Books like 'The Carpathians'
Readers who enjoyed The Carpathians by Janet Frame also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
contemporary 20th century magical-realism literary-fiction
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My Sweet Orange Tree by José Mauro de Vasconcelos
Rated: 4.41 of 5 stars · 31 ratingsFifty years after its first publication, the multimillion-copy international bestseller is available again in English, sharing the heartbreaking tale of a gifted, mischievous, direly misunderstood boy growing up in Rio de Janeiro.When the precocious Zeze grows up, he wants to be a poet in a bow tie...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century audiobook book children classics coming-of-age -
![The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano]()
The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsParable, paradox, anecdote, dream, and autobiography blend into an exuberant world view and affirmation of human possibility...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult book classics contemporary fiction -
![Casa Tomada y Otros Cuentos by Julio Cortázar, Luisa Valenzuela]()
Casa Tomada y Otros Cuentos by Julio Cortázar, Luisa Valenzuela
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 15 ratingsWith an introduction by Luisa Valenzuela, this carefully selected anthology not only comprises Julio Cortazar's best short stories but also contains a study of the author's work by Anibal Jarkowski...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult anthologies audiobook classics contemporary -
![Cronopios and Famas by Julio Cortázar]()
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 magical-realism 20th-century adult anthologies classics contemporary fiction -
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![The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Álvaro Mutis]()
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Álvaro Mutis
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsMaqroll the Gaviero (the Lookout) is one of the most alluring and memorable characters in the fiction of the last twenty-five years...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century action-adventure adult anthologies classics comedy -
![All Fires the Fire by Julio Cortázar]()
All Fires the Fire by Julio Cortázar
Rated: 4.30 of 5 stars · 32 ratingsCortazar's stories are like small time pieces, where each polished part moves relentlessly on its own particular path, exercising a crucial and perpetual influence on the mechanism as a whole...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult anthologies classics contemporary fiction -
![What Work Is by Philip Levine]()
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:
literary-fiction 20th-century adult anthologies classics contemporary fiction literary -
![Revenge of the Lawn / The Abortion / So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away by Richard Brautigan]()
Revenge of the Lawn / The Abortion / So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away by Richard Brautigan
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThree unforgettable Brautigan masterpieces reissued in a one-volume omnibus edition. REVENGE OF THE LAWN: Originally published in 1971, these bizarre flashes of insight and humor cover everything from "A High Building in Singapore" to the "Perfect California Day." This is Brautigan's only collection of stories and includes "The Lost Chapters of TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult anthologies comedy contemporary dark-humor -
![Nostalgia by Mircea Cărtărescu]()
Nostalgia by Mircea Cărtărescu
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsMircea Cartarescu, born in 1956, is one of Romania's leading novelists and poets...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult book classics contemporary fiction -
![Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges]()
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...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century action-adventure adult book classics contemporary -
![Bestiary: The Selected Stories of Julio Cortázar by Julio Cortázar]()
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 magical-realism 20th-century adult anthologies classics contemporary fiction -
![Collected Stories by Gabriel García Márquez]()
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 -
![The Burning Plain and Other Stories by Juan Rulfo]()
The Burning Plain and Other Stories by Juan Rulfo
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 35 ratingsA major figure in the history of post-Revolutionary literature in Mexico, Juan Rulfo received international acclaim for his brilliant short novel Pedro Paramo (1955) and his collection of short stories El llano en llamas (1953), translated as a collection here in English for the first time...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult anthologies classics contemporary drama -
![62: A Model Kit by Julio Cortázar]()
62: A Model Kit by Julio Cortázar
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsAs one of the main characters, the intellectual Juan, puts it: to one person the City might appear as Paris, to another it might be where one goes upon getting out of bed in Barcelona; to another it might appear as a beer hall in Oslo...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult book classics contemporary fiction -
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![Teresa Batista, Cansada de Guerra by Jorge Amado]()
Teresa Batista, Cansada de Guerra by Jorge Amado
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsAt thirteen Tereza is sold by her aunt to a ranch owner who treats her like a piece of property, and sexually abuses her. When caught in bed with her lover she defends herself against the ranch owner’s violence with a knife and ends up in jail. Freed by a long-time admirer, she eventually ends up in a brothel...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult book classics contemporary drama -
![The Book of Sand & Shakespeare's Memory by Jorge Luis Borges]()
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...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult anthologies audiobook classics contemporary -
![The Best of Saki by Saki]()
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...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult anthologies classics comedy contemporary -
![Piano Stories by Felisberto Hernández, Julio Cortázar]()
Piano Stories by Felisberto Hernández, Julio Cortázar
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsInhabited by rich, eccentric characters and full of strange and surprising landscapes, this collection of short stories deeply influenced a generation of magical realists.If I hadn't read the stories of Felisberto Hernandez in 1950, I would not be the writer I am today. Because he taught me that the most haunting mysteries are those of everyday life...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult anthologies contemporary fiction low-fantasy -
![Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine by Stanley Crawford, Ben Marcus]()
Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine by Stanley Crawford, Ben Marcus
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsForty years ago I first linked up with Unguentine and we made love on twin-hulled catamarans, sails a-billow, bless the seas . . .So begins the courtship of a certain Unguentine to the woman we know only as “Mrs. Unguentine,” the chronicler of their sad, fantastical tale. For forty years, they sail the seas together, alone on a giant land-covered barge of their own devising... -
![Reader’s Block by David Markson]()
Reader’s Block by David Markson
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsIn this spellbinding, utterly unconventional fiction, an aging author who is identified only as Reader contemplates the writing of a novel. As he does, other matters insistently crowd his mind - literary and cultural anecdotes, endless quotations attributed and not, scholarly curiosities - the residue of a lifetime's reading which is apparently all he has to show for his decades on earth...Categorized as:
literary-fiction 20th-century adult book contemporary fiction historical-fiction philosophy -
![A School for Fools by Sasha Sokolov]()
A School for Fools by Sasha Sokolov
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsHailed by Nabokov as a masterpiece, Sokolov's first novel is set at a school for "disturbed" children outside Moscow...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult book classics contemporary fiction -
![Break It Down by Lydia Davis]()
Break It Down by Lydia Davis
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsPublished to huge acclaim in the US, Lydia Davis's important debut collection of 34 stories seems to assure us that reality is ordered and reasonable. However, as the characters in the stories prove, misunderstanding and confusion are inherent in everyday life... -
![The Yellow Arrow by Victor Pelevin]()
The Yellow Arrow by Victor Pelevin
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThe main character, Andrei, is a passenger aboard the Yellow Arrow, who begins to despair over the trains ultimate destination and looks for a way out as the chapters count down. Indifferent to their fate, the other passengers carry on as usual — trading in nickel melted down fro the carriage doors, attending the Upper Bunk avant-garde theatre, and leafing through Pasternak’s Early Trains...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult alternate-history audiobook book contemporary -
![Dear Shameless Death by Latife Tekin]()
Dear Shameless Death by Latife Tekin
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsA strange magical story of a young girl growing up in modern Turkey, from her birth in a small rural village haunted by fairies and demons to hertraumatic move to the big city. It concentrates on the daughter's struggle gainst her overbearing mother and is both fantastic and hallucinatory...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult book contemporary female-author fiction -
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![Fup by Jim Dodge]()
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"... -
![Către frumusețe by David Foenkinos, Daniel Nicolescu]()
Către frumusețe by David Foenkinos, Daniel Nicolescu
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratings„Dacă nu ar părea tocit de atâta folosire, aș fi ales drept motto al romanului meu acest adagiu al lui Dostoievski: «Frumusețea va salva lumea»“, mărturisea David Foenkinos într-un interviu... -
![Ocean Sea by Alessandro Baricco]()
Ocean Sea by Alessandro Baricco
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 35 ratingsThis haunting, suspenseful tale of love and vengeance by the author of the international bestseller Silk surges with the hypnotic power of the ocean sea. In Ocean Sea, Alessandro Baricco presents a hypnotizing postmodern fable of human malady--psychological, existential, erotic--and the sea as a means of deliverance...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult audiobook book classics contemporary -
![The Lyre of Orpheus by Robertson Davies]()
The Lyre of Orpheus by Robertson Davies
Rated: 4.12 of 5 stars · 27 ratingsHailed as a literary masterpiece, Robertson Davies' The Cornish Trilogy comes to a brilliant conclusion in the bestselling Lyre of Orpheus.There is an important decision to be made...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult arthurian audiobook book classics -
![Stone Junction by Jim Dodge]()
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 magical-realism 20th-century adult book classics coming-of-age contemporary -
![Adventures in Immediate Irreality by Max Blecher]()
Adventures in Immediate Irreality by Max Blecher
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsAdventures in Immediate Irreality, the masterwork of the Romanian writer Max Blecher, vividly paints the crises of "irreality" that plagued him in his youth: eerie and unsettling mirages wherein he would glimpse future events...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult book classics contemporary existentialism -
![House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk]()
House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk
Rated: 4.09 of 5 stars · 27 ratingsThe English translation of the prize-winning international bestseller Winner of the Gunter Grass PrizeNowa Ruda is a small town in Silesia, an area that has been a part of Poland, Germany, and the former Czechoslovakia in the past. When the narrator moves into the area, she discovers everyone--and everything--has a story...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century action-adventure adult audiobook book contemporary -
![Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel García Márquez]()
Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel García Márquez
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsIn Barcelona, an aging Brazilian prostitute trains her dog to weep at the grave she has chosen for herself. In Vienna, a woman parlays her gift for seeing the future into a fortunetelling position with a wealthy family...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult anthologies audiobook classics contemporary -
![The Swimmer by John Cheever]()
The Swimmer by John Cheever
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsNeddy Merrill decides to swim home from a friend's pool party, traveling from fashionable swimming pool to swimming pool on a perfect mid-summer's day. But as night falls and the season begins to change, Neddy sinks from optimistic bliss to utter despair...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult audiobook book classics contemporary -
![Why the Child is Cooking in the Polenta by Aglaja Veteranyi]()
Why the Child is Cooking in the Polenta by Aglaja Veteranyi
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsA nomadic family of circus performers, refugees from Romania, travels through Europe and Africa by caravan. The mother’s death-defying act causes constant anxiety for her two daughters, who voice their fears through a grisly communal fairy tale about a child being cooked alive in polenta—but their real life is no less of a dark fable, and one that seems just as unlikely to have a happy ending...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult audiobook book communism contemporary -
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![Voroshilovgrad by Serhiy Zhadan]()
Voroshilovgrad by Serhiy Zhadan
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsA city-dwelling executive heads home to take over his brother's gas station after his mysterious disappearance, but all he finds at home are mysteries and ghosts...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century 21st-century adult audiobook book contemporary -
![Black Tickets by Jayne Anne Phillips]()
Black Tickets by Jayne Anne Phillips
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsPhillips writes stories that lay bare the suffering and joy of men and women who rarely register in our literature. Here are the abused and the abandoned, the violent and the passive, the impoverished and the disenfranchised who populate the small towns and rural byways of the country. A patron of the arts reserves his fondest feeling for the one man who wants it least...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult anthologies classics coming-of-age contemporary -
![Two Lives by William Trevor]()
Two Lives by William Trevor
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsWilliam Trevor's astonishing range as a writer--his humor, subtlety, and compassionate grasp of human behavior--is fully demonstrated in these two short novels. In Reading Turgenev, a lonely country girl escapes her loveless marriage in the arms of a bookish young man. In My House in Umbria, a former madam befriends the other survivors of a terrorist bombing with surprising results... -
![Catastrophe: And Other Stories by Dino Buzzati]()
Catastrophe: And Other Stories by Dino Buzzati
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsIn Catastrophe, the renowned Italian short story writer Dino Buzzati brings vividly to life the slow and quietly terrifying collapse of our known, everyday world. In stories touched by the fantastical and the strange, and filled with humor, irony, and menace, Buzzati illuminates the nightmarish side of our ordinary existence...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult anthologies classics contemporary fiction -
![Blinding by Mircea Cărtărescu]()
Blinding by Mircea Cărtărescu
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsPart visceral dream-memoir, part fictive journey through a hallucinatory Bucharest, Mircea Cărtărescu's BLINDING was one of the most widely heralded literary sensations in contemporary Romania, and a bestseller from the day of its release...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult book contemporary family fiction -
![In the Penny Arcade by Steven Millhauser]()
In the Penny Arcade by Steven Millhauser
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsThe seven stories of In the Penny Arcade blend both the real and the fantastic in a seductive mix that illuminates the full range of Steven Millhauser's gifts, from 'August Eschenburg', the story of a clockmaker's son whose extraordinary talent for creating animated figures is lost on a world whose taste for the perverse and crude supersedes that of the refined and beautiful, to 'Cathay', a...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult anthologies contemporary fiction horror -
![An Explanation of the Birds by António Lobo Antunes, Richard Zenith]()
An Explanation of the Birds by António Lobo Antunes, Richard Zenith
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsRui S., a political historian, is unable to accept the circumstances of his life: his mother's death from cancer, his estrangement from his family, his rejection by his first wife and children, his political vacillations and his ambigious feelings for his second wife... -
![The Jade Cabinet by Rikki Ducornet]()
The Jade Cabinet by Rikki Ducornet
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsMade speechless by her eccentric father, the beautiful Etheria is traded for a piece of precious jade. Memory, her sister, tells her story, that of a childhood enlivened by Lewis Carroll and an orangutan named Dr. Johnson and envenomed by the pernicious courtship of Radulph Tubbs, Queen Victoria's own Dragon of Industry...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult book contemporary female-author fiction -
![Hôtel Splendid by Marie Redonnet]()
Hôtel Splendid by Marie Redonnet
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsThese three short novels are the first works to appear in English by a remarkable contemporary French author, Marie Redonnet. Born in Paris in 1947, Redonnet taught for a number of years in a suburban lycée before deciding to pursue a writing career full time...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult book coming-of-age contemporary female-author -
![The Age of Miracles by Ellen Gilchrist]()
The Age of Miracles by Ellen Gilchrist
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsAn observation of family life at its least conventional. These stories portray human longing and love as an elderly couple find joy and recognition, a physician tries to mould his lover into the image of his dead wife and some children kidnap their mother to stop her having a facelift...Categorized as:
literary-fiction 20th-century adult anthologies contemporary female-author fiction humor -
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![Lands of Memory by Felisberto Hernández, Esther Allen]()
Lands of Memory by Felisberto Hernández, Esther Allen
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsLands of Memory presents a half-dozen wonderful works by one of the greatest yet least-known Latin American writers of the twentieth century. Felisberto Hernández's extraordinary stories have been always greatly prized by other writers, and the two novellas and four stories collected in Lands of Memory show why...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult anthologies contemporary fiction journey -
![The Franchiser by Stanley Elkin, William H. Gass]()
The Franchiser by Stanley Elkin, William H. Gass
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsBen Flesh is one of the men "who made America look like America, who made America famous." He collects franchises, traveling from state to state, acquiring the brand-name establishments that shape the American landscape. But both the nation and Ben are running out of energy... -
![The Abortion by Richard Brautigan]()
The Abortion by Richard Brautigan
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsA reclusive young man works in a San Francisco library for unpublishable books. Life's losers, an astonishing number of whom seem to be writers, can bring their manuscripts to the library, where they will be welcomed, registered and shelved. They will not be read, but they will be cherished. In comes Vida, with her manuscript. Her book is about her gorgeous body, in which she feels uncomfortable... -
![Evening in Paradise: More Stories by Lucia Berlin, Kyla Garcia]()
Evening in Paradise: More Stories by Lucia Berlin, Kyla Garcia
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsA collection of previously uncompiled stories from the short-story master and literary sensation Lucia BerlinIn 2015, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published A Manual for Cleaning Women, a posthumous story collection by a relatively unknown writer, to wild, widespread acclaim...Categorized as:
literary-fiction 20th-century adult anthologies audiobook contemporary female-author fiction -
![The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier]()
The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsA composer, fleeing an empty existence in New York City, takes a journey with his mistress to one of the few remaining areas of the world not yet touched by civilization-the upper reaches of a great South American river. The Lost Steps describes his search, his adventures, and the remarkable decision he makes in a village that appears to be truly outside history...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century action-adventure adult book classics contemporary -
![Autumn in Peking by Boris Vian]()
Autumn in Peking by Boris Vian
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsBoris Vian was a jack of all trades - although unfortunately his name was Boris and "Boris of all trades" never took off as a turn of phrase. But nevertheless Vian was a great songwriter, playwright, singer, jazz critic and, of course novelist so it should have been Boris instead of Jack...Categorized as:
literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult book classics contemporary fiction
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