Books like 'The Missing Piece'
Readers who enjoyed The Missing Piece by Shel Silverstein also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
historical action / adventure comedy psychological 20th century historical classics humor children realistic
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Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 41 ratingsThe perennially popular tale of Alexander's worst day is a storybook that belongs on every child's bookshelf.Alexander knew it was going to be a terrible day when he woke up with gum in this hair.And it got worse...His best friend deserted him. There was no dessert in his lunch bag... -
![Extinction by Thomas Bernhard]()
Extinction by Thomas Bernhard
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe last work of fiction by one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists, Extinction is widely considered Thomas Bernhard’s magnum opus. Franz-Josef Murau—the intellectual black sheep of a powerful Austrian land-owning family—lives in Rome in self-imposed exile, surrounded by a coterie of artistic and intellectual friends... -
![Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, William T. Vollmann]()
Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, William T. Vollmann
Rated: 4.18 of 5 stars · 28 ratingsLouis-Ferdinand Celine's revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every page of this novel. Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty and obscene nihilism... -
![Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith]()
Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsStark lives in Colour, a neighbourhood whose inhabitants like to be co-ordinated with their surroundings – a neighbourhood where spangly purple trousers are admired by the walls of buildings as you pass them. Close by is Sound, where you mustn’t make any, apart from one designated hour a day when you can scream your lungs raw... -
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![Suttree by Cormac McCarthy]()
Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsArguably the masterpiece of a novelist as highly praised and scarcely read as any living writer, the Vintage Contemporaries reprint of Suttree should help to bring McCarthy the readers to match his many awards and voluminous reviews... -
![Monday Begins on Saturday by Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky]()
Monday Begins on Saturday by Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 38 ratingsWhen young programmer Aleksandr Ivanovich Privalov picks up two hitchhikers while driving in Karelia, he is drawn into the mysterious world of the Scientific Research Institute of Sorcery and Wizardry, where research into magic is serious business... -
![Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh]()
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 40 ratingsBrace yourself, America, for Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting—the novel and the film that became the cult sensations of Britain. Trainspotting is the novel that first launched Irvine Welsh's spectacular career—an authentic, unrelenting, and strangely exhilarating episodic group portrait of blasted lives. It accomplished for its own time and place what Hubert Selby, Jr... -
![The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, Jefferson Mays]()
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... -
![Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson]()
Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsAs two pals wander the streets of Belfast in search of something better--a better pint, a better job, a better woman, a better now--readers are treated to their hilarious misadventures, political intrigues, and outlandish schemes... -
![What's Eating Gilbert Grape by Peter Hedges]()
What's Eating Gilbert Grape by Peter Hedges
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsJust about everything in Endora, Iowa (pop. 1,091 and dwindling) is eating Gilbert Grape, a twenty-four-year-old grocery clerk who dreams only of leaving. His enormous mother, once the town sweetheart, has been eating nonstop ever since her husband's suicide, and the floor beneath her TV chair is threatening to cave in... -
![There's A Boy In The Girl's Bathroom by Louis Sachar]()
There's A Boy In The Girl's Bathroom by Louis Sachar
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsWith the new school counselor's help, Bradley begins to see himself as less of a monster and more of an individual capable of believing in himself...Categorized as:
children classics friendship humor realistic 20th-century action-adventure audiobook -
![Forrest Gump by Winston Groom]()
Forrest Gump by Winston Groom
Rated: 3.98 of 5 stars · 35 ratingsMeet Forrest Gump, the lovable, herculean, and surprisingly savvy hero of this remarkable comic odyssey. After accidentally becoming the star of University of Alabama's football team, Forrest goes on to become a Vietnam War hero, a world-class Ping-Pong player, a villainous wrestler, and a business tycoon -- as he wonders with childlike wisdom at the insanity all around him... -
![Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk]()
Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 66 ratingsShe's a catwalk model who has everything: a boyfriend, a career, a loyal best friend. But when a sudden motor 'accident' leaves her disfigured and incapable of speech, she goes from being the beautiful centre of attention to being an invisible monster, so hideous that no one will acknowledge she exists... -
![Factotum by Charles Bukowski]()
Factotum by Charles Bukowski
Rated: 3.93 of 5 stars · 34 ratingsOne of Bukowski's best, this beer-soaked, deliciously degenerate novel follows the wanderings of aspiring writer Henry Chinaski across World War II-era America. Deferred from military service, Chinaski travels from city to city, moving listlessly from one odd job to another, always needing money but never badly enough to keep a job... -
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![The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim]()
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim
Rated: 3.92 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsAnd indeed Mr. Briggs seemed very much interested. He wanted to hear all about everything she had been doing from the moment she got there... -
![Bellwether by Connie Willis]()
Bellwether by Connie Willis
Rated: 3.92 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsConnie Willis has won more Hugo and Nebula awards than any other science fiction author. Now, with her trademark wit and inventiveness, she explores the intimate relationship between science, pop culture, and the arcane secrets of the heart.Sandra Foster studies fads - from Barbie dolls to the grunge look - how they start and what they mean... -
![Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa]()
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa
Rated: 3.92 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsMario Vargas Llosa's brilliant, multilayered novel is set in the Lima of the author's youth, where a young student named Marito is toiling away in the news department of a local radio station. His young life is disrupted by two arrivals.The first is his aunt Julia, recently divorced and thirteen years older, with whom he begins a secret affair... -
![The Scarecrow by Ronald Hugh Morrieson]()
