Books like 'Extinction'
Readers who enjoyed Extinction by Thomas Bernhard also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
historical 20th century comedy psychological action-adventure classics literary-fiction humor historical-fiction journey
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The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
Rated: 4.27 of 5 stars · 78 ratingsThe story takes the form of a series of letters from a senior demon, Screwtape, to his nephew, a junior "tempter" named Wormwood, so as to advise him on methods of securing the damnation of a British man, known only as "the Patient".Screwtape holds an administrative post in the bureaucracy ("Lowerarchy") of Hell, and acts as a mentor to Wormwood, the inexperienced tempter...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction humor literary-fiction 20th-century audiobook book christian -
![Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.]()
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 62 ratingsLibrarian note: Alternate cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.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...Categorized as:
classics drama historical-fiction humor literary-fiction 20th-century adult audiobook -
![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... -
![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...Categorized as:
action-adventure classics historical-fiction humor literary-fiction 20th-century adult book -
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![Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist by Erich Kästner]()
Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist by Erich Kästner
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsGoing to the Dogs is set in Berlin after the crash of 1929 and before the Nazi takeover, years of rising unemployment and financial collapse. The moralist in question is Jakob Fabian, “aged thirty-two, profession variable, at present advertising copywriter . . -
![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...Categorized as:
action-adventure classics drama family historical-fiction humor literary-fiction 20th-century -
![The Farewell Symphony by Edmund White]()
The Farewell Symphony by Edmund White
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsFollowing A Boy's Own Story (now a classic of American fiction) and his richly acclaimed The Beautiful Room Is Empty, here is the eagerly awaited final volume of Edmund White's groundbreaking autobiographical trilogy...Categorized as:
classics drama historical-fiction humor literary-fiction 20th-century adult anthologies -
![Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis]()
Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsUniversally recognized as a landmark in American literature, Elmer Gantry scandalized readers when it was first published, causing Sinclair Lewis to be "invited" to a jail cell in New Hampshire and to his own lynching in Virginia...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction humor literary-fiction 20th-century adult audiobook book -
![The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary]()
The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary
Rated: 3.92 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThe Horse's Mouth, the third and most celebrated volume of Joyce Cary's First Trilogy, is perhaps the finest novel ever written about an artist. Its painter hero, the charming and larcenous Gulley Jimson, has an insatiable genius for creation and a no less remarkable appetite for destruction... -
![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...Categorized as:
action-adventure classics drama historical-fiction humor journey literary-fiction 20th-century -
![Swann in Love by Marcel Proust]()
Swann in Love by Marcel Proust
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThe newest translation of the classic of French literature From the text: But at the age Swann was approaching, where one is already a little disillusioned and where he knows to be content at being in love simply for the pleasure of it, without demanding too much in return, this coming together of two hearts, if it is no longer, as it was in one's youth, the goal that love, by necessity, tends... -
![An Accidental Man by Iris Murdoch]()
An Accidental Man by Iris Murdoch
Rated: 3.80 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsA scintillating novel of fate, accidents, and moral dilemmasSet in the time of the Vietnam War, this story concerns the plight of a young American, happily installed in a perfect job in England, engaged to a wonderful girl, who is suddenly drafted to a war he disapproves of... -
![Titmuss Regained by John Mortimer]()
Titmuss Regained by John Mortimer
Rated: 3.75 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsThe Right Honourable Leslie Titmuss has clawed his way up the Tory government ranks and is now Secretary of State at the Ministry of Housing, Ecological Affairs and Planning (H.E.A.P.), and in pursuit of beautiful widow Jenny Sidonia. But seismic changes are afoot in the beautiful countryside where a new town threatens to engulf his own back garden... -
![زنان فوقالعاده by Barbara Pym]()
زنان فوقالعاده by Barbara Pym
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 25 ratingsExcellent Women is probably the most famous of Barbara Pym's novels. The acclaim a few years ago for this early comic novel, which was hailed by Lord David Cecil as one of ”the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past seventy-five years,” helped launch the rediscovery of the author's entire work...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction humor literary-fiction 20th-century adult audiobook book -
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![Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy]()
Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy
Rated: 3.81 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsDr. Tom More has created a stethoscope of the human spirit. With it, he embarks on an unforgettable odyssey to cure mankind's spiritual flu. This novel confronts both the value of life and its susceptibility to chance and ruin... -
![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:
