Books like 'The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989'
Readers who enjoyed The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 by Samuel Beckett also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
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Death and the Dervish by Meša Selimović
Rated: 4.55 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsDeath and the Dervish is an acclaimed novel by Bosnian writer Mesa Selimovic. It recounts the story of Sheikh Nuruddin, a dervish residing in an Islamic monastery in Sarajevo in the eighteenth century during the Ottoman Turk hegemony over the Balkans. When his brother is arrested, he must descend into the Kafkaesque world of the Ottoman authorities in his search to discover what happened to him...Categorized as:
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When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin D. Yalom
Rated: 4.35 of 5 stars · 33 ratingsIn 19th-century Vienna, a drama of love, fate, and will is played out amid the intellectual ferment that defined the era.Josef Breuer, one of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, is at the height of his career. Friedrich Nietzsche, Europe's greatest philosopher, is on the brink of suicidal despair, unable to find a cure for the headaches and other ailments that plague him... -
Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, D.J. Enright
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsFirst published in 1919, Within a Budding Grove was awarded the Prix Goncourt, bringing the author immediate fame. In this second volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator turns from the childhood reminiscences of Swann’s Way to memories of his adolescence...Categorized as:
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Animal Farm / 1984 by George Orwell
Rated: 4.30 of 5 stars · 72 ratingsThis edition features George Orwell’s best-known novels—1984 and Animal Farm—with an introduction by Christopher Hitchens.In 1984, London is a grim city where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind. Winston Smith joins a secret revolutionary organisation called The Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party...Categorized as:
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The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 66 ratingsAlternative cover for ISBN: 978-0-00-746123-3C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce is a classic Christian allegorical tale about a bus ride from hell to heaven. An extraordinary meditation upon good and evil, grace and judgment, Lewis’s revolutionary idea in the The Great Divorce is that the gates of Hell are locked from the inside... -
The Spinoza Problem by Irvin D. Yalom
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsWhen sixteen-year-old Alfred Rosenberg is called into his headmaster’s office for anti-Semitic remarks he made during a school speech, he is forced, as punishment, to memorize passages about Spinoza from the autobiography of the German poet Goethe. Rosenberg is stunned to discover that Goethe, his idol, was a great admirer of the Jewish seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza... -
Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsThe magnificent second novel from the legendary author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Following the astonishing success of his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey wrote what Charles Bowden calls "one of the few essential books written by an American in the last half century...Categorized as:
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Remembrance of Things Past: Volume III - The Captive, The Fugitive, & Time Regained by Marcel Proust
Rated: 4.55 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe third and final volume includes THE CAPTIVE, THE FUGITIVE, and TIME REGAINED...Categorized as:
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The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsHailed as a masterpiece by critics worldwide, The Last Temptation of Christ is a monumental reinterpretation of the Gospels that brilliantly fleshes out Christ’s Passion. This literary rendering of the life of Jesus Christ has courted controversy since its publication by depicting a Christ far more human than the one seen in the Bible...Categorized as:
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Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 33 ratingsMarcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is one of the most entertaining reading experiences in any language and arguably the finest novel of the twentieth century. But since its original prewar translation there has been no completely new version in English...Categorized as:
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Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 32 ratingsMarcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is one of the most entertaining reading experiences in any language and arguably the finest novel of the twentieth century. But since its original prewar translation there has been no completely new version in English...Categorized as:
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The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig by Stefan Zweig
Rated: 4.43 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe collected stories of Stefan Zweig, one of the most popular writers of short fiction of the twentieth century This collection brings together twenty-three of Stefan Zweig's best-loved short stories. Written in his typically flowing and readable style, these tales are characterised by their pacing, their psychological insightfulness, and above all their pervading humanity...Categorized as:
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The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham
Rated: 4.12 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsBased on the life of Paul Gauguin, The Moon and Sixpence is W. Somerset Maugham's ode to the powerful forces behind creative genius. Charles Strickland is a staid banker, a man of wealth and privilege. He is also a man possessed of an unquenchable desire to create art...Categorized as:
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VALIS & Later Novels: A Maze of Death / VALIS / The Divine Invasion / The Transmigration of Timothy Archer by Philip K. Dick
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsIn 2007, Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s became the fastest selling title in The Library of America's history. The 2008 companion volume, Five Novels of the1960s & 70s, broke series records for advance sales... -
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Collected Stories and Other Writings by John Cheever
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsJohn Cheever’s stories rank among the finest achievements of twentieth-century short fiction. Ensnared by the trappings of affluence, adrift in the emptiness of American prosperity, his characters find themselves in the midst of dramas that, however comic, pose profound questions about conformity and class, pleasure and propriety, and the conduct and meaning of an individual life... -
