Books like 'The Birthday Party'
Readers who enjoyed The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
contemporary 20th century mystery comedy psychological drama classics university absurdism literary-fiction
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 88 ratingsBoisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her... -
![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...Categorized as:
classics drama humor literary-fiction postmodernism university 20th-century action-adventure -
![Franz Kafka's The Castle (Dramatization) by David Fishelson, Aaron Leichter]()
Franz Kafka's The Castle (Dramatization) by David Fishelson, Aaron Leichter
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsNote - This is not the novel by Franz Kafka! For the novel see The... -
![Kiss Kiss by Roald Dahl]()
Kiss Kiss by Roald Dahl
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 33 ratingsIn these dark, disturbing stories Roald Dahl explores the sinister side of human nature: the cunning, sly selfish part of each of us that leads into the territory of the unexpected and unsettling.Originally published in 1960, Kiss Kiss brings together 11 of Roald's macabre adult tales... -
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![Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.]()
Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Rated: 4.05 of 5 stars · 41 ratingsBroad humor and bitter irony collide in this fictional autobiography of Rabo Karabekian, who, at age seventy-one, wants to be left alone on his Long Island estate with the secret he has locked inside his potato barn... -
![Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz]()
Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsA dark, quasi-detective novel, Cosmos follows the classic noir motif to explore the arbitrariness of language, the joke of human freedom, and man’s attempt to bring order out of chaos in his psychological life.Published in 1965, Cosmos is the last novel by Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969) and his most somber and multifaceted work... -
![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... -
![Post Office by Charles Bukowski]()
Post Office by Charles Bukowski
Rated: 3.95 of 5 stars · 40 ratings"It began as a mistake." By middle age, Henry Chinaski has lost more than twelve years of his life to the U.S. Postal Service... -
![The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch, Martha C. Nussbaum]()
The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch, Martha C. Nussbaum
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsBradley Pearson, an unsuccessful novelist in his late fifties, has finally left his dull office job as an Inspector of Taxes. Bradley hopes to retire to the country, but predatory friends and relations dash his hopes of a peaceful retirement... -
![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...Categorized as:
classics drama humor literary-fiction philosophical postmodernism satire 20th-century -
![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... -
![The House of Sleep by Jonathan Coe]()
The House of Sleep by Jonathan Coe
Rated: 3.92 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsLike a surreal and highly caffeinated version of The Big Chill, Jonathan Coe's new novel follows four students who knew each other in college in the eighties. Sarah is a narcoleptic who has dreams so vivid she mistakes them for real events. Robert has his life changed forever by the misunderstandings that arise from her condition. Terry spends his wakeful nights fueling his obsession with movies... -
![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...Categorized as:
classics humor literary-fiction 20th-century action-adventure book comedy coming-of-age -
![The Nice and the Good by Iris Murdoch]()
The Nice and the Good by Iris Murdoch
Rated: 3.86 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsIris Murdoch's richly peopled novel revolves round a happily married couple, Kate and Octavian, and the friends of all ages attached to their household in Dorset. The novel deals with love in its two aspects, the self-gratifying and the impersonal; - The Nice And The Good - as they are embodied in a fascinating array of paired characters... -
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![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 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...Categorized as:
classics drama humor literary-fiction university 20th-century action-adventure adult -
![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...Categorized as:
classics drama humor literary-fiction satire 20th-century 21st-century action-adventure -
![The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace]()
The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace
Rated: 3.84 of 5 stars · 39 ratingsPublished when Wallace was just twenty-four years old, The Broom of the System stunned critics and marked the emergence of an extraordinary new talent. At the center of this outlandishly funny, fiercely intelligent novel is the bewitching heroine, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman. The year is 1990 and the place is a slightly altered Cleveland, Ohio...Categorized as:
classics humor literary-fiction philosophical postmodernism satire university 20th-century -
![Athena by John Banville]()
Athena by John Banville
Rated: 3.63 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsMorrow – a clerkish, middle-aged type encumbered with a chain-smoking dying aunt and a considerable talent for wallowing – is at a loose end when, on two separate occasions, he is beckoned up the stairs of an empty Dublin house. The first is an offer of dubious work, and Morrow soon becomes caught up in a conspiracy to authenticate a series of fake paintings... -
![Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.]()
Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Rated: 3.82 of 5 stars · 39 ratingsDeadeye Dick is Kurt Vonnegut’s funny, chillingly satirical look at the death of innocence. Amid a true Vonnegutian host of horrors—a double murder, a fatal dose of radioactivity, a decapitation, an annihilation of a city by a neutron bomb—Rudy Waltz, aka Deadeye Dick, takes us along on a zany search for absolution and happiness... -
![Filth by Irvine Welsh]()
Filth by Irvine Welsh
Rated: 3.77 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsWith the Christmas season upon him, Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson of Edinburgh's finest is gearing up socially—kicking things off with a week of sex and drugs in Amsterdam.There are some sizable flies in the ointment, though: a missing wife and child, a nagging cocaine habit, some painful below-the-belt eczema, and a string of demanding extramarital affairs... -
![The Face of Another by Kōbō Abe]()
The Face of Another by Kōbō Abe
Rated: 3.77 of 5 stars · 27 ratingsLike an elegantly chilling postscript to The Metamorphosis, this classic of postwar Japanese literature describes a bizarre physical transformation that exposes the duplicities of an entire world. The narrator is a scientist hideously deformed in a laboratory accident–a man who has lost his face and, with it, his connection to other people. Even his wife is now repulsed by him... -