action-adventure classics drama historical-fiction humor literary-fiction 20th-century audiobook -
![King, Queen, Knave by Vladimir Nabokov]()
King, Queen, Knave by Vladimir Nabokov
Rated: 3.78 of 5 stars · 18 ratings'Of all my novels this bright brute is the gayest', Nabokov wrote of King, Queen, Knave. Comic, sensual and cerebral, it dramatizes an Oedipal love triangle, a tragi-comedy of husband, wife and lover, through Dreyer the rich businessman, his ripe-lipped ad mercenary wife Martha, and their bespectacled nephew Franz... -
![Anglo-Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson]()
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson
Rated: 3.63 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsGerald Middleton is a sixty-year-old self-proclaimed failure. Worse than that, he’s "a failure with a conscience." As a young man, he was involved in an archaeological dig that turned up an obscene idol in the coffin of a seventh-century bishop and scandalized a generation...Categorized as:
classics humor industrial-era literary-fiction victorian 20th-century adult archaeology -
![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...Categorized as:
action-adventure classics drama historical-fiction humor literary-fiction 20th-century adult -
![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)...Categorized as:
action-adventure classics humor literary-fiction 20th-century adult anthologies comedy -
![The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer]()
The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer
Rated: 3.64 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsLibrarian note: Alternative cover edition of ISBN 0140021663"The Pumpkin Eater "is a surreal black comedy about the wages of adulthood and the pitfalls of parenthood. A nameless woman speaks, at first from the precarious perch of a therapist's couch, and her smart, wry, confiding, immensely sympathetic voice immediately captures and holds our attention... -
![The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark]()
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
Rated: 3.73 of 5 stars · 31 ratingsShe was a schoolmistress with a difference. Proud, cultured, romantic, her ideas were progressive, even shocking. And when she decided to transform a group of young girls under her tutelage into the creme de la creme of Marcia Blaine school, no one could have predicted the outcome...Categorized as:
classics drama historical-fiction humor literary-fiction 20th-century audiobook bildungsroman -
![Party Going by Henry Green]()
Party Going by Henry Green
Rated: 3.50 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsA group of rich, spoiled and idle young people heading off on a winter holiday are stranded at a railway station when their train is delayed by thick, enclosing fog. Party Going describes their four-hour wait in a London railway hotel where they shelter from the grim weather and the throngs of workers on the platform below...Categorized as:
classics literary-fiction historical-fiction humor fiction 20th-century historical male-author -
![Ulysses by James Joyce]()
Ulysses by James Joyce
Rated: 3.74 of 5 stars · 65 ratingsIn the past, Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and even unreadable. None of these adjectives, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in a close-focus sort of way) suspenseful... -
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![Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis]()
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
Rated: 3.65 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsProsperous and socially prominent, George Babbitt appears to have everything a man could wish: good health, a fine family, and a profitable business in a booming Midwestern city. But the middle-aged real estate agent is shaken from his self-satisfaction by a growing restlessness with the limitations of his life...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction humor literary-fiction 20th-century adult audiobook book -
![Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K. Dick]()
Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K. Dick
Rated: 3.58 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsThe Glimmung wants Joe Fernwright. Fernwright is a pot-healer - a repairer of ceramics - in a drably utilitarian future where such skills have little value. And the Glimmung? The Glimmung is a being that looks something like a gyroscope, something like a teenaged girl, and something like the contents of an ocean. What's more, it may be divine... -
![Loving by Henry Green]()
Loving by Henry Green
Rated: 3.50 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsOne of his most admired works, Loving describes life above and below stairs in an Irish country house during the Second World War... -
![The Longest Journey by E.M. Forster, Elizabeth Heine]()
The Longest Journey by E.M. Forster, Elizabeth Heine
Rated: 3.43 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsE. M. Forster once described The Longest Journey as the book "I am most glad to have written." An introspective novel of manners at once comic and tragic, it tells of a sensitive and intelligent young man with an intense imagination and a certain amount of literary talent...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction humor industrial-era literary-fiction 20th-century adult audiobook -
![The Soft Machine by William S. Burroughs]()
The Soft Machine by William S. Burroughs
Rated: 3.42 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsIn Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs revealed his genius. In The Soft Machine he begins an adventure that will take us even further into the dark recesses of his imagination, a region where nothing is sacred, nothing taboo... -
![Closing Time by Joseph Heller]()
Closing Time by Joseph Heller
Rated: 3.05 of 5 stars · 29 ratingsRevisiting many of the characters of Catch-22, Joseph Heller's Closing Time is a darkly funny depiction of the moral collapse of the Western world. It features ageing versions of Yossarian, Milo and Sammy Singer and others fighting not the Germans, but The End...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction humor literary-fiction 20th-century adult aging audiobook
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