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 85 ratingsSiddhartha (1922) by Hermann Hesse is a deceptively simple, intense, and lyrical allegorical tale of a man in ancient India striving for enlightenment at the time of Buddha. Siddhartha is a man whose life journey runs in parallel and who may or may not be another version of Buddha himself...Categorized as:
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Ancient Tillage by Raduan Nassar
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsFor André, a young man growing up on a farm in Brazil, life consists of “the earth, the wheat, the bread, our table, and our family.” He loves the land, fears his austere, pious father, who preaches from the head of the table as if from a pulpit, and loathes himself as he begins to harbor shameful feelings for his sister Ana... -
Balthazar by Lawrence Durrell
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThe dazzling second volume of The Alexandria Quartet--an enthralling and deeply disturbing work of gorgeous surfaces and endless deceptions.In Alexandra, in the years before the Second World War, an exiled Irish schoolteacher seeks to unravel his sexual obsession with two women: the tubercular cafe dancer, Melissa, and Justine, the alluring Jewish wife of a wealthy Coptic Christian... -
Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsAs two pals wander the streets of Belfast in search of something better--a better pint, a better job, a better woman, a better now--readers are treated to their hilarious misadventures, political intrigues, and outlandish schemes...Categorized as:
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Hunger by Knut Hamsun
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsOne of the most important and controversial writers of the 20th century, Knut Hamsun made literary history with the publication in 1890 of this powerful, autobiographical novel recounting the abject poverty, hunger and despair of a young writer struggling to achieve self-discovery and its ultimate artistic expression...Categorized as:
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A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 35 ratingsThe last book published during Kafka's lifetime, A Hunger Artist (1924) explores many of the themes that were close to him: spiritual poverty, asceticism, futility, and the alienation of the modern artist. He edited the manuscript just before his death, and these four stories are some of his best known and most powerful work, marking his maturity as a writer...Categorized as:
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A Book of Memories by Péter Nádas, Imre Goldstein
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsThis extraordinary magnum opus seems at first to be a confessional autobiographical novel in the grand manner, claiming and extending the legacy of Proust and Mann. But it is more: Peter Nadas has given us a superb contemporary psychological novel that comes to terms with the ghosts, corpses, and repressed nightmares of Europe's recent past...Categorized as:
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Selected Short Stories by William Faulkner
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsFrom the Modern Library’s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by William Faulkner—also available are Snopes, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!William Faulkner was a master of the short story... -
The Obscene Madame D by Hilda Hilst
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThe English-language debut of one of Brazil’s leading writers of the twentieth centuryThe Obscene Madame D is the first work by acclaimed Brazilian author Hilda Hilst to be published in English. Radically irreverent and formally impious, this novel portrays an unyielding radical intelligence, a sixty-year-old woman who decides to live in the recess under the stairs... -
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Roman Fever (and Other Stories) by Edith Wharton
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsA Virago Modern Classic These stories - all powerful moral analyses - demonstrate the true professionalism of Edith Wharton...Categorized as:
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In Love by Alfred Hayes
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsNew York in the 1950s. A man on a barstool is telling a story about a woman he met in a bar, early married and soon divorced, her child farmed out to her parents, good-looking, if a little past her prime. They’d gone out, they’d grown close, but as far as he was concerned it didn’t add up to much. He was a busy man. Then one day, out dancing, she runs into a rich awkward lovelorn businessman... -
Storming Heaven by Denise Giardina
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsAnnadel, West Virginia, was a small town rich in coal, farms, and close-knit families, all destroyed when the coal company came in. It stole everything it hadn't bothered to buy -- land deeds, private homes, and ultimately, the souls of its men and women...Categorized as:
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The Drinker by Hans Fallada
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThis astonishing, autobiographical tour de force was written by Hans Fallada in an encrypted notebook while he was incarcerated in a Nazi insane asylum. Discovered after his death, it tells the tale—often fierce, often poignant, often extremely funny—of a small businessman losing control as he fights valiantly to blot out an increasingly oppressive society... -
Mysteries by Knut Hamsun
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsMysteries (1892) is the story of Johan Nilsen Nagel, a mysterious stranger who suddenly turns up in a small Norwegian town one summer-and just as suddenly disappears. Nagel is a complete outsider, a sort of modern Christ treated in a spirit of near parody...Categorized as:
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Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsAlternate-cover edition for ISBN 0865470561 / 9780865470569 can be found here The wife of a successful lawyer in 1930s Kansas City, India Bridge, tries to cope with her dissatisfaction with an easy, though empty, life.Before Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique there was Mrs... -
The Ghost Road by Pat Barker
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsAn alternate cover edition can be found here.As World War I winds to a close, two men--Dr. William Rivers, a psychologist whose dedicated healing sends men back to the brutal front, and Billy Prior, a shell-shocked soldier determined to rejoin the final English offensive--are profounded affected by the events of the era. Winner of the 1995 Booker Prize... -
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)... -
Caligula by Albert Camus
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsa new adaptation of Camus' 1944 play by Scottish playwright David...Categorized as:
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Silence by Shūsaku Endō
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 26 ratings"In my opinion one of the finest novels of our time." - Graham GreeneShusaku Endo is Japan's foremost novelist, and Silence is generally regarded to be his masterpiece. In a perfect fusion of treatment and theme, this powerful novel tells the story of a seventeenth-century Portuguese priest in Japan at the height of the fearful persecution of the small Christian community...Categorized as:
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Marat Sade by Peter Weiss
Rated: 4.03 of 5 stars · 19 ratingsThis extraordinary play, which swept Europe before coming to America, is based on two historical truths: the infamous Marquis de Sade was confined in the lunatic asylum of Charenton, where he staged plays; and the revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat was stabbed in a bathtub by Charlotte Corday at the height of the Terror during the French Revolution. But this play-within-a-play is not historical drama... -
Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 42 ratingsA modern classic, Einstein’s Dreams is a fictional collage of stories dreamed by Albert Einstein in 1905, when he worked in a patent office in Switzerland. As the defiant but sensitive young genius is creating his theory of relativity, a new conception of time, he imagines many possible worlds. In one, time is circular, so that people are fated to repeat triumphs and failures over and over...Categorized as:
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Libra by Don DeLillo
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsFrom the author of White Noise (winner of the National Book Award) and Zero KIn this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history...Categorized as:
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The Dead by James Joyce
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsOften cited as the best work of short fiction ever written, "The Dead" is the final short story in the 1914 collection Dubliners by James Joyce... -
The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsDespite the enormous success--both critical and popular--of her novel Ship of Fools, Katherine Anne Porter's reputation as one of America's most distinguished writers rest chiefly on her superb short stories. This volume brings together the collections Flowering Judas; Pale Horse, Pale Rider; and The Leaning Tower as well as four stories not available elsewhere in book form.Go little book..Categorized as:
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In Search of April Raintree by Beatrice Mosionier, Michaela Washburn
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsTwo young sisters are taken from their home and family. Powerless to change their fortunes, they are separated, and each put into different foster homes. Yet over the years, the bond between them grows. As they each make their way in a society that is, at times, indifferent, hostile, and violent, one embraces her Métis identity, while the other tries to leave it behind... -
On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsLewis and Benjamin Jones, identical twins, were born with the century on a farm on the English-Welsh border. For eighty years they live on the farm--sharing the same clothes, tilling the same soil, sleeping in the same bed. Their lives and the lives of their neighbors--farmers, drovers, clergymen, traders, coffin-makers--are only obliquely touched by the chaos of twentieth-century progress... -
The Mirage by Naguib Mahfouz
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsA stunning example of Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz’s psychological portraiture, The Mirage is the story of an intense young man who has been so dominated by his mother that her death sets him dangerously adrift in a world he cannot manage alone.Kamil Ru’ba is a tortured soul who hopes that writing the story of his life will help him gain control of it... -
Fantastic Night & Other Stories by Stefan Zweig
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsFive of Stefan Zweig's most compelling novellas are presented together in this powerful volume. Fantastic Night is the story of one transforming evening in the life of a rich and bored young man. He spends a day at the races and an evening in the seedy but thrilling company of the dregs of society... -
The Vivisector by Patrick White
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsHurtle Duffield, a painter, coldly dissects the weaknesses of any and all who enter his circle. His sister's deformity, a grocer's moonlight indiscretion, the passionate illusions of the women who love him - all are used as fodder for his art... -
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The Collected Short Stories by Jean Rhys
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsJean Rhys was one of the twentieth century's foremost writers, a literary artist who made exqusite use of the raw material of her own often turbulent life to create fiction of memorable resonance and poignancy. Here for the first time in one volume are her complete stories...Categorized as:
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Four Plays: Come Back, Little Sheba / Picnic / Bus Stop / The Dark at the Top of the Stairs by William Inge
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 8 ratings'Inge has presented with astounding veracity the oppressive banality of the lives of his characters: the events of their lives have the nerve-lightening regularity of a dripping faucet. His female characters especially are engulfed by the bathos of their lives, and Inge capitalizes on this fact in order to heighten dramatically the moment of personal crisis which comes to each of them...Categorized as:
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The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue by W.H. Auden
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsThe first critical edition of a poem that named an eraWhen it was first published in 1947, The Age of Anxiety--W. H. Auden's last, longest, and most ambitious book-length poem--immediately struck a powerful chord, capturing the imagination of the cultural moment that it diagnosed and named... -
Eustace Chisholm and the Works by James Purdy
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsHis fifth novel...Categorized as:
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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... -
المجنون by Kahlil Gibran
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 35 ratingsالترجمة الوحيدة التي أقرها جبرانThis thought-provoking collection of strange, subtle, but meaningful parables casts an ironic light on the beliefs, hopes, and vanities of humankind...Categorized as:
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