The Scarecrow by Ronald Hugh Morrieson
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 6 ratings'The same week our fowls were stolen, Daphne Moran had her throat cut.' The greatest opening line in New Zealand literature opens this hilarious Gothic melodrama. Klynham is a sleepy little New Zealand town in which not a lot happens. But then one moonlit night the Scarecrow arrives, swilling brandies and looking for victims. Something sordid and even macrabre lies ahead... -
![Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk]()
Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk
Rated: 3.92 of 5 stars · 65 ratingsFrom the author of the underground sensation Fight Club comes this wickedly incisive second novel, a mesmerizing, unnerving, and hilarious vision of cult and post-cult life.Tender Branson—last surviving member of the so-called Creedish Death Cult—is dictating his life story into the flight recorder of Flight 2039, cruising on autopilot at 39,000 feet somewhere over the Pacific Ocean... -
![The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow]()
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsAugie comes on stage with one of literature’s most famous opening lines. “I am an American, Chicago born, and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted.” It’s the “Call me Ishmael” of mid-20th-century American fiction. (For the record, Bellow was born in Canada...Categorized as:
classics historical humor 20th-century action-adventure audiobook bildungsroman book -
![The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson]()
The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson
Rated: 3.84 of 5 stars · 33 ratingsBegun in 1959 by a twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary is a tangled love story of jealousy, treachery, and violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s... -
![Revenge (aka The Stars’ Tennis Balls) by Stephen Fry]()
Revenge (aka The Stars’ Tennis Balls) by Stephen Fry
Rated: 3.78 of 5 stars · 18 ratings"We are merely the stars' tennis balls, struck and --bandied/Which way please them." ----The Duchess of Malfi --by John WebsterEverything about Stephen Fry's new novel, including the title, will be a surprise, perhaps even a shock. The only thing that can be guaranteed is that it will be his next earth-movingly funny bestseller... -
![The Painter of Signs by R.K. Narayan]()
The Painter of Signs by R.K. Narayan
Rated: 3.71 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsFor Raman the sign painter, life is a familiar and satisfying routine. A man of simple, rational ways, he lives with his pious aunt and prides himself on his creative work. But all that changes when he meets Daisy, a thrillingly independent young woman who wishes to bring birth control to the area... -
![Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth]()
Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth
Rated: 3.76 of 5 stars · 23 ratingsIn this outrageously farcical adventure, hero George Giles sets out to conquer the terrible Wescac computer system that threatens to destroy his community in this brilliant "fantasy of theology, sociology, and sex" (Time)... -
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![Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow]()
Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow
Rated: 3.75 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsHenderson has come to Africa on a spiritual safari, a quest for the truth. His feats of strength, his passion for life, and, most importantly, his inadvertant success in bringing rain have made him a god-like figure among the tribes... -
![Felicia's Journey by William Trevor]()
Felicia's Journey by William Trevor
Rated: 3.69 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsWilliam Trevor's Last Stories is forthcoming from Viking.Felicia is unmarried, pregnant, and penniless. She steals away from a small Irish town and drifts through the industrial English Midlands, searching for the boyfriend who left her. Instead she meets up with the fat, fiftyish, unfailingly reasonable Mr. Hilditch, who is looking for a new friend to join the five other girls in his Memory Lane... -
![Number 11 by Jonathan Coe]()
Number 11 by Jonathan Coe
Rated: 3.67 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThis is a novel about the hundreds of tiny connections between the public and private worlds and how they affect us all.It's about the legacy of war and the end of innocence.It's about how comedy and politics are battling it out and comedy might have won.It's about how 140 characters can make fools of us all... -
![The Grotesque by Patrick McGrath]()
The Grotesque by Patrick McGrath
Rated: 3.58 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsParalysed, mute and confined to a wheelchair, former palaeontologist Sir Hugo Coal recounts the events that led to his 'cerebral accident', as well as his suspicions of his butler Fledge, who he suspects is plotting to replace him as Lord of Crook Manor... -
![The Verificationist by Donald Antrim]()
The Verificationist by Donald Antrim
Rated: 3.42 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsWith The Verificationist , Donald Antrim, acclaimed author of The Hundred Brothers , confirms his place as one of America's strangest and fiercely intelligent young writers.One April night, a group of psychologists from the Krakower Institute meet at a pancake house, where they order breakfast foods and engage in shop talk and the occasional flirtation...Categorized as:
humor fiction literary-fiction magical-realism contemporary postmodernism psychological satire -
![The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon]()
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
Rated: 3.69 of 5 stars · 36 ratingsThe highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self knowledge... -
![Dead Babies by Martin Amis]()
Dead Babies by Martin Amis
Rated: 3.33 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsIf the Marquis de Sade were to crash one of P.G. Wodehouse's house parties, the chaos might resemble the nightmarishly funny goings-on in this novel by the author of London Fields. The residents of Appleseed Rectory have primed themselves both for a visit from a triad of Americans and a weekend of copious drug taking and sexual gymnastics... -
![A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka]()
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka
Rated: 3.38 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsA Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian was bestselling author Marina Lewycka's bestselling debut novel which has sold over one million copies worldwide. Lewycka tells the side-splittingly funny story of two feuding sisters, Vera and Nadezhda, who join forces against their father's new, gold-digging girlfriend... -
![The Water-Method Man by John Irving]()
The Water-Method Man by John Irving
Rated: 3.33 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsThe main character of John Irving's second novel, written when the author was twenty-nine, is a perpetual graduate student with a birth defect in his urinary tract--and a man on the threshold of committing himself to a second marriage that bears remarkable resemblance to his first...."Three or four times as funny as most novels."THE NEW YORKERFrom the Paperback edition...
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