Books like 'Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons'
Readers who enjoyed Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons by John Barth also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
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The David Foster Wallace Reader by David Foster Wallace
Rated: 4.40 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsWhere do you begin with a writer as original and brilliant as David Foster Wallace? Here — with a carefully considered selection of his extraordinary body of work, chosen by a range of great writers, critics, and those who worked with him most closely...Categorized as:
literary-fiction postmodernism philosophical fiction philosophy audiobook contemporary classics -
JR by William Gaddis
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsJ R is the long-awaited novel from William Gaddis, author of The Recognitions, that tremendous book which, in the twenty years since its publication, has come to be acknowledged as an American masterpiece...Categorized as:
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Correction by Thomas Bernhard
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsRoithamer, a character based on Wittgenstein, has committed suicide having been driven to madness by his own frightening powers of pure thought. We witness the gradual breakdown of a genius ceaselessly compelled to correct and refine his perceptions until the only logical conclusion is the negation of his own soul...Categorized as:
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Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsBeauty, in László Krasznahorkai’s new novel, reflects, however fleeting, the sacred — even if we are mostly unable to bear it.In Seiobo There Below we see the goddess Seiobo returning to mortal realms in search of perfection...Categorized as:
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Old Masters: A Comedy by Thomas Bernhard
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsOld Masters (subtitled A Comedy) is a novel by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, which was first published in 1985. It tells of the life and opinions of Reger, a 'musical philosopher', through the voice of his acquaintance Atzbacher, a 'private academic'.The book is set in Vienna on one day around the year of its publication, 1985... -
Leonard and Hungry Paul by Ronan Hession, John Hopkins
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsLeonard and Hungry Paul are two friends who see the world differently. They use humour, board games and silence to steer their way through the maelstrom that is the 21st century.‘The figure in Munch’s painting isn’t actually screaming!’ Hungry Paul said. ‘Really, are you sure?’ Replied Leonard. ‘Absolutely. That’s the whole thing. The figure is actually closing his ears to block outa scream...Categorized as:
literary-fiction realistic satire 21st-century adult anthologies audiobook coming-of-age -
The Selected Stories Of Mavis Gallant by Mavis Gallant
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsA collection of fifty-two short stories, written between 1953 and 1995, by Mavis Gallant...Categorized as:
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The Recognitions by William Gaddis
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 29 ratingsWyatt Gwyon's desire to forge is not driven by larceny but from love. Exactingly faithful to the spirit and letter of the Flemish masters, he produces uncannily accurate originals - pictures the painters themselves might have envied...Categorized as:
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Darconville's Cat by Alexander Theroux
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsThe main story is a love affair between Alaric Darconville, an English professor at a Virginia women's college, and one of his students, Isabel.The style relies on complex syntax and unusual words. The satire is broad, and uses southern culture cliches but is often very funny. Some of the names of the girls at the school, for example, are Mimsy Borogoves, Barbara Celarent, and Pengwynn Custiss... -
Hurt Others by Sam Pink
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsOh man, it just had to happen. Someone had to be a bagger at a grocery store and fantasize about hitting children in the head with wine bottles. Someone had to fear a puddle floating at him from across the street. Someone had to celebrate beating up a pregnant woman. Someone just HAD to be a nanny, and stare at giant motorized spiders...Categorized as:
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Selected Stories by William Trevor
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 8 ratings"Trevor was our twentieth century Chekov.--Wall Street Journal Selected as one of The New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year. Four-time winner of the O. Henry Prize, three-time winner of the Whitbread Award, and five-time nominee for the Booker Prize, William Trevor is one of the most acclaimed authors of our era... -
62: A Model Kit by Julio Cortázar
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsAs one of the main characters, the intellectual Juan, puts it: to one person the City might appear as Paris, to another it might be where one goes upon getting out of bed in Barcelona; to another it might appear as a beer hall in Oslo...Categorized as:
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World Cup Wishes by Eshkol Nevo
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsFour friends get together to watch the 1998 World Cup final. One of them has an idea: let's write down our wishes for the next few years, put them away, and during the next final - four years from now - we'll get them out and see how many we've achieved. This is how World Cup Wishes opens, and from here we watch what happens to their wishes and their friendships as life marches on... -
Forty Stories by Donald Barthelme
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsThis collection of pithy, brilliantly acerbic pieces is a companion to Sixty Stories, Barthelme's earlier retrospective volume. Barthelme spotlights the idiosyncratic, haughty, sometimes downright ludicrous behavior of human beings, but it is style rather than content which takes precedence...Categorized as:
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Women and Men by Joseph McElroy
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsBeginning in childbirth and entered like a multiple dwelling in motion, Women and Men embraces and anatomizes the 1970s in New York from experiments in the chaotic relations between the sexes to the flux of the city itself...Categorized as:
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the truth about fragile things by Regina Sirois
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsBryon died fifty years before his time. Charlotte grew up angry. I grew up scared. And Phillip- well, he never grew up. And now we are all bound together into one painful heap of humanity. Broken, but bound. And maybe it is only the fact that we are tangled in one terrible knot that will hold us together until we heal. This is unfortunately, and miraculously, my story...Categorized as:
literary-fiction realistic book coming-of-age contemporary female-author fiction young-adult -
Honeybees and Distant Thunder by Riku Onda
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsTender and intense, Honeybees and Distant Thunder is the unflinching story of love, courage and rivalry as three young people come to understand what it means to truly be a friend.In a small coastal town just a stone's throw from Tokyo, a prestigious piano competition is underway...Categorized as:
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Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine by Stanley Crawford, Ben Marcus
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsForty years ago I first linked up with Unguentine and we made love on twin-hulled catamarans, sails a-billow, bless the seas . . .So begins the courtship of a certain Unguentine to the woman we know only as “Mrs. Unguentine,” the chronicler of their sad, fantastical tale. For forty years, they sail the seas together, alone on a giant land-covered barge of their own devising...Categorized as:
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Stories in the Worst Way by Gary Lutz
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsFiction. Short Stories. Originally released by Knopf in 1996, Lutz's rigorously innovative debut barely made a ripple in the mainstream publishing world. Meanwhile, however, the book attained a cult status, and its influence has grown tremendously in the years since its appearance, disappearance, and reappearance...Categorized as:
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Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique by Gonçalo M. Tavares, Daniel Hahn
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsThe second installment in Tavares’s acclaimed “Kingdom” series. In a city not quite of any particular era, a distant and calculating man named Lenz Buchmann works as a surgeon, treating his patients as little more than equations to be solved: life and death no more than results to be worked through without the least compassion... -
Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970 by Richard Brautigan
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsA collection of 62 very short stories set in 1960s California, particularly around the author's home town of San Francisco. Richard Brautigan is the author of "Willard & His Bowling Trophies", "Trout Fishing in America", "In Watermelon Sugar" & "A Confederate General From Big Sur"...Categorized as:
literary-fiction philosophical postmodernism 20th-century adult anthologies classics comedy -
Oblivion: Stories by David Foster Wallace
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsIn the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness—a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind...Categorized as:
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The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 15 ratingsMaman was exigeante—there is no English word–and I had the benefit of her training. Others may not be so fortunate. If some other young girl, with two million dollars at stake, finds this of use I shall count myself justified.Raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father, a 17-year-old girl has learned above all to avoid mauvais ton ("bad taste" loses something in the translation)...Categorized as:
literary-fiction realistic satire fiction contemporary humor female-author anthologies -
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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This Is Not a Novel by David Markson
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThe Barnes & Noble ReviewThis experimental work is an enthralling amalgamation of anecdotes, aphorisms, and quotations from writers and artists, interspersed with self-reflexive comments by the Writer who has assembled them. As the title implies, this is certainly not a novel -- not in the general sense of the term...Categorized as:
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Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry by B.S. Johnson, John Lanchester
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsChristie Malry is a simple man. His job in a bank puts him next to, but not in possession of, money. As a clerk he learns the principles of Double-Entry Bookkeeping and adapts them in his own dramatic fashion to settle his personal account with society...Categorized as:
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The Last Novel by David Markson
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsIn recent novels, which have been called "hypnotic," "stunning," and "exhilarating," David Markson has created his own personal genre. In this new work, The Last Novel, an elderly author (referred to only as "Novelist") announces that since this will be his final effort, he has "carte blanche to do anything he damned well pleases...Categorized as:
literary-fiction postmodernism philosophical fiction contemporary psychological university death -
Descent of Man by T. Coraghessan Boyle
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsIn seventeen slices of life that defy the expected and launch us into the absurd, T.C. Boyle offers his unique view of the world. A primate-center researcher becomes romantically involved with a chimp; a Norse poet overcomes bard-block; collectors compete to snare the ancient Aztec beer can, Quetzacoatl Lite; and Lassie abandons Timmy for a randy coyote... -
Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories by Jim Shepard
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsI’ve been a problem baby, a lousy son, a distant brother, an off-putting neighbor, a piss-poor student, a worrisome seatmate, an unreliable employee, a bewildering lover, a frustrating confidante and a crappy husband. Among the things I do pretty well at this point I’d have to list darts, re-closing Stay-Fresh boxes, and staying out of the way...Categorized as:
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Lithium for Medea by Kate Braverman, Rick Moody
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsLithium for Medea is a tale of addiction: to drugs, physical love, and dysfunctional family chains. It is also a tale of mothers and daughters, their mutual rebellion and unconscious mimicry. Rose grew up with an emotionally crippled, narcissistic mother while her father, a veteran gambler, spent his waking hours in the garden cut off from his wife's harangues...Categorized as:
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Summer Dreams: Dual Image/Untamed by Nora Roberts
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 8 ratings#1 New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author Nora Roberts presents classic stories of two unlikely couples who choose…love!Dual ImagePlaying Booth DeWitt's cruel ex-wife in his semiautobiographical film is the chance of a lifetime for actor Ariel Kirkwood. Not only is it a giant boon for her career, but she also gets to work with the screenwriter himself... -
Totlandia: Book 4 by Josie Brown
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsIN BOOK 4 OF THE TOTLANDIA SERIES: As summer sizzles in Totlandia, emotions boil over for the newest members of Pacific Heights Moms & Tots Club, whose trust in each other is sorely tempted by Bettina and her club politics. When Jillian's vindictive joke backfires, she learns the true meaning of forgiveness... -
Always by Shaw Hart
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsWe started as friends.Evangeline Rauley is a small town girl. She was born and raised in Rosewood, Colorado and while both of her friends left to go to college, she never had that luxury.She was raised by her mother and living on a single parent salary was never easy. She’s been working the odd job since she was fifteen, saving up until she can finally afford to open her own nursery... -
Supersaurio by Meryem El Mehdati
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsAn uproarious debut novel about a young woman from the Canary Islands whose internship with a supermarket chain reveals the soul-crushing vagaries of modern life.Meryem is twenty-five years old, drinks too much coffee, goes on dates with terrifying men and never says what she really thinks... -
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The Teenage Dirtbag Years by Ross O'Carroll-Kelly, Paul Howard
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsSo there I was, roysh, class legend, schools rugby legend, basically all-round legend, when someone decides you can't, like, sit the Leaving Cert four times. Well that put a focking spanner in the works.But joining the goys at college wasn't the mare I thought it would be, basically for, like, three major beer, women and more women... -
Holler, Child: Stories by LaToya Watkins
Rated: 4.10 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsAn extraordinary and unforgettable short story collection about community, home, betrayal, and forgiveness--from a writer whose "spellbinding, buoyant"* storytelling will break your heart as it tends to the wounds. *Texas Monthly In Holler, Child's eleven brilliant stories, LaToya Watkins presses at the bruises of guilt, love, and circumstance...Categorized as:
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Unquiet by Linn Ullmann, Thilo Reinhard
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsPraised across Scandinavia as a "literary masterpiece," "spellbinding," and "magnificent," Unquiet reflects on six taped conversations the author had with her father at the very end of his life.He is a renowned Swedish filmmaker and has a plan for everything. She is his daughter, the youngest of nine children...Categorized as:
aging literary-fiction philosophical audiobook book coming-of-age contemporary family -
Respiración artificial by Ricardo Piglia
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsRespiración artificial se trata no sólo del único libro memorable publicado durante el período de la dictadura militar (la edición original es de 1980), sino también de una espléndida ficción que se convierte en espejo de la historia, de una novela que, utilizando la estructura de la novela policíaca -para Piglia éste es uno de los géneros fundamentales de la literatura contemporánea-, puede... -
Tenth of December by George Saunders
Rated: 3.97 of 5 stars · 52 ratingsOne of the most important and blazingly original writers of his generation, George Saunders is an undisputed master of the short story, and Tenth of December is his most honest, accessible, and moving collection yet...Categorized as:
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Discontent by Beatriz Serrano
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsFrom a dazzling new international voice, an audacious, darkly funny novel about a young woman whose carefully crafted office persona threatens to crack when she’s forced to attend her company’s annual retreatOn the surface, Marisa's life looks enviable... -
Marigold by Troy James Weaver
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsA thirty-something floral salesman searches for reasons to keep living...Categorized as:
literary-fiction satire fiction contemporary mental-illness season-spring humor book -
If the River Was Whiskey: Stories by T. Coraghessan Boyle
Rated: 3.92 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsMagical, surprising, and very funny stories about eccentrics, charlatans, misfits, and lost souls by the winner of 1987's PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction...Categorized as:
literary-fiction satire adult anthologies contemporary fiction humor magical-realism -
The Devil You Know by Louise Bagshawe
Rated: 3.92 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsNew York ...Smart, sexy Rose Fiorello grows up poor with nothing but a blistering hatred of Rothstein Realty, the developer that crushed her father's business...and a shocking plan to get even. Los Angeles ...Pampered society princess Poppy Allen wants to escape the smothering cocoon of her parents' privileged life to embrace the excitement of becoming a rock star...or rock star maker... -
The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson
Rated: 3.90 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsB.S. Johnson’s lost classic has been showered with praise: New York Magazine named The Unfortunates one of their Ten Best Books of 2008, listed in The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2008, and The Los Angeles Times declared it to be “his most daring work.”A legendary 1960s experiment in form, The Unfortunates is B. S...Categorized as:
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Jealousy & In the Labyrinth by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Rated: 3.90 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsHere, in one volume, are two remarkable novels by the chief spokesman of the so-called “new novel” which has caused such discussion and aroused such controversy. “Jealousy,” said the New York Times Book Review “is a technical masterpiece, impeccably contrived.” “It is an exhilarating challenge,” said the San Francisco Chronicle...Categorized as:
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Checking Out by Nick Spalding
Rated: 3.92 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsWhat do you do when the doctor says you could die at any moment? Well…after you’ve made a cup of tea, of course. Nathan James is young, successful and has the world at his feet. Unfortunately, he’s also about to die—which ruins things somewhat. And now he’s staring imminent death in the face, Nathan is having to rethink some of his life choices very hard... -
Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsMulligan Stew takes as its subject the comic possibilities of the modern literary imagination. As avant-garde novelist Antony Lamont struggles to write a "new wave murder mystery," his frustrating emotional and sexual life wreaks havoc on his work-in-progress...Categorized as:
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Country Pursuits: Churchminister series 1 by Jo Carnegie
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsThe gorgeous women of Churchminster know exactly what they want - a constant flow of champagne (on tap at the local pub) and the love of a good man. But faced with the likes of braying, beer-guzzling farmer Angus, foul-tempered Lord Fraser and suave banker Sebastian (devoted only to himself), their attentions are increasingly drawn to more attractive possibilities . . -
Second Skin by John Hawkes, Jeffrey Eugenides
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 8 ratings"John Hawkes is an extraordinary writer. I have always admired his books. They should be more widely read...Categorized as:
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Oh Honey by Emily R. Austin
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 13 ratings“Hello, my name is Esther. I am calling on behalf of Krippler Incorporated, a market research institute. Today we are conducting a survey on feline diabetes. Do you, or any member of your household, own a cat?” They hang up. “Hello. My name is Joan. I am calling on behalf of—” They hang up. “Hello. My name’s Doreen.” Jane is a telemarketer...
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