![A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch]()
A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch
Rated: 3.72 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsAs macabre as a Jacobean tragedy, as frivolous as a Restoration comedy, Iris Murdoch's fifth novel takes sombre themes - adultery, incest, castration, violence and suicide - and yet succeeds in making of them a book that is brilliantly enjoyable... -
![American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis]()
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
Rated: 3.82 of 5 stars · 71 ratingsPatrick Bateman is twenty-six and he works on Wall Street, he is handsome, sophisticated, charming and intelligent. He is also a psychopath. Taking us to head-on collision with America's greatest dream—and its worst nightmare—American Psycho is bleak, bitter, black comedy about a world we all recognise but do not wish to confront... -
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![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...Categorized as:
classics drama humor literary-fiction satire 20th-century action-adventure audiobook -
![Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett]()
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Rated: 3.81 of 5 stars · 67 ratingsIn Waiting for Godot, two wandering tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait by a lonely tree, to meet up with Mr. Godot, an enigmatic figure in a world where time, place and memory are blurred and meaning is where you find it. The tramps hope that Godot will change their lives for the better. Instead, two eccentric travelers arrive, one man on the end of the other's rope... -
![The Book of Evidence by John Banville]()
The Book of Evidence by John Banville
Rated: 3.67 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsReturning to Ireland to reclaim a painting that is part of his patrimony, a thirty-eight-year-old man commits a ghastly and motiveless murder, which he confesses in a novel-length narrative... -
![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...Categorized as:
drama humor literary-fiction philosophical satire 20th-century 21st-century action-adventure -
![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 Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis]()
The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis
Rated: 3.72 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsSet at a small affluent liberal-arts college in New England eighties, The Rules of Attraction is a startlingly funny, kaleidoscopic novel about three students with no plans for the future—or even the present—who become entangled in a curious romantic triangle... -
![Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland]()
Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland
Rated: 3.69 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsAndy, Dag and Claire have been handed a society priced beyond their means. Twentysomethings, brought up with divorce, Watergate and Three Mile Island, and scarred by the 80s fall-out of yuppies, recession, crack and Ronald Reagan, they represent the new generation - Generation X... -
![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... -
![The Information by Martin Amis]()
The Information by Martin Amis
Rated: 3.56 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsFame, envy, lust, violence, intrigues literary and criminal - they're all here in The Information. How does one writer hurt another writer? This is the question novelist Richard Tull mills over, for his friend Gwyn Barry has become a darling of book buyers, award committees, and TV interviewers, even as Tull himself sinks deeper into the sub-basement of literary failure... -
![The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro]()
The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
Rated: 3.57 of 5 stars · 36 ratingsLibrarian note: an alternate cover for this edition can be found here.The Unconsoled is at once a gripping psychological mystery, a wicked satire of the cult of art, and a poignant character study of a man whose public life has accelerated beyond his control.The setting is a nameless Central European city where Ryder, a renowned pianist, has come to give the most important performance of his life... -
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![The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark]()
The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark
Rated: 3.47 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsThe Ballad of Peckham Rye is the wickedly farcical fable of a blue-collar town turned upside down. When the firm of Meadows, Meade & Grindley hires Dougal Douglas (a.k.a. Douglas Dougal) to do "human research" into the private lives of its workforce, they are in no way prepared for the mayhem, mutiny, and murder he will stir up... -
![The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart]()
The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart
Rated: 3.54 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsThe cult classic that can still change your life! Let the dice decide! This is the philosophy that changes the life of bored psychiatrist Luke Rhinehart -- and in some ways changes the world as well. Because once you hand over your life to the dice, anything can happen. Entertaining, humorous, scary, shocking, subversive, The Dice Man is one of the cult bestsellers of our time... -
![Emotionally Weird by Kate Atkinson]()
Emotionally Weird by Kate Atkinson
Rated: 3.44 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsA hilarious and utterly original novel about mothers, daughters, and love, by the author of Life After Life.On a weather-beaten island off the coast of Scotland, Effie and her mother, Nora, take refuge in the large, mouldering house of their ancestors and tell each other stories. Nora, at first, recounts nothing that Effie really wants to hear--like who her real father was...Categorized as:
humor literary-fiction philosophical postmodernism 20th-century 21st-century adult audiobook -
![Three Bedrooms in Manhattan by Georges Simenon]()
Three Bedrooms in Manhattan by Georges Simenon
Rated: 3.38 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsOne of his most erotic and emotionally charged stories' The Times Two people who didn't know each other and who had come together by a miracle in the great city, and who now clung desperately to each other, as if already they felt a chilly solitude settling in. A divorced actor and a lonely woman, both adrift in New York, meet by chance in an all-night diner... -
![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...Categorized as:
classics drama humor literary-fiction philosophical postmodernism satire 20th-century -
![Amsterdam by Ian McEwan]()
Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
Rated: 3.44 of 5 stars · 31 ratingsOn a chilly February day, two old friends meet in the throng outside a London crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Molly's lovers in the days before they reached their current eminence: Clive is Britain's most successful modern composer, and Vernon is editor of the newspaper The Judge...
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