Books like 'A Proper Marriage'
Readers who enjoyed A Proper Marriage by Doris Lessing also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
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The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa
Rated: 4.42 of 5 stars · 26 ratings"There is a distinguished mind at work beneath the totally acceptable dullness of clerking. The mind is that of Pessoa. We must be given the chance to learn more about him...Categorized as:
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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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The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsHere are sixty-one stories that chronicle the lives of what has been called "the greatest generation." From the early wonder and disillusionment of city life in "The Enormous Radio" to the surprising discoveries and common mysteries of suburbia in "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill" and "The Swimmer," Cheever tells us everything we need to know about "the pain and sweetness of life...Categorized as:
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The Grapes of Wrath/The Moon is Down/Cannery Row/East of Eden/Of Mice & Men by John Steinbeck
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe Grapes of Wrath / The Moon Is Down / Cannery Row / East of Eden / Of Mice and...Categorized as:
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Iza's Ballad by Magda Szabó
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsWhen Ettie's husband dies, her daughter Iza insists that her mother give up the family house in the countryside and move to Budapest. Displaced from her community and her home, Ettie tries to find her place in this new life, but can't seem to get it right...Categorized as:
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The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov by Vladimir Nabokov
Rated: 4.30 of 5 stars · 29 ratingsFrom the writer who shocked and delighted the world with his novels Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, and so many others, comes a magnificent collection of stories. Written between the 1920s and 1950s, these sixty-five tales—eleven of which have been translated into English for the first time—display all the shades of Nabokov's imagination...Categorized as:
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What's Bred in the Bone by Robertson Davies
Rated: 4.26 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsFrancis Cornish was always good at keeping secrets. From the well-hidden family secret of his childhood to his mysterious encounters with a small-town embalmer, an expert art restorer, a Bavarian countess, and various masters of espionage, the events in Francis's life were not always what they seemed...Categorized as:
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Winter Solstice by Rosamunde Pilcher
Rated: 4.15 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsHer captivating bestseller of loss and the healing power of love now re-issued with a stunning new jacket look. Elfrida Phipps loves her new life in the pretty Hampshire village. She has a tiny cottage, her faithful dog Horace and the friendship of the neighbouring Blundells - particularly Oscar - to ensure that her days include companionship as well as independence...Categorized as:
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Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories by Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsOne of our most imaginative and accomplished writers, Angela Carter left behind a dazzling array of work: essays, citicism, and fiction. But it is in her short stories that her extraordinary talents—as a fabulist, feminist, social critic, and weaver of tales—are most penetratingly evident...Categorized as:
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Night in Question by Tobias Wolff
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsAuthor most recently of a stunningly clear-eyed memoir, This Boy's Life, Tobias Wolff's new collection of short stories maintains a similar steady gaze on his fictional creations. The author steels himself with a fine sense of irony and an awareness of moral ambiguity against the unjust suffering that is part of life...Categorized as:
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Fear by Stefan Zweig
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsFinding her comfortable bourgeois existence as wife and mother predictable after eight years of marriage, Irene Wagner brings a little excitement into it by starting an affair with a rising young pianist. Her lover’s former mistress begins blackmailing her, threatening to give her secret away to her husband. Irene is soon in the grip of agonizing fear... -
Immortality by Milan Kundera
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 28 ratingsThis breathtaking, reverberating survey of human nature finds Kundera still attempting to work out the meaning of life, without losing his acute sense of humour. It is one of those great unclassifiable masterpieces that appear once every twenty years or so.'It will make you cleverer, maybe even a better lover. Not many novels can do that...Categorized as:
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Letter from an Unknown Woman: The Fowler Snared by Stefan Zweig
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 28 ratingsThis story of distorted passion and behaviour reveals the unrequited love of a woman for a man who cares so little for her that he fails to recognize her as she obsessively pursues him. Also included is The Fowler Snared, sharing a similar theme, only it is the man whose passion is unrequited...Categorized as:
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The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse, Theodore Ziolkowski
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 29 ratingsThe final novel of Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game is a fascinating tale of the complexity of modern life as well as a classic of modern literature.Set in the twenty-third century, The Glass Bead Game is the story of Joseph Knecht, who has been raised in Castalia, the remote place his society has provided for the intellectual elite to grow and flourish...Categorized as:
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The Lime Works: A Novel (Vintage International) by Thomas Bernhard
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsFor five years, Konrad has imprisoned himself and his crippled wife in an abandoned lime works where he’s conducted odd auditory experiments and prepared to write his masterwork, The Sense of Hearing. As the story begins, he’s just blown the head off his wife with the Mannlicher carbine she kept strapped to her wheelchair... -
What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsWhat Makes Sammy Run?Everyone of us knows someone who runs. He is one of the symp-toms of our times—from the little man who shoves you out of the way on the street to the go-getter who shoves you out of a job in the office to the Fuehrer who shoves you out of the world. And all of us have stopped to wonder, at some time or another, what it is that makes these people tick...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult anti-hero book comedy -
A Clean Well Lighted Place by Ernest Hemingway
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 18 ratings"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" is a short story by American author Ernest Hemingway, first published in Scribner's Magazine in 1933; it was also included in his collection Winner Take Nothing (1933).James Joyce once remarked: "He [Hemingway] has reduced the veil between literature and life, which is what every writer strives to do. Have you read 'A Clean Well-Lighted Place'?... It is masterly...Categorized as:
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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...Categorized as:
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A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 26 ratings"When A Single Man was originally published, it shocked many by its frank, sympathetic, and moving portrayal of a gay man in midlife. George, the protagonist, is adjusting to life on his own after the sudden death of his partner, determined to persist in the routines of his daily life...Categorized as:
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Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle by Vladimir Nabokov
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 35 ratingsPublished two weeks after his seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of Nabokov's greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest. But more: it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue...Categorized as:
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Of Mice and Mooshaber by Ladislav Fuks, Mark Corner
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsLadislav Fuks (1923-94) was an outstanding Czech writer whose work, consisting primarily of psychological fiction, explores themes of anxiety and life in totalitarian systems... -
The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and the Stories by Nella Larsen, Marita Golden
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsA light-skinned beauty who spends years passing for white finds herself dangerously drawn to an old friend's Harlem neighborhood. A restless young mulatto tries desperately to find a comfortable place in a world in which she sees herself as a perpetual outsider. A mother's confrontation with tragedy tests her loyalty to her race...Categorized as:
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The Knot of Vipers by François Mauriac, David Lodge
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThe masterpiece of one of the greatest modern Catholic writersthe divine grace that remains available to each of us until the very moment of our deaths. It is the unforgettable tale of the battle for one man's soul...Categorized as:
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Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You: 13 Stories by Alice Munro
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsIn the thirteen stories in her remarkable second collection, Alice Munro demonstrates the precise observation, straightforward prose style, and masterful technique that led no less a critic than John Updike to compare her to Chekhov...Categorized as:
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A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsFrederick Exley's inimitable "fictional memoir" A Fan's Notes has assumed the status of a classic since its first publication in 1968. Mordantly and poignantly, Exley describes the profound failures of his life; professional, sexual, and personal...Categorized as:
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Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratings**Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature**A woman haunted by dreams of her dead mother. An adulterous couple stepping over the line where the initial excitement ends and the pain begins. A widow visiting a Scottish village in search of her husband's past - and instead discovering unsettling truths about a total stranger...Categorized as:
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Rock Springs by Richard Ford
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsIn these ten stories, Ford mines literary gold from the wind-scrubbed landscape of the American West--and from the guarded hopes and gnawing loneliness of the people who live there. Rock Springs is a masterpiece of taut narration, cleanly chiseled prose, and empathy so generous that it feels like a kind of grace...Categorized as:
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Dreams from Bunker Hill by John Fante
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsMy first collision with fame was hardly memorable. I was a busboy at Marx's Deli. The year was 1934. The place was Third and Hill, Los Angeles. I was twenty-one years old, living in a world bounded on the west by Bunker Hill, on the east by Los Angeles Street, on the south by Pershing Square, and on the north by Civic Center... -
Schoolgirl by Osamu Dazai
Rated: 4.05 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsThe novella that first propelled Dazai into the literary elite of post-war Japan. Essentially the start of Dazai's career, Schoolgirl gained notoriety for its ironic and inventive use of language. Now it illuminates the prevalent social structures of a lost time, as well as the struggle of the individual against them--a theme that occupied Dazai's life both personally and professionally...Categorized as:
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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... -
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... -
World of Wonders by Robertson Davies
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 29 ratingsHailed by the Washington Post Book World as "a modern classic," Robertson Davies’s acclaimed Deptford Trilogy is a glittering, fantastical, cunningly contrived series of novels, around which a mysterious death is woven...Categorized as:
classics historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult book coming-of-age contemporary -
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:
historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century action-adventure adult audiobook book contemporary -
The Joke by Milan Kundera
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 28 ratingsThe authoritative version of the brilliant first novel by the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. A great novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried, in a completely revised translation that is nothing less than the restoration of a classic...Categorized as:
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A Heart So White by Javier Marías
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsAn alternate cover of this ISBN can be found here.Javier Marías's A Heart So White chronicles with unnerving insistence the relentless power of the past. Juan knows little of the interior life of his father Ranz; but when Juan marries, he begins to consider the past anew, and begins to ponder what he doesn't really want to know...Categorized as:
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Lying on the Couch by Irvin D. Yalom
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsFrom the bestselling author of Love's Executioner and When Nietzsche Wept comes a provocative exploration of the unusual relationships three therapists form with their patients. Seymour is a therapist of the old school who blurs the boundary of sexual propriety with one of his clients... -
Birdy by William Wharton
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsHailed upon its publication as "a classic for readers not yet born" (Philadelphia Inquirer), Birdy is an inventive, hypnotic novel about friendship and family, dreaming and surviving, love and war, madness and beauty, and, above all, "birdness...Categorized as:
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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... -
Open Secrets: Stories by Alice Munro
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsIn these eight tales, Munro evokes the devastating power of old love suddenly recollected. She tells of vanished schoolgirls and indentured frontier brides and an eccentric recluse who, in the course of one surpassingly odd dinner party, inadvertently lands herself a wealthy suitor from exotic Australia...Categorized as:
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Wittgenstein's Nephew by Thomas Bernhard
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsIt is 1967. In separate wings of a Viennese hospital, two men lie bedridden. The narrator, Thomas Bernhard, is stricken with a lung ailment; his friend Paul, nephew of the celebrated philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, is suffering from one of his periodic bouts of madness...Categorized as:
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Linden Hills by Gloria Naylor
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsA world away from Brewster Place, yet intimately connected to it, lies Linden Hills. With its showcase homes, elegant lawns, and other trappings of wealth, Linden Hills is not unlike other affluent black communities. But residence in this community is indisputable evidence of "making it...Categorized as:
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The Lonely Passion Of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 16 ratings'The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne' launched Brian Moore's distinguished literary career and also – because of his sensitive portrayal of her – enshrined Judith Hearne in the gallery of literature's unforgettable women. A penetrating, comic, tragic tale of a plain woman, it is a novel that occasionally sings with the lilt of the Irish greats...Categorized as:
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Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsAn intricate and self-reflective novel about that most delicate of relationships--meaning the one between writers and readers. The narrator, an anonymous graduate student, sets off on the trail of a French novelist named Paul Michel, who is currently confined to an asylum...Categorized as:
classics literary-fiction 20th-century adult book contemporary female-author fiction -
In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories by William H. Gass
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsIN THIS SUITE of five short pieces -- one of the unqualified literary masterpieces of the American 1960s -- William Gass finds five beautiful forms in which to explore the signature theme of his fiction: the solitary soul’s poignant, conflicted, and doomed pursuit of love and community...Categorized as:
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Nightwork by Irwin Shaw
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsA dead man’s briefcase presents a down-on-his-luck pilot with the chance of a lifetime.Pilot Douglas Grimes’s best days are long behind him. Grounded due to a medical condition, Douglas has resigned himself to menial work as a desk clerk at a seedy hotel. But his fortune flips when he discovers a hotel guest dead from a heart attack and, next to him, a tube jammed with hundred-dollar bills...Categorized as:
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Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant, Lorna Raver
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsMavis Gallant is an undisputed master of the short story whose peerless prose captures the range of human experience while evoking time and place with unequaled skill. This new collection of 15 of Gallant's stories, edited by best-selling author Michael Ondaatje, gathers the best of her many stories set in Europe and Paris, where Gallant has long lived...Categorized as:
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Aurélia and Other Writings by Gérard de Nerval
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsAurelia is French poet and novelist Gerard de Nerval's account of his descent into madness--a condition provoked in part by his unrequited passion for an actress named Jenny Colon...Categorized as:
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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:
classics literary-fiction 20th-century adult anthologies contemporary fiction horror -
White Walls: Collected Stories by Tatyana Tolstaya
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsTatyana Tolstaya's short stories — with their unpredictable fairy-tale plots, appealingly eccentric characters, and stylistic abundance and flair — established her in the 1980s as one of modern Russia's finest writers. Since then her work has been translated throughout the world. Edna O'Brien has called Tolstaya "an enchantress." Anita Desai has spoken of her work's "richness and ardent life...Categorized as:
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The Clown by Heinrich Böll
Rated: 3.96 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsAcclaimed entertainer Hans Schnier collapses when his beloved Marie leaves him because he won’t marry her within the Catholic Church. The desertion triggers a searing re-examination of his life—the loss of his sister during the war, the demands of his millionaire father and the hypocrisies of his mother, who first fought to “save” Germany from the Jews, then worked for “reconciliation” afterwards...Categorized as:
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