Books like 'The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works'
Readers who enjoyed The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works by William Shakespeare also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
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Ascendance of a Bookworm: Part 5 Volume 9 by Miya Kazuki, 香月 美夜
Rated: 4.60 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsThe Battle of Gerlach begins at last. Together with Matthias, Rozemyne must defeat the cold-blooded giebe Grausam—but an unexpected development makes that easier said than done. Body doubles, collateral damage, even more dark plots transpiring in the shadows.. -
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...Categorized as:
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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:
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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... -
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The Humans by Matt Haig
Rated: 4.09 of 5 stars · 63 ratingsBody-snatching has never been so heartwarming . . .The Humans is a funny, compulsively readable novel about alien abduction, mathematics, and that most interesting subject of all: ourselves. Combine Douglas Adams’s irreverent take on life, the universe, and everything with a genuinely moving love story, and you have some idea of the humor, originality, and poignancy of Matt Haig’s latest novel... -
Dead Men's Trousers by Irvine Welsh
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsA spectacular return of the wild, dissolute gang from Trainspotting, from the author the New York Times called “Blisteringly funny…. ”The gang from Trainspotting have mostly cleaned up their act…until they are drawn back together to Scotland for one last scheme—a scheme one of them won’t survive. It’s an action-packed, hilarious and rollicking trip, as well as a moving elegy to the crew... -
The Illicit Happiness of Other People by Manu Joseph
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsOusep Chacko, journalist and failed novelist, prides himself on being “the last of the real men.” This includes waking neighbors upon returning late from the pub. His wife Mariamma stretches their money, raises their two boys, and, in her spare time, gleefully fantasizes about Ousep dying... -
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
Rated: 4.02 of 5 stars · 47 ratingsAn international sensation, this hilarious, feel-good novel is narrated by an oddly charming and socially challenged genetics professor on an unusual quest: to find out if he is capable of true love.Don Tillman, professor of genetics, has never been on a second date...Categorized as:
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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... -
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...Categorized as:
classics drama historical-fiction humor literary-fiction university 20th-century adult -
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... -
Blister by Jeff Strand
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThey call her Blister. She’s a hideously disfigured twenty-three year-old woman, living in a shed next to her father’s house, hidden away from the world.Jason Tray is a successful cartoonist, banished to his agent’s lakeside cabin for a few days of mandatory rest and relaxation... -
Mystery Man by Colin Bateman
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsA superbly gripping and blackly funny mystery by the king of the comic crime caper. He's the Man With No Name and the owner of No Alibis, a mystery bookshop in Belfast. But when a detective agency next door goes bust, the agency's clients start calling into his shop asking him to solve their cases. It's not as if there's any danger involved... -
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin, 嘉布莉·麗文
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 72 ratingsOn the faded Island Books sign hanging over the porch of the Victorian cottage is the motto “No Man Is an Island; Every Book Is a World.” A. J. Fikry, the irascible owner, is about to discover just what that truly means.A. J. Fikry’s life is not at all what he expected it to be... -
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Strawberries by Casey Bartsch
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsStrawberries is the name he has been given. When they let him out, they had no way of knowing what he was. A psychopath. A killer. The body count is at twenty already, and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. Agent Harry Bland can’t see one anyway. He doesn’t have a single clue to go on. It doesn’t help that his mind won’t focus. His heart just isn’t in it anymore... -
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...Categorized as:
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Skagboys by Irvine Welsh
Rated: 3.96 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsMark Renton has it all: he's good-looking, young, with a pretty girlfriend and a place at university. But there's no room for him in the 1980s. Thatcher's government is destroying working-class communities across Britain, and the post-war certainties of full employment, educational opportunity and a welfare state are gone...Categorized as:
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Rabbit Cake by Annie Hartnett
Rated: 3.95 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsThis is a darkly comic novel about a young girl named Elvis trying to figure out her place in a world without her mother. Twelve-year-old Elvis Babbitt has a head for the facts: she knows science proves yellow is the happiest color, she knows a healthy male giraffe weighs about 3,000 pounds, and she knows that the naked mole rat is the longest living rodent... -
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
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... -
Crazy in Alabama by Mark Childress
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsFamily tumult and nationwide social unrest converge to shake the world of 12-year-old orphan Peejoe Bullis in the summer of 1965, "when everybody went crazy in Alabama...Categorized as:
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Anima Rising by Christopher Moore
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsFrom New York Times bestselling author Christopher Moore comes a hilariously deranged tale of a mad scientist, a famous painter, and an undead woman’s electrifying journey of self-discovery.Vienna, 1911. Gustav Klimt, the most famous painter in the Austrian Empire, the darling of Viennese society, spots a woman’s nude body in the Danube canal...Categorized as:
historical-fiction humor literary-fiction fantasy fiction audiobook historical comedy -
Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville
Rated: 3.93 of 5 stars · 32 ratingsAcademics hail it as the beginning of modernism, but to readers around the world—even those daunted by Moby-Dick—Bartleby the Scrivener is simply one of the most absorbing and moving novellas ever...Categorized as:
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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:
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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...Categorized as:
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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 President's Hat by Antoine Laurain
Rated: 3.96 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsDining alone in an elegant Parisian brasserie, accountant Daniel Mercier can hardly believe his eyes when President François Mitterrand sits down to eat at the table next to him.Daniel’s thrill at being in such close proximity to the most powerful man in the land persists even after the presidential party has gone, which is when he discovers that Mitterrand’s black felt hat has been left behind...Categorized as:
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Observatory Mansions by Edward Carey, محمد غفوری
Rated: 3.96 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsOnce the Orme family’s magnificent ancestral estate, Observatory Mansions is now a crumbling apartment complex, home to an eccentric group of misfits. One of them is Francis Orme, who earns his livelihood as a living statue. When not practicing “inner and outer stillness,” Francis steals the cherished possessions of others to add to his private museum... -
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
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... -
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...Categorized as:
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Rock-a-bye Baby by Willow Rose
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsLisa Rasmussen just had a baby and everything in her life seems perfect at this point. Only she wishes that everyone else around her would be as flawless as she is and stop getting in her way. And if they won't listen, then she'll make them.ROCK-A-BYE BABY, is a thriller novella from Willow Rose, author of the International Bestselling horror-series starring the Danish reporter Rebekka Franck...Categorized as:
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Blackburn by Bradley Denton, Marcella Dallatorre
Rated: 3.89 of 5 stars · 11 ratingsBlackburn is a serial killer. But, like the rest of us, he confronts the same hypocrisies and frustrations of the world and, unable to help himself, or at the mercy of circumstance, he crosses a dangerous threshold--and he kills. In this novel, we meet many of his twenty-one victims: law enforcers, writers, adulterers, auto mechanics, and other liars... -
Espresso Tales by Alexander McCall Smith
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 24 ratings44 SCOTLAND STREET - Book 2The residents and neighbors of 44 Scotland Street and the city of Edinburgh come to vivid life in these gently satirical, wonderfully perceptive serial novels, featuring six-year-old Bertie, a remarkably precocious boy—just ask his mother. Back are all our favorite denizens of a Georgian townhouse in Edinburgh... -
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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:
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The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether by Edgar Allan Poe
Rated: 3.75 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThe story follows an unnamed narrator who visits a mental institution in southern France (more accurately, a "Maison de Santé") known for a revolutionary new method of treating mental illnesses called the "system of soothing". A companion with whom he is travelling knows Monsieur Maillard, the originator of the system, and makes introductions before leaving the narrator...Categorized as:
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Rant by Chuck Palahniuk
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 34 ratingsBuster “Rant” Casey just may be the most efficient serial killer of our time. A high school rebel, Rant Casey escapes from his small town home for the big city where he becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing. Rant Casey will die a spectacular highway death, after which his friends gather the testimony needed to build an oral history of his short, violent life...Categorized as:
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I Am Stalker by Ashley S. Clancy, Jimmy Tudeski
Rated: 3.70 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsWhat exactly is a stalker? What if you were ever watched and stalked yourself? Would you ever trust a man just out of prison, convicted of indecency and stalking crimes? Now you must decide, because he's here!The final book and last ever thriller to be written by Ashley.S Clancy and said to be her best work yet... -
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:
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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... -
The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau by Graeme Macrae Burnet
Rated: 3.78 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsManfred Baumann is a loner. Socially awkward and perpetually ill at ease, he spends his evenings quietly drinking and surreptitiously observing Adele Bedeau, the sullen but alluring waitress at a drab bistro in the unremarkable small French town of Saint-Louis... -
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:
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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.
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... -
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Fra Keeler by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Rated: 3.50 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsThe debut novel from PEN/Faulkner award-winning author of Call Me Zebra and Savage Tongues is a comic psychological thriller, an absurdist journey into the heart of darkness.A man purchases a house, the house of Fra Keeler, moves in, and begins investigating the circumstances of the latter's death...Categorized as:
literary-fiction humor fiction mystery horror philosophical contemporary psychological -
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... -
Kiss the Girls and Make Them Spy: An Original Jane Bond Parody by Mabel Maney
Rated: 3.50 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsSometimes the Best Bond for a Job is a Jane ... Jane Bond."What's the story on Bond?""Your man is a homicidal depressive paranoiac," the doctor reported."I know that. I want to know what's wrong with him!And be straight with me, man. No medical mumbo jumbo.""He's lost his nerve." N. had suspected as much. After a long while spent staring at the jagged skyline of London, N. came to a decision... -
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... -
Company by Max Barry
Rated: 3.72 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsStephen Jones is a shiny new hire at Zephyr Holdings... -
Something Missing by Matthew Dicks
Rated: 3.72 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsA career criminal with OCD tendencies and a savant-like genius for bringing order to his crime scenes, Martin considers himself one of the best in the biz. After all, he’s been able to steal from the same people for years on end—virtually undetected. Of course, this could also be attributed to his unique business model—he takes only items that will go unnoticed by the homeowner...
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