Ray Bradbury
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsRay Bradbury's second short story collection is back in print, its chilling encounters with funhouse mirrors, parasitic accident-watchers, and strange poker chips intact. Both sides of Bradbury's vaunted childhood nostalgia are also on display, in the celebratory "Uncle Einar," and haunting "The Lake," the latter a fine elegy to childhood loss...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism myths retellings 20th-century action-adventure adult anthologies -
Little Red Riding Hood by Trina Schart Hyman
Rated: 4.12 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsEveryone loves the little girl who wears a red-hooded cloak, but no one more than her grandmother. One day, Grandmother gets sick, and Little Red Riding Hood sets out to visit her, carrying a basket of food as a present...Categorized as:
historical-fiction myths retellings 20th-century action-adventure animals audiobook book -
Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren
Rated: 4.09 of 5 stars · 42 ratingsAstrid Lindgren's story of feisty, red-haired Pippi has been given a sparkling new translation by award-winning Tiina Nunnally and engaging pictures by acclaimed Lauren Child.Pippi Longstocking was first published in the United States in 1950, and has been translated from the original Swedish into ninety-one languages... -
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 53 ratings"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his." So begins Italo Calvino's compilation of fragmentary urban images... -
The Discovery of Heaven by Harry Mulisch
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 35 ratingsHarry Mulisch's magnum opus, is a rich mosaic of twentieth-century trauma in which many themes—friendship, loyalty, family, art, technology, religion, fate, good, and evil—suffuse a suspenseful and resplendent narrative.The Discovery of Heaven begins with the meeting of Onno and Max, two complicated individuals whom fate has mysteriously and magically brought together... -
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Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsOne of the New York Times’s Ten Best Books of the Year: These traditional stories of Italy, retold by a literary master, are “a treasure” (Los Angeles Times)... -
Mama Day by Gloria Naylor
Rated: 4.18 of 5 stars · 32 ratingsA fascinating novel that reworks elements of Shakespeare's The Tempest. On the island of Willow Springs, off the Georgia coast, the powers of healer Mama Day are tested by her great niece, Cocoa, a stubbornly emancipated woman endangered by the island's darker forces... -
The First Four Books Of Poems by Louise Glück
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThe fierce, austerely beautiful voice that has become Glück's trademark speaks in these poems of a life lived in unflinching awareness. Includes "Firstborn", "The House on Marshland", "Descending Figure", and "The Triumph of Achilles"... -
The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, Jefferson Mays
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThe definitive edition of Calvino’s cosmicomics, bringing together all of these enchanting stories—including some never before translated—in one volume for the first timeIn Italo Calvino’s cosmicomics, primordial beings cavort on the nearby surface of the moon, play marbles with atoms, and bear ecstatic witness to Earth’s first dawn... -
How to Become King by Jan Terlouw
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsSeventeen years after the king of Katoren dies, a boy aspires to win the crown and is tested with seven impossible tasks by six Ministers... -
Silver on the Tree by Susan Cooper
Rated: 4.12 of 5 stars · 43 ratingsThe Dark is rising in its last and greatest bid to control the world. And Will Stanton -- last-born of the immortal Old Ones, dedicated to keeping the world free -- must join forces with this ageless master Merriman and Bran, the Welsh boy whose destiny ties him to the Light. Drawn in with them are the three Drew children, who are mortal, but have their own vital part in the story...Categorized as:
historical-fiction low-fantasy myths retellings 20th-century action-adventure arthurian audiobook -
The World's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy
Rated: 4.16 of 5 stars · 29 ratingsBe terrified. It's you I love, perfect man, Greek God, my own; but I know you'll go, betray me, stray from home. So better by far for me if you were stone. from "Medusa"Stunningly original and haunting, the voices of Mrs... -
Dreams Underfoot by Charles de Lint
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 34 ratingsWelcome to Newford…Welcome to the music clubs, the waterfront, the alleyways where ancient myths and magic spill into the modern world. Come meet Jilly, painting wonders in the rough city streets; and Geordie, playing fiddle while he dreams of a ghost; and the Angel of Grasso Street gathering the fey and the wild and the poor and the lost...Categorized as:
low-fantasy magical-realism myths retellings 20th-century action-adventure anthologies audiobook -
The Magus by John Fowles
Rated: 4.05 of 5 stars · 32 ratingsThis daring literary thriller, rich with eroticism and suspense, is one of John Fowles's best-loved and bestselling novels and has contributed significantly to his international reputation as a writer of the first degree. At the center of The Magus is Nicholas Urfe, a young Englishman who accepts a teaching position on a remote Greek island, where he befriends a local millionaire... -
The Book of Sand & Shakespeare's Memory by Jorge Luis Borges
Rated: 4.12 of 5 stars · 36 ratingsThe acclaimed translation of Borges's valedictory stories, in its first stand-alone edition Jorge Luis Borges has been called the greatest Spanish-language writer of the twentieth century. Now Borges's remarkable last major story collection, The Book of Sand, is paired with a handful of writings from the very end of his life... -
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The Witch in the Broom Cupboard and Other Tales by Pierre Gripari
Rated: 4.15 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsAbsurd fairy tales, very sensibly told There once was a good little devil - did you read that right? Yes you did: not a wicked little devil but a good one, and boy, was he in a fix! Instead of doing bad things like forgetting his homework and playing tricks on his teachers, this little devil kept trying to be good... -
The Book of Night with Moon by Diane Duane
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsWizards and sorcerers, some cats even can cast spells and become invisible. They are the guardians of the Gates, weaving and maintaining the magic threads between realities. But when an ancient evil conquers the mystical Gates beneath Grand Central Station, flooding New York with surreal horror from another dimension, a quartet of feline champions is called to defend Earth...Categorized as:
low-fantasy magical-realism myths retellings 20th-century action-adventure animals anthropomorphism -
The Eagle's Gift by Carlos Castaneda
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsCarlos Castaneda takes the reader into the very heart of sorcery, challenging both imagination and reason, shaking the very foundations of our belief in what is "natural" and "logical... -
Lanark by Alasdair Gray
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThis work, originally published in 1981, has been hailed as the most influential Scottish novel of the second half of the 20th century. Its playful narrative techniques convey a profound message, personal and political, about humankind's inability to love and yet our compulsion to go on trying...Categorized as:
literary-fiction low-fantasy magical-realism 20th-century action-adventure adult bildungsroman book -
Литературный призрак (Большой роман) by David Mitchell, Дэвид Митчелл
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 28 ratingsOblivious to the bizarre ways in which their lives intersect, nine characters - a terrorist in Okinawa, a record-shop clerk in Tokyo, a money-laundering British financier in Hong Kong, an old woman running a tea shack in China, a transmigrating "noncorpum" entity seeking a human host in Mongolia, a gallery-attendant-cum-art-thief in Petersburg, a drummer in London, a female physicist in Ireland,...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism historical-fiction low-fantasy asia east-asia japan urban -
The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman by Louis de Bernières
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 27 ratingsThe epic finale of the Latin American trilogy following The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts and Senor Vivo and the Coca LordWhile the economy of his small South American country collapses, President Veracruz joins his improbable populace of ex-soldiers, former guerrillas, unfrocked priests and reformed - though by no means inactive - whores, in a bizarre search for sexual fulfilment...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction low-fantasy magical-realism 20th-century adult book classics -
The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 50 ratingsThis night will be bad and tomorrow will be beyond imagining.It's Midwinter's Eve, the day before Will's eleventh birthday. But there is an atmosphere of fear in the familiar countryside around him. This will be a birthday like no other. Will discovers that he has the power of the Old Ones, and that he must embark on a quest to vanquish the terrifyingly evil magic of the Dark... -
World of Wonders by Robertson Davies
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 29 ratingsHailed by the Washington Post Book World as "a modern classic," Robertson Davies’s acclaimed Deptford Trilogy is a glittering, fantastical, cunningly contrived series of novels, around which a mysterious death is woven...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult book classics coming-of-age -
Tree and Leaf: Includes Mythopoeia and The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth by J.R.R. Tolkien
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 28 ratingsThis volume is a provocative and entertaining collection of works which reveals the diversity of J.R.R. Tolkien's imagination and the breadth of his talent as a creator of fantastic fiction... -
Stone Junction by Jim Dodge
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsCharging like a runaway semitrailer on a downhill grade and spanning the era from Haight-Ashbury's Summer of Love into the darkness of 1980s Manhattan, Stone Junction is a wise and wildly imaginative novel about Daniel Pearse, an orphaned child who is taken under the wings of the AMO -- the Alliance of Magicians and Outlaws...Categorized as:
literary-fiction low-fantasy magical-realism 20th-century adult book classics coming-of-age -
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Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsA powerful being fights for his life within the body of a humble, earthbound puppy.Sirius, immortal Lord of the Dog Star and infamous for his quick temper, cannot believe it when he is falsely accused of murder and banished to Earth. There he is reborn into the body of a puppy and learns that he has the life-span of that creature to recover the missing murder weapon. If he fails, he will die...Categorized as:
low-fantasy magical-realism myths retellings 20th-century action-adventure animals anthropomorphism -
The Bone People by Keri Hulme
Rated: 4.05 of 5 stars · 39 ratingsIntegrating both Maori myth and New Zealand reality, The Bone People became the most successful novel in New Zealand publishing history when it appeared in 1984. Set on the South Island beaches of New Zealand, a harsh environment, the novel chronicles the complicated relationships between three emotional outcasts of mixed European and Maori heritage...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction magical-realism myths 20th-century abuse action-adventure adult -
Ghostwritten by David Mitchell
Rated: 4.05 of 5 stars · 38 ratingsA gallery attendant at the Hermitage. A young jazz buff in Tokyo. A crooked British lawyer in Hong Kong. A disc jockey in Manhattan. A physicist in Ireland. An elderly woman running a tea shack in rural China. A cult-controlled terrorist in Okinawa. A musician in London. A transmigrating spirit in Mongolia...Categorized as:
historical-fiction literary-fiction low-fantasy magical-realism 20th-century adult asia audiobook -
Bailey's Café by Gloria Naylor
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsSet in a diner where the food isn't very good and the ambience veers between heaven and hell, this bestselling novel from the author of Mama Day and The Women of Brewster Place is a feast for the senses and the spirit... -
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands by Jorge Amado
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsIt surprises no one that the charming but wayward Vadinho dos Guimaraes–a gambler notorious for never winning—dies during Carnival. His long suffering widow Dona Flor devotes herself to her cooking school and her friends, who urge her to remarry. She is soon drawn to a kind pharmacist who is everything Vadinho was not, and is altogether happy to marry him... -
Last Call by Tim Powers
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsTwenty years ago Scott Crane abandoned his career as a professional poker player and went into hiding, after a weird high-stakes game played with Tarot cards. But now the cards - and the supernatural powers behind them - have found him again.Crane's father killed gangster Bugsy Siegel in 1948 to become the Fisher King, and to keep that power he is determined to kill his son...Categorized as:
historical-fiction low-fantasy magical-realism myths retellings 20th-century action-adventure adult
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