Books like 'Love Is a Dog from Hell'
Readers who enjoyed Love Is a Dog from Hell by Charles Bukowski also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
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Collected Stories by Raymond Carver
Rated: 4.57 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsRaymond Carver’s spare dramas of loneliness, despair, and troubled relationships breathed new life into the American short story of the 1970s and ’80s. In collections such as Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Carver wrote with unflinching exactness about men and women enduring lives on the knife-edge of poverty and other deprivations...Categorized as:
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Hurry Up, Franklin by Paulette Bourgeois
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsIn this Franklin Classic Storybook, Franklin sets off to Bear's house for a birthday party, but it's far from a straightforward journey. Like most preschoolers, Franklin is a dawdler, slow even for a turtle. The trip becomes an opportunity to play leapfrog with Rabbit, slip and slide in the mud with Otter, and maybe even play hide-and-seek with Fox... -
The Complete Yes Prime Minister by Jonathan Lynn, Antony Jay
Rated: 4.58 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsPresented in the form of diaries, official documents, and letters, rather than simply transcribed scripts, this book is a companion to the successful BBC series, "Yes Prime Minister... -
The Compromise by Sergei Dovlatov
Rated: 4.39 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsBased on Dovlatov's experiences as a journalist in the Soviet Republic of Estonia, this is an acidly comic picture of ludicrous bureaucratic ineptitude, which obviously still continues... -
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Are You My Mother? by P.D. Eastman
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 42 ratingsARE YOU MY MOTHER? tells a very simple story for children who have just started to read. their younger brothers or sisters will also want to follow the baby bird's quest as he asks everyone and everything he meets, "Are You My Mother?".Back in 1957, Theodor Geisel responded to an article in Life magazine that lamented the use of boring reading primers in schools. Using the pseudonym of "Dr... -
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... -
The Collected Stories of Richard Yates by Richard Yates
Rated: 4.31 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsRichard Yates was acclaimed as one of the most powerful, compassionate and accomplished writers of America's post-war generation...Categorized as:
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The Collected Poems, 1957-1987 by Octavio Paz
Rated: 4.31 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsNobel Laureate Octavio Paz is incontestably Latin America's foremost poet. The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz is a landmark bilingual gathering of all the poetry he has published in book form since 1952, the year of his premier long poem, Sunstone (Piedra de Sol)―here translated anew by Eliot Weinberger―made its appearance...Categorized as:
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Pierre: A Cautionary Tale in Five Chapters and a Prologue by Maurice Sendak
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsA story with a moral air about Pierre, who learned to care. Young Pierre, whose favorite line is I don't care! changes his mind after meeting a hungry lion. Three-color illustrations... -
The Collected Stories by Lorrie Moore
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsSince the publication of Self-Help, her first collection of stories, Lorrie Moore has been hailed as one of the greatest and most influential voices in American fiction...Categorized as:
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The Mixed Up Chameleon by Eric Carle
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsThe chameleon's life was not very exciting until the day it discovered it could change not only its color but its shape and size,too. When it saw the wonderful animals in the zoo, it immediately wanted to be like them -- and ended up likeall of them at once -- with hilarious results... -
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsWith this, his first collection, Carver breathed new life into the short story. In the pared-down style that has since become his hallmark, Carver showed us how humour and tragedy dwelt in the hearts of ordinary people, and won a readership that grew with every subsequent brilliant collection of stories, poems and essays that appeared in the last eleven years of his life...Categorized as:
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You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense by Charles Bukowski
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsCharles Bukowski examines cats and his childhood in You Get So Alone at Times, a book of poetry that reveals his tender side. He delves into his youth to analyze its repercussions... -
The Colossus and Other Poems by Sylvia Plath
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsWith this startling, exhilarating book of poems, which was first published in 1960, Sylvia Plath burst into literature with spectacular force. In such classics as "The Beekeeper's Daughter," "The Disquieting Muses," "I Want, I Want," and "Full Fathom Five," she writes about sows and skeletons, fathers and suicides, about the noisy imperatives of life and the chilly hunger for death...Categorized as:
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Noises Off by Michael Frayn
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsNoises Off, the classic farce by the Tony Award—winning author of Copenhagen, is not one play but two: simultaneously a traditional sex farce, Nothing On, and the backstage “drama” that develops during Nothing On’s final rehearsal and tour... -
What Work Is by Philip Levine
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsWinner of the National Book Award in 1991 “This collection amounts to a hymn of praise for all the workers of America. These proletarian heroes, with names like Lonnie, Loo, Sweet Pea, and Packy, work the furnaces, forges, slag heaps, assembly lines, and loading docks at places with unglamorous names like Brass Craft or Feinberg and Breslin’s First-Rate Plumbing and Plating...Categorized as:
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Higglety Pigglety Pop! or There Must Be More to Life by Maurice Sendak
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 14 ratings‘A daring imagination has woven a simple rhyme into a brilliantly original tale [about Jennie, the Sealyham terrier, who seeks Experience and becomes the star of the World Mother Goose Theatre].' 'H. ‘Superb fantasy.' 'BL... -
Old Masters: A Comedy by Thomas Bernhard
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsOld Masters (subtitled A Comedy) is a novel by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, which was first published in 1985. It tells of the life and opinions of Reger, a 'musical philosopher', through the voice of his acquaintance Atzbacher, a 'private academic'.The book is set in Vienna on one day around the year of its publication, 1985... -
The Dream Songs by John Berryman
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThis edition combines The Dream Songs, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1965, and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1969 and contains all 385 songs. Of The Dream Songs, A. Alvarez wrote in The Observer, "A major achievement. He has written an elegy on his brilliant generation and, in the process, he has also written an elegy on himself... -
The Brotherhood of the Grape by John Fante
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsHenry Molise, a 50 year old, successful writer, returns to the family home to help with the latest drama; his aging parents want to divorce. Henry's tyrannical, brick laying father, Nick, though weak and alcoholic, can still strike fear into the hearts of his sons. His mother, though ill and devout to her Catholicism, still has the power to comfort and confuse her children... -
Darconville's Cat by Alexander Theroux
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsThe main story is a love affair between Alaric Darconville, an English professor at a Virginia women's college, and one of his students, Isabel.The style relies on complex syntax and unusual words. The satire is broad, and uses southern culture cliches but is often very funny. Some of the names of the girls at the school, for example, are Mimsy Borogoves, Barbara Celarent, and Pengwynn Custiss... -
The Collected Plays, Vol. 1 by Neil Simon
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsThis first volume of The Collected Plays of Neil Simon contains the triumphs that put his unique brand of comic genius on the American stage, and made him the most successful playwright of his generation... -
Mulliner Nights by P.G. Wodehouse, Jonathan Cecil
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsA private detective who can make the guilty confess simply by smiling at them. An artist so intimidated by his morally impeccable cat that he feels compelled to wear formal attire at dinner. A devotee of Proust whose life is turned upside down when he inadvertently subscribes to a correspondence course on "How to Acquire Complete Self-Confidence and an Iron Will... -
Reasons to Live by Amy Hempel
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsIt is always "earthquake weather" in Amy Hempel's California, a landscape where everything can change without warning. Traditional resources—home, parents, lovers, friends, even willpower—are not dependable. And so the characters in these short, compelling stories have learned to depend on small triumphs of wit, irony, and spirit...Categorized as:
classics literary-fiction 20th-century adult anthologies contemporary female-author fiction -
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Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories by Raymond Carver
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsMore than sixty stories, poems, and essays are included in this wide-ranging collection by the extravagantly versatile Raymond Carver. Two of the stories—later revised for What We Talk About When We Talk About Love—are particularly notable in that between the first and the final versions, we see clearly the astounding process of Carver’s literary development... -
The Collected Stories by Grace Paley
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThis reissue of Grace Paley's classic collection—a finalist for the National Book Award—demonstrates her rich use of language as well as her extraordinary insight into and compassion for her characters, moving from the hilarious to the tragic and back again... -
The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThis novel in verse about a group of California yuppies was one of the most highly praised books of 1986 and a bestseller on both coasts... -
Forty Stories by Donald Barthelme
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsThis collection of pithy, brilliantly acerbic pieces is a companion to Sixty Stories, Barthelme's earlier retrospective volume. Barthelme spotlights the idiosyncratic, haughty, sometimes downright ludicrous behavior of human beings, but it is style rather than content which takes precedence... -
The Best of Saki by Saki
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 21 ratingsThe short stories of Saki give brief but dazzling glimpses into the lives of the Edwardian rich; a class that virtually disappeared with the advent of the First World War. With delicious malice, Saki portrays the follies, eloquence, tradition and foibles of his characters... -
Last of the Curlews by Fred Bodsworth
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 6 ratings"The story of this migration is magnificent, informative, breathtaking and exotic". Los Angeles TimesMore than three million readers around the world have been touched by this conservation classic, the story of a solitary Eskimo curlew's last perilous migration and search for a mate. The lone survivor comes to stand for the entirety of a lost species...Categorized as:
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The Daughter of the Manor by Betty Neels
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsWhy did James keep helping her? It was deeply irritating to Leonora Crosby that she was always caught out in awkward moments by the new village doctor, James Galbraith. It shouldn't have mattered—she was engaged to Tony, after all!—but James proved a stalwart support as Leonora did her best to keep her parents' decrepit but much-loved manor house running smoothly... -
Light a Single Candle by Beverly Butler
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsWhen Cathy lost her sight at the age of 14, she faced a very different way of life, where her other senses had to take over the work of her eyes. Adjusting to blindness was often easier than handling the reactions of people. One friend who now avoided her her. Another smothered her with too much kindness... -
Zenobia by Gellu Naum
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsOne of the best-known novels by prolific Romanian avant-garde writer Gelu Naum, Zenobia is the evocation of the singular quest of a Surrealist knight-errant who strives to be true to the gentle demands of his lady in a landscape of snares, desolation, incipient madness, and material poverty magically interrupted by moments of extreme beauty... -
The Poor Mouth: A Bad Story about the Hard Life by Flann O'Brien
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe Poor Mouth relates the story of one Bonaparte O'Coonassa, born in a cabin in a fictitious village called Corkadoragha in western Ireland equally renowned for its beauty and the abject poverty of its residents. Potatoes constitute the basis of his family's daily fare, and they share both bed and board with the sheep and pigs... -
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Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories by Grace Paley
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsSeventeen stories written over the past fifteen years reveal the author's vision of human love and tragedy...Categorized as:
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Selected Stories by Robert Walser, Susan Sontag
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsHow to place the mysterious Swiss writer Robert Walser, a humble genius who possessed one of the most elusive and surprising sensibilities in modern literature? Walser is many things: a Paul Klee in words, maker of droll, whimsical, tender, and heartbreaking verbal artifacts; an inspiration to such very different writers as Kafka and W.G...Categorized as:
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The Wine of Youth by John Fante
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsContains the stories in Dago Red, first published in 1940, together with seven new stories, including "A Nun No More" and "My Father’s God... -
Rosy Is My Relative by Gerald Durrell
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsRosy, the elephant bequeathed to young Adrian Rookwhistle by a reprobate relative, turned out to be a handful: not alone because of her size but also because of her fondness for strong drink. To Adrian she represented the chance to get away froma City shop and a suburban lodging by exploiting her theatrical talent and experience...Categorized as:
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Her Lover by Albert Cohen
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsHandsome, worldly, and intelligent, Solal holds a position of enviable power in 1930s Geneva. But as Under-Secretary-General of the League of Nations, he has become bitterly disillusioned by international affairs and the self-serving people who surround him...Categorized as:
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So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away by Richard Brautigan
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 16 ratings"So the Wind Won't Blow it all Away" is a beautifully-written, brooding gem of a novel - set in the Pacific Northwest region of Oregon where Brautigan spent most of his childhood. Through the eyes, ears and voice of Brautigan's youthful protagonist the reader is gently led into a small-town tale where the narrator accidentally shoots dead his best friend with a gun... -
Fup by Jim Dodge
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsFirst published in 1983, this story is set in the coastal hills of Northern California between 1880 and the present. The tale revolves around three characters: two humans and one duck. Jim Dodge is the author of "Not Fade Away" and "Stone Junction"... -
Short Cuts: Selected Stories by Raymond Carver
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe nine stories and one poem collected in this volume formed the basis for the astonishingly original film “Short Cuts” directed by Robert Altman. Collected altogether in this volume, these stories form a searing and indelible portrait of American innocence and loss...Categorized as:
classics literary-fiction 20th-century adult anthologies contemporary fiction literary -
Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970 by Richard Brautigan
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsA collection of 62 very short stories set in 1960s California, particularly around the author's home town of San Francisco. Richard Brautigan is the author of "Willard & His Bowling Trophies", "Trout Fishing in America", "In Watermelon Sugar" & "A Confederate General From Big Sur"... -
One, No One and One Hundred Thousand by Luigi Pirandello
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsThe great Pirandello's (1867-1936) 1926 novel, previously published here in 1933 in another translation, synthesizes the themes and personalities that illuminate such dramas as Six Characters in Search of an Author... -
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The Odd Couple by Neil Simon, Nathan Lane
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsComedy / 6m, 2f / Int. This classic comedy opens as a group of the guys assembled for cards in the apartment of divorced Oscar Madison. And if the mess is any indication, it's no wonder that his wife left him. Late to arrive is Felix Unger who has just been separated from his wife... -
Auto-da-Fé by Elias Canetti
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 18 ratings"Auto-da-Fé" is the story of Peter Kien, a distinguished, reclusive sinologist living in Vienna between the wars. With masterly precision, Canetti reveals Kien's character, displaying the flawed personal relationships which ultimately lead to his destruction... -
El Camino by Miguel Delibes
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsUpon entering the Royal Spanish Academy in 1975, Miguel Delibes delivered an address which reclaimed El Camino (1950) for the emerging Green movement...Categorized as:
classics humor literary-fiction 20th-century audiobook book coming-of-age contemporary -
In His Own Write by John Lennon
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsAbout The Awful I was bored on the 9th of Octover 1940 when, I believe, the Nasties were still booming us led by Madolf Heatlump (who only had one). Anyway they didn't get me. I attended to varicous schools in Liddypol. And still didn't pass—much to my Aunties supplies... -
Full of Life by John Fante
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThe narrator is an Italian-American writer living in Los Angeles with his pregnant wife, Joyce. As the novel follows the course of Joyce's pregnancy, John deals with Joyce's shifting emotional moods, her growing interest in Roman Catholicism (from which John himself has fallen away), and termite infestation in the house... -
The Little Disturbances of Man by Grace Paley
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsWith a sure and humorous touch, Grace Paley explores the "little disturbances" that lie behind our everyday lives. Whether writing about sexy little girls, loving and bickering couples, angry suburbanites, frustrated job-seekers, or Jewish children performing a Christmas play, she captures the loneliness, poignancy, and humor of human experience with matchless style...
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