* statistically, based on millions of data-points provided by fellow humans
The novel has two settings. The first is Moscow during the 1930s, where Satan appears at Patriarch's Ponds as Professor Woland . He is accompanied by Koroviev, a grotesquely-dressed valet; Behemoth , ... (Wikipedia)
"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young ... (Goodreads)
In this bitterly funny novel by the renowned Polish author Witold Gombrowicz. a writer finds himself tossed into a chaotic world of schoolboys by a diabolical professor who wishes to reduce him to ... (Goodreads)
The book opens with Bone relating the details of her birth. Bone's 15-year-old mother Anney gives birth to her after being seriously injured in a car accident. Anney, who is comatose during the ... (Wikipedia)
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a marvel of ingenuity, an experimental text that looks longingly back to the great age of narration—"when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to ... (Goodreads)
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (TLS). That time is the period between the two World Wars, ... (Goodreads)
The protagonist, K., arrives in a village governed by a mysterious bureaucracy operating in a nearby castle. When seeking shelter at the town inn, he claims to be a land surveyor summoned by the ... (Wikipedia)
The inhabitants of post-apocalypse Labrador have vague knowledge of the "Old People", a technologically advanced civilization they believe was destroyed when God sent " Tribulation " to the world to ... (Wikipedia)
My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two ... (Goodreads)
Italo Calvino's extraordinary imagination and intelligence combine here in an enchanting series of stories about the evolution of the universe. He makes his characters out of mathematical formulae ... (Goodreads)
Lirael, the protagonist of the second and third books, is raised as a Clayr, part of a vast family of precognitive women who dwell in a remote glacier within the Old Kingdom. As she lacks the Clayr's ... (Wikipedia)
The story describes a two-dimensional world occupied by geometric figures, whereof women are simple line-segments, while men are polygons with various numbers of sides. The narrator is a square , a ... (Wikipedia)
Prized through the ages for its splendor and its savage, sophisticated wit, The Metamorphoses is a masterpiece of Western culture–the first attempt to link all the Greek myths, before and after ... (Goodreads)
Boy Novak, a young white girl, is born to an abusive father who works as an exterminator and whom she refers to as the rat catcher. In the winter of 1953, when she is twenty years old, Boy runs away ... (Wikipedia)
In 1955, , Jumpei Niki, , a schoolteacher from Tokyo, visits a fishing village to collect insects. After missing the last bus, he is led by the villagers, in an act of apparent hospitality, to a ... (Wikipedia)
The novel's protagonist , Iris Chase, and her sister Laura, grow up well-off but motherless in a small town in southern Ontario. As an old woman, Iris recalls the events and relationships of her ... (Wikipedia)
Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its ... (Goodreads)
Shade's poem digressively describes many aspects of his life. Canto 1 includes his early encounters with death and glimpses of what he takes to be the supernatural. Canto 2 is about his family and ... (Wikipedia)
The narrative opens in the decade before World War I . It introduces the protagonist, Hans Castorp, the only child of a Hamburg merchant family. Following the early death of his parents, Castorp has ... (Wikipedia)
Although his work has been restricted to the short story, the essay, and poetry, Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina is recognized all over the world as one of the most original and significant figures in ... (Goodreads)
A reclusive novelist named Bill Gray works endlessly on a novel which he chooses not to finish. He has chosen a lifestyle secluded from the outside world in order to try to keep his writing pure. He, ... (Wikipedia)
Tod Hackett is the novel's protagonist. He moves from the east coast to Hollywood, California in search of inspiration for his next painting. The novel is set in the 1930s during the Great Depression ... (Wikipedia)
In the 1970s, an impoverished but intelligent thirty-seven-year-old Mexican-American woman Consuelo (Connie) Ramos, a resident of Spanish Harlem , is unfairly incarcerated in a New York mental ... (Wikipedia)
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being , Milan Kundera tells the story of a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing and one of his mistresses and ... (Goodreads)
The protagonist, K., arrives in a village governed by a mysterious bureaucracy operating in a nearby castle. When seeking shelter at the town inn, he claims to be a land surveyor summoned by the ... (Wikipedia)
The protagonist is referred to in the story as Kochan, which is the diminutive of the author's real name: Kimitake. Being raised during Japan's era of right-wing militarism and Imperialism, he ... (Wikipedia)
The prose poems of the great French Symbolist, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), have acquired enormous prestige among readers everywhere and have been a revolutionary influence on poetry in the twentieth ... (Goodreads)
Ceremony follows a half- Pueblo , half-white man named Tayo after his return from World War II . His white doctors say he is suffering from "battle fatigue," which would be called post-traumatic ... (Wikipedia)
The novel begins with Isserley picking up hitchhikers. Gradually, it is revealed she is an alien, originally somewhat canine in form, who has been surgically altered to look like a human woman, thus ... (Wikipedia)
Fair and long-legged, independent and articulate, Janie Crawford sets out to be her own person – no mean feat for a black woman in the '30s. Janie's quest for identity takes her through three ... (Goodreads)