Books like 'The Man Who Lived Underground'
Readers who enjoyed The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
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The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes
Rated: 4.44 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsOne of his best-known works, Hughes wrote The Ways of White Folks while living in Carmel, California. In it, he shares acrid and poignant stories of blacks colliding--sometimes humorously, but often tragically--with whites throughout the 1920s and 1930s... -
The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes
Rated: 4.44 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsLangston Hughes's first book of poetry, including the following classic, poignant and moving Proem, The Weary Blues, Jazzonia, Negro Dancers, The Cat And The Saxophone (2 A.M...Categorized as:
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Recitatif by Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsA beautiful, arresting short story by Toni Morrison--the only one she ever wrote--about race and the relationships that shape us through life, with an introduction by Zadie Smith. Twyla and Roberta have known each other since they were eight years old and spent four months together as roommates in the St. Bonaventure shelter... -
Footsteps by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsAs the world moves into the twentieth century, Minke, one of the few European-educated Javanese, optimistically starts a new life in a new town: Betawi. With his enrollment in medical school and the opportunity to meet new people, there is every reason to believe that he can leave behind the tragedies of the past...Categorized as:
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The Spook Who Sat by the Door by Sam Greenlee
Rated: 4.36 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsA classic in the black literary tradition, The Spook Who Sat by the Door is both a comment on the civil rights problems in the United States in the late 1960s and a serious attempt to focus on the issue of black militancy.Dan Freeman, the spook who sat by the door, is enlisted in the CIA's elitist espionage program...Categorized as:
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Kinfolk by Pearl S. Buck
Rated: 4.36 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsKinfolk is the story of a Chinese family. Dr. Liang moves to America in search of a better life, but his children long to return to China. Each responds to their new life in China differently, providing rich insight into the struggles between Eastern and Western culture, and the differences between generations...Categorized as:
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Selected Poems by Langston Hughes
Rated: 4.28 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsWith the publication of his first book of poems, The Weary Blues, in 1926, Langston Hughes electrified readers and launched a renaissance in black writing in America. The poems Hughes wrote celebrated the experience of invisible men and women: of slaves who "rushed the boots of Washington"; of musicians on Lenox Avenue; of the poor and the lovesick; of losers in "the raffle of night...Categorized as:
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A Mind at Peace by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar
Rated: 4.28 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsLibrarian note: Alternate cover edition of: 9780976395096Set on the eve of World War II, A Mind at Peace captures the anxieties of a Turkish family facing the difficult reality entrenched in the early republic, founded on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire in 1923...Categorized as:
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Early Novels & Stories: Go Tell It on the Mountain / Giovanni’s Room / Another Country / Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin
Rated: 4.40 of 5 stars · 10 ratings“The civil rights struggle,” said The New York Times Book Review, “found eloquent expression in [Baldwin’s] novels. His historical importance is indisputable.” Here, in a Library of America volume edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, is the fiction that established James Baldwin’s reputation as a writer who fused unblinking realism and rare verbal eloquence... -
Collected Short Stories: Volume 2 by W. Somerset Maugham
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThis final classic collection reveals Somerset Maugham's unique talent for exposing and exploring the bitter realities of human relationships in tales of love, infidelity, passion and prejudice. The stories range from "The Lotus Eater" where a man envisions a life of bliss in the Mediterranean, to the astringent tales of "The Outstation" and "The Back of Beyond" in Malaya and South East Asia...Categorized as:
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Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky by Patrick Hamilton
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsA timeless classic of sleazy London life in the 1930s, a world of streets full of cruelty and kindness, comedy and pathos, where people emerge from cheap lodgings in Pimlico to pour out their passions, hopes and despair in pubs and bars... -
A Foreign Woman by Sergei Dovlatov, Antonina W. Bouis
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsAfter leaving the Soviet Union following a series of unsatisfying relationships, Marusya Tatarovich quickly becomes the center of the Russian community in Queens, New York, but finds that it mirrors in many ways the community she left...Categorized as:
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The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2: The Romantic Period through the Twentieth Century by M.H. Abrams, Stephen Greenblatt
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsFirmly grounded by the hallmark strengths of all Norton Anthologies--thorough and helpful introductory matter, judicious annotation, complete texts wherever possible--The Norton Anthology of English Literature has been revitalized in this Eighth Edition through the collaboration between six new editors and six seasoned ones...Categorized as:
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Missing Soluch by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsPerhaps the most important work in modern Iranian literature, this starkly beautiful novel examines the trials of an impoverished woman and her children living in a remote village in Iran, after the unexplained disappearance of her husband, Soluch.Lyrical yet unsparing, the novel examines her life as she contends with the political corruption, authoritarianism, and poverty of the village...Categorized as:
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The Major Plays by Anton Chekhov, Rosamund Bartlett
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsAnton ChekhovThe Major PlaysIvanov * The Sea Gull * Uncle Vanya * The Three Sisters * The Cherry Orchard“Let the things that happen onstage be just as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life,” Chekhov once declared. “For instance, people are having a meal, just having a meal, but at the same time, their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed up...Categorized as:
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The Street by Ann Petry
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 21 ratingsThe Street tells the poignant, often heartbreaking story of Lutie Johnson, a young black woman, and her spirited struggle to raise her son amid the violence, poverty, and racial dissonance of Harlem in the late 1940s. Originally published in 1946 and hailed by critics as a masterwork, The Street was Ann Petry's first novel, a beloved bestseller with more than a million copies in print...Categorized as:
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Fathers and Crows by William T. Vollmann
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsWith the same panoramic vision and mythic sensibility he brought to The Ice-Shirt, William T. Vollmann continues his hugely original fictional history of the clash of Indians and Europeans in the New World...Categorized as:
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Selected Poems by Boris Pasternak, Борис Пастернак
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsAleksandr Blok (1880-1921) lived through his country's savage wars and radical traumas trying to welcome the new order. Trotsky wrote, `Certainly Blok is not one of us, but he came towards us. And that is what broke him.' Pasternak said, `He is as free as the wind... -
Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether, Nellie Y. McKay
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThis modern classic is “a tough, tender, bitter novel of a black girl struggling towards womanhood” in 1930s Harlem—with a foreword by James Baldwin ( Publishers Weekly ). Depression-era Harlem is home for twelve-year-old Francie Coffin and her family, and it’s both a place of refuge and the source of untold dangers for her and her poor, working class family...Categorized as:
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The Outsider by Richard Wright
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 14 ratings"Wright presents a compelling story of a black man's attempt to escape his past and start anew in Harlem. Cross Damon is a man at odds with society and with himself, a man who hungers for peace but who brings terror and destruction wherever he goes...Categorized as:
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Uncle Tom's Children by Richard Wright
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsSet in the American Deep South, each of the powerful novellas collected here concerns an aspect of the lives of black people in the postslavery era, exploring their resistance to white racism and oppression. Published in 1938, this was the first book from Wright, who would continue on to worldwide fame as the author of the novels Native Son and Black Boy... -
The Third Life Of Grange Copeland by Alice Walker
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsAlice Walker's first book recounts the lives of three generations growing up in Georgia, where the author herself grew up. Grange Copeland is a black tenant farmer who is forced to leave his land and family in search of a better future. He heads North but discovers that the racism and poverty he experienced in the South are, in fact, everywhere...Categorized as:
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The Short Stories by Langston Hughes
Rated: 4.40 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsThis collection of forty-seven stories written between 1919 and 1963--the most comprehensive available--showcases Langston Hughes's literary blossoming and the development of his personal and artistic concerns. Many of the stories assembled here have long been out of print, and others never before collected...Categorized as:
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Buddies by Ethan Mordden
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 6 ratings"What unites us, all of us, surely is brotherhood, a sense that our friendships are historic, designed to hold Stonewall together," muses on character in Ethan Mordden's Buddies. This need for friendship, for nonerotic affection, for buddies, shines forth as an American obsession from Moby-Dick through Of Mice and Men to The Sting... -
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The Last Hurrah by Edwin O'Connor
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsO'Connor's 1956 account of big-city politics, inspired by the career of longtime Boston Mayor James M. Curley, portrays its Irish-American political boss as a demagogue and a rogue who nonetheless deeply understands his constituents. The book was later made into a John Ford film staring Spencer Tracy... -
I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots by Susan Straight
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsBeginning in the late 1950s, this novel tells the story of Marietta Cook, a tall girl growing up in Pine Gardens, a Gullah-speaking village in South Carolina. When Marietta's mother dies, she heads to Charleston in search of her uncle - only to find a lover and return pregnant with twins two years later... -
The Engineer of Human Souls by Josef Škvorecký
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsThe Engineer of Human Souls is a labyrinthine comic novel that investigates the journey and plight of novelist Danny Smiricky, a Czech immigrant to Canada. As the novel begins, he is a professor of American literature at a college in Toronto...Categorized as:
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Where the Air Is Clear by Carlos Fuentes
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratings"Where the Air Is Clear," Carlos Fuentes's first novel, is an unsparing portrayal of Mexico City's upper class. Departing from a traditional linear narrative, Fuentes overlays Mexican myths onto contemporary settings, showing that even the rich and powerful must succumb to the indomitable spirit of Mexico, which undermines all institutions and shapes all destinies...Categorized as:
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Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall, Mary Helen Washington
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsA vivid and bittersweet classic coming-of-age tale, set in immigrant Brooklyn. Remarkable for its courage, its color, and its natural control. --The New Yorker An unforgettable novel written with pride and anger, with rebellion and tears...Categorized as:
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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)... -
The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsFirst published in 1935 and 1939, the two related novels, The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin, which make up The Berlin Stories are recognized today as classics of modern fiction...Categorized as:
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Zayni Barakat by Gamal al-Ghitani, جمال الغيطاني
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 16 ratings"In the course of my long travels I have never seen a city so devastated. After a long time I ventured out into the streets. Death, cold and heavy, hung in the air. Walls have no value here, doors have been eliminated. No one is certain that they will see another day...Categorized as:
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The Spider's House by Paul Bowles, Francine Prose
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsSet in Fez, Morocco, during that country's 1954 nationalist uprising, The Spider's House is perhaps Paul Bowles's most beautifully subtle novel, richly descriptive of its setting, and uncompromising in its characterizations...Categorized as:
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The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories by Ivan Bunin
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe first story in this book "The Gentleman from San Francisco" is translated by D. H. Lawrence and S. S. Koteliansky. Owing to a mistake Mr. Lawrence's name has been omitted from the title-page. The three other stories are translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf...Categorized as:
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Ravensong by Lee Maracle
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsLee Maracle, author of the best-selling I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism, sets this novel in an urban Native American community on the Pacific Northwest coast in the early 1950s. Ravensong is by turns damning, humorous, inspirational, and prophetic... -
One by One in the Darkness by Deirdre Madden
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsA story about three Northern Irish sisters. It has a double narrative, part of which describes their childhood and shows the impact of the political changes and the violence of the late-1960s upon the people of Ulster. The author won the Somerset Maugham Prize for "The Birds of the Innocent Wood"...Categorized as:
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There Is Confusion by Jessie Redmon Fauset, Thadious M. Davis
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsSet in Philadelphia some 60 years ago, There Is Confusion traces the lives of Joanna Mitchell and Peter Bye, whose families must come to terms with an inheritance of prejudice and discrimination as they struggle for legitimacy and respect...Categorized as:
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The Old Forest and Other Stories by Peter Taylor
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsFrom the grand master of the American short story, these fourteen tales of domestic life in the South during the thirties and forties explore that extraordinary world of manners, expectations and unspoken understanding. The reader is drawn as if by magnetic force into a world rendered in breathtaking, painterly detail...Categorized as:
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Passing by Samaria by Sharon Ewell Foster
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsWhen the discovery of a schoolmate's lynched body puts her own life in jeopardy, Alena is sent by her parents from her beloved Mississippi home. With thousands of other African-Americans, Alena begins making her way north to the Promised Land of turn-of-the-century Chicago...Categorized as:
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The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
Rated: 3.96 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsIn 1831 Nat Turner awaits death in a Virginia jail cell. He is a slave, a preacher, and the leader of the only effective slave revolt in the history of 'that peculiar institution'. William Styron's ambitious and stunningly accomplished novel is Turner's confession, made to his jailers under the duress of his God...Categorized as:
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Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood
Rated: 3.96 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsHere, meine Damen und Herren, is Chrisopther Isherwood's brilliant farewell to a city which was not only buildings, streets and people, but was also a state of mind which will never come again.In linked short stories, he says goodbye to Sally Bowles, to Fraulein Schroeder, to pranksters, perverts, political manipulators; to the very, very guilty and to the dwindling band of innocents...Categorized as:
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Petersburg by Andrei Bely, Olga Matich
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsTaking place over a short, turbulent period in 1905, 'Petersburg' is a colourful evocation of Russia's capital—a kaleidoscope of images and impressions, an eastern window on the west, a symbol of the ambiguities and paradoxes of the Russian character...Categorized as:
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Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance by Zora Neale Hurston, M. Genevieve West
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsFrom “one of the greatest writers of our time” (Toni Morrison)—the author of Barracoon and Their Eyes Were Watching God—a collection of remarkable stories, including eight “lost” Harlem Renaissance tales now available to a wide audience for the first time. Newsweek’s Most Anticipated Books of 2020Forbes...Categorized as:
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God's Bits of Wood by Ousmane Sembène
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsIn 1947-8 the workers on the Dakar-Niger Railway came out on strike. Sembène Ousmane, in this vivid and moving novel, evinces all of the colour, passion and tragedy of those decisive years in the history of West Africa.'Ever since they left Thiès, the women had not stopped singing...Categorized as:
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A Bird in the House by Margaret Laurence, Isabel Huggan
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsOne of Canada’s most accomplished authors combines the best qualities of both the short story and the novel to create a lyrical evocation of the beauty, pain, and wonder of growing up...Categorized as:
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Joe Turner's Come and Gone by August Wilson
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsHerald Loomis turns up at a boardinghouse to look for his missing wife...Categorized as:
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Corregidora by Gayl Jones
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsOne of The New Yorker's "The Best Books We Read in 2020" picks"Jones's great achievement is to reckon with both history and interiority, and to collapse the boundary between them."--Anna Wiener, The New YorkerThe new edition of an American masterpiece, this is the harrowing story of Ursa Corregidora, a blues singer in the early 20th century forced to confront the inherited trauma of slavery...Categorized as:
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Bernice Bobs Her Hair by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsI want to be a society vampire, you see, she announced coolly, and went on to inform him that bobbed hair was the necessary prelude. She added that she wanted to ask his advice, because she had heard he was so critical about girls...Categorized as:
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Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by Lu Xun
Rated: 3.93 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThis collection of short stories by Lu Xun, commonly considered one of the greatest writers in 20th-century China and often referred to as the father of modern Chinese literature, includes the celebrated short story, "A Madman's Diary". This short story is considered to be one of the first and most influential modern works written in vernacular Chinese...Categorized as:
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If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes, Hilton Als
Rated: 3.93 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThis story of a man living every day in fear of his life for simply being black is as powerful today as it was when it was first published in 1947. The novel takes place in the space of four days in the life of Bob Jones, a black man who is constantly plagued by the effects of racism...Categorized as:
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