Books like 'Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism'
Readers who enjoyed Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
historical 20th century psychological politics university colonization classics religion social-commentary journalism
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Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsWoman or man? This internationally acclaimed novel looks at the world through the eyes of Jess Goldberg, a masculine girl growing up in the "Ozzie and Harriet" McCarthy era and coming out as a young butch lesbian in the pre-Stonewall gay drag bars of a blue-collar town...Categorized as:
classics politics social-commentary university 20th-century adult book coming-of-age -
Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsA landmark American drama that inspired a classic film and a Broadway revival—featuring an introduction by David MametA blistering character study and an examination of the American melting pot and the judicial system that keeps it in check, Twelve Angry Men holds at its core a deeply patriotic faith in the U.S. legal system... -
Fatelessness by Imre Kertész
Rated: 4.05 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsAt the age of 14 Georg Koves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn’t particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, “You are no Jew... -
Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsPossessing the Secret of Joy is the story of Tashi, a tribal African woman who lives much of her adult life in North America. As a young woman, a misguided loyalty to the customs of her people led her to voluntarily submit to the tsunga's knife and be genitally mutilated (pharoanoically circumcised)... -
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Vladimir Nabokov: Novels 1955–1962 by Vladimir Nabokov
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsThis Library of America volume is the second of three volumes that contain the most authoritative versions of the English works of the brilliant Russian émigré, Vladimir Nabokov.Lolita (1955), Nabokov’s single most famous work, is one of the most controversial and widely read books of its time...Categorized as:
classics politics fiction literary-fiction humor 20th-century psychological historical -
The Spider's House by Paul Bowles, Francine Prose
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsSet in Fez, Morocco, during that country's 1954 nationalist uprising, The Spider's House is perhaps Paul Bowles's most beautifully subtle novel, richly descriptive of its setting, and uncompromising in its characterizations... -
The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre
Rated: 3.96 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsSet in France during the days immediately before World War II, this is the story of Mathieu, a French professor of philosophy obsessed with the idea of freedom. Translated from the French by Eric Sutton... -
The Conformist by Alberto Moravia
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsSecrecy and Silence are second nature to Marcello Clerici, the hero of The Conformist, a book which made Alberto Moravia one of the world's most read postwar writers. Clerici is a man with everything under control - a wife who loves him, colleagues who respect him, the hidden power that comes with his secret work for the Italian political police during the Mussolini years... -
House Taken Over by Julio Cortázar
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratings"Casa Tomada" (English: "House Taken Over") is a 1946 short story by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. It was originally published in Los anales de Buenos Aires, a literary magazine edited by Jorge Luis Borges, and later included in his volume of stories, Bestiario.It tells the story of a brother and sister living together in their ancestral home which is being "taken over" by unknown entities...Categorized as:
classics politics university fiction horror magical-realism literary-fiction fantasy -
A Burnt-Out Case by Graham Greene
Rated: 3.93 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsA famous architect struggling with a crisis of faith escapes to a leper colony in the Congo, in Graham Greene’s “greatest novel” (Time). Querry is a world-renowned architect noted for his magnificent churches, each designed not for the glory of God, but for the satisfaction of self. Suddenly infected with indifference, he has abandoned his pursuit of pleasure... -
Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley
Rated: 3.95 of 5 stars · 35 ratingsWhen the novel Brave New World first appeared in 1932, its shocking analysis of a scientific dictatorship seemed a projection into the remote future. Here, in one of the most important and fascinating books of his career, Aldous Huxley uses his tremendous knowledge of human relations to compare the modern-day world with his prophetic fantasy... -
Amongst Women by John McGahern
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsMoran is an old Republican whose life was forever transformed by his days of glory as a guerilla leader in the War of Independence. Now, in old age, living out in the country, Moran is still fighting - with his family, his friends, even himself - in a poignant struggle to come to terms with the past... -
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 38 ratingsPulitzer Prize Winner (1998)In American Pastoral, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all the twentieth century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss...Categorized as:
classics politics religion social-commentary university 20th-century adult anthologies -
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... -
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1934: A Novel by Alberto Moravia
Rated: 3.63 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsMoravia's political fable about an Italian anti-Fascist and the frightened, suicide-seeking German girl he encounters on a boat to Capri--the setting of Moravia's Il disprezzo from 1954--was welcomed as one of his finest novels...Categorized as:
classics politics fiction 20th-century historical historical-fiction psychological book -
The Simple Past by Driss Chraïbi
Rated: 3.50 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsThe Simple Past came out in 1954, and both in France and its author’s native Morocco the book caused an explosion of fury... -
Thérèse by François Mauriac
Rated: 3.71 of 5 stars · 19 ratingsFrom the moment she walks from court having been charged with attempting to poison her husband, to her banishment, escape to Paris, and final years of solitude and waiting, the life of Thérèse Desqueyroux is passionate and tortured. The victim of a hostile fate, Thérèse, as Mauriac said of her ‘belongs to that class of human beings … for whom night can end only when life itself ends... -
The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon
Rated: 3.70 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsMeet Moses, Galahad, Big City, Tolroy, Five Past Twelve, and other West Indians who have come to London in search of the dream. There to face a reality of racial discrimination, poverty, harsh winters, waiting to see what tomorrow brings. This novel both joyful and sad, is an ode to the survival instinct of the modern immigrant... -
Tristessa (Duluoz Legend) by Jack Kerouac, Aram Saroyan
Rated: 3.67 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsTristessa is the name with which Kerouac baptized Esperanza Villanueva, a Catholic Mexican young woman, a prostitute and addict to certain drugs, whom he fell in love with during one of his stays in Mexico -a country that he frequently visited - by the middle of the fifties... -
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... -
Walden Two by B.F. Skinner
Rated: 3.51 of 5 stars · 29 ratingsThis fictional outline of a modern utopia has been a center of controversy since its publication in 1948. Set in the United States, it pictures a society in which human problems are solved by a scientific technology of human conduct... -
The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen
Rated: 3.36 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsIn The Heat of the Day, Elizabeth Bowen brilliantly recreates the tense and dangerous atmosphere of London during the bombing raids of World War II.Many people have fled the city, and those who stayed behind find themselves thrown together in an odd intimacy born of crisis. Stella Rodney is one of those who chose to stay... -
The Fire Next Time (Hrw Library) by James Baldwin
Rated: 4.53 of 5 stars · 39 ratingsA national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document...Categorized as:
classics colonization politics religion social-commentary university 20th-century adult -
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi
Rated: 4.53 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsIn this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti–Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. Stamped from the Beginning uses the lives of five major American intellectuals to offer a window into the contentious debates between assimilationists and segregationists and between racists and anti-racists...Categorized as:
colonization politics religion social-commentary 20th-century 21st-century audiobook civil-war -
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Warmth of Other Suns, The: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson, Robin Miles
Rated: 4.43 of 5 stars · 38 ratingsIn this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America...Categorized as:
classics journalism politics social-commentary 20th-century 21st-century adult audiobook -
Warmth of Other Suns, The: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson, Robin Miles
Rated: 4.42 of 5 stars · 39 ratingsIn this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America...Categorized as:
classics journalism politics social-commentary 20th-century 21st-century adult audiobook -
James Baldwin : Collected Essays : Notes of a Native Son / Nobody Knows My Name / The Fire Next Time / No Name in the Street / The Devil Finds Work / Other Essays by James Baldwin
Rated: 4.64 of 5 stars · 14 ratings"Collected Essays" is the most comprehensive gathering of Baldwin's nonfiction ever published. The collection confirms his as a uniquely prophetic voice in American letters. Included are such famous essays as "The Harlem Ghetto", "Everybody's Protest Novel", Many Thousands Gone", and "Stranger in the Village"...Categorized as:
classics journalism politics religion social-commentary 20th-century adult anthologies -
Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich, Keith Gessen
Rated: 4.41 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsWritten by the winner of the Nobel Prize in LiteratureOn April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy...Categorized as:
classics journalism politics social-commentary university 20th-century adult anthologies -
Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism by bell hooks
Rated: 4.46 of 5 stars · 24 ratings"Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism is among America's most influential works. Prolific, outspoken, and fearless."-The Village Voice "This book is a classic. It . . . should be read by anyone who takes feminism seriously."-Sojourner "[Ain't I a Woman]should be widely read, thoughtfully considered, discussed, and finally acclaimed for the real enlightenment it offers for social change...Categorized as:
classics politics social-commentary university 20th-century audiobook female-author feminism -
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro
Rated: 4.42 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsOne of the most acclaimed books of our time, winner of both the Pulitzer and the Francis Parkman prizes, The Power Broker tells the hidden story behind the shaping (and mis-shaping) of twentieth-century New York (city and state) and makes public what few have known: that Robert Moses was, for almost half a century, the single most powerful man of our time in New York, the shaper not only of the...
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