Literary theme analysis, by a book like {foo}
Books about Bewilderment
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams
Quirky comedic intergalactic adventure, exploring the absurdities of life.
Seconds before the Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of the The Hitch ... (Goodreads)
Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There
by Lewis Carroll
Alice's fantastical journey through a strange and surreal world of her own making.
Chapter One – Looking-Glass House : Alice is playing with a white kitten (whom she calls "Snowdrop") and a black kitten (whom she calls "Kitty") when she ponders what the world is like on the other ... (Wikipedia)
Me Talk Pretty One Day
by David Sedaris
A humorous, autobiographical account of a man's experiences learning French and growing up.
David Sedaris' move to Paris from New York inspired these hilarious pieces, including the title essay, about his attempts to learn French from a sadistic teacher who declares that every day spent ... (Goodreads)
The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy
by Stanisław Lem
A satirical sci-fi journey of a man struggling to make sense of a world of surrealism and absurdity.
Ijon Tichy is sent to the Eighth World Futurological Congress in Costa Rica , by professor Tarantoga . The conference is set to focus on the world's overpopulation crisis and ways of dealing with it. ... (Wikipedia)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll
A young girl's surreal journey down a rabbit hole leading to a mysterious and magical realm.
After a tumble down the rabbit hole, Alice finds herself far away from home in the absurd world of Wonderland. As mind-bending as it is delightful, Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel is pure magic for young ... (Goodreads)
Naked Lunch
by William S. Burroughs
Surrealist exploration of addiction, delusions, and reality.
Naked Lunch is a non-linear narrative without a clear plot. The following is a summary of some of the events in the book that could be considered the most relevant. The book begins with the ... (Wikipedia)
The Complete Stories
by Flannery O'Connor
A collection of stories that explore aspects of the human condition through surreal and darkly comedic lenses.
This is the original cover edition of, ISBN: 0374515360, (ISBN13: 9780374515362 Winner of the National Book Award The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's ... (Goodreads)
Collected Fictions
by Jorge Luis Borges
An anthology of Borges' masterful short stories, exploring the depths of human thought and imagination.
Jorge Luis Borges has been called the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century. Now for the first time in English, all of Borges' dazzling fictions are gathered into a single volume, ... (Goodreads)
Galápagos
by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
A journey to the Galápagos Islands revealing secrets of evolution, humanity, and the future.
Galápagos is the story of a small band of mismatched humans who are shipwrecked on the fictional island of Santa Rosalia in the Galápagos Islands after a global financial crisis cripples the world's ... (Wikipedia)
The Sirens of Titan
by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Intergalactic odyssey exploring the meaning of life and the human condition.
Malachi Constant is the richest man in a future North America. He possesses extraordinary luck that he attributes to divine favor which he has used to build upon his father's fortune. He becomes the ... (Wikipedia)
Infinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace
A journey through the absurdist world of entertainment, drugs, addiction & death.
There are four major interwoven narratives: , These narratives are connected via a film, Infinite Jest , also referred to in the novel as "the Entertainment" or "the samizdat ". The film is so ... (Wikipedia)
Ulysses
by James Joyce
Epic narrative following a day in the life of an Irishman living in Dublin.
It is 8 a.m. Buck Mulligan , a boisterous medical student, calls Stephen Dedalus (a young writer encountered as the principal subject of, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ) up to the roof of ... (Wikipedia)
The Third Policeman
by Flann O'Brien
A bizarre yet darkly funny tale of a man's descent into a surreal world of mischievous creatures and strange events.
The Third Policeman is set in rural Ireland and is narrated by a dedicated amateur scholar of de Selby , a scientist and philosopher. , The narrator, whose name we never learn, is orphaned at a young ... (Wikipedia)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass
by Lewis Carroll
A fantastical journey of a curious young girl down the rabbit hole into a surreal world.
Chapter One – Looking-Glass House : Alice is playing with a white kitten (whom she calls "Snowdrop") and a black kitten (whom she calls "Kitty") when she ponders what the world is like on the other ... (Wikipedia)
1Q84 Book 1
by Haruki Murakami
A surreal and mysterious journey of two people in a strange alternate world.
The events of 1Q84 take place in Tokyo during a fictionalized year of 1984, with the first volume set between April and June, the second between July and September, and the third between October and ... (Wikipedia)
A Wild Sheep Chase
by Haruki Murakami
A surreal journey of self-discovery through fantasy, reality, and the unknown.
This quasi-detective tale follows an unnamed, chain-smoking narrator and his adventures in Tokyo and Hokkaido in 1978. The story begins when the recently divorced protagonist, an advertisement ... (Wikipedia)
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
by Haruki Murakami
A surreal exploration of two separate yet interwoven realities.
The story is split between parallel narratives. The odd-numbered chapters take place in the 'Hard-Boiled Wonderland', although the phrase is not used anywhere in the text, only in page headers. The ... (Wikipedia)
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
by Oliver Sacks
A collection of case studies, illustrating extraordinary neurological phenomena.
If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self—himself—he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it. Dr. Oliver Sacks recounts the ... (Goodreads)
Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
by Nikolai Gogol
Collection of humorous and dark stories exploring the absurd and surreal.
Hailed by Nabokov as "the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced," Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) left his mark as a playwright, novelist, and writer of short stories. Gogol's works remain popular ... (Goodreads)
Survivor
by Chuck Palahniuk
A darkly humorous look at the trappings of modern society and the state of human existence.
The novel opens, in medias res, to Tender Branson, who has just hijacked an airliner, released its passengers, and is now sitting in the cockpit telling his life story to the cockpit voice recorder . ... (Wikipedia)
Pale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov
A darkly comic and philosophical exploration of art, sanity, and the nature of reality.
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)
Bartleby the Scrivener
by Herman Melville
A story of a mysterious scrivener whose refusal to comply with workplace demands leads to tragedy.
The narrator is an unnamed Manhattan lawyer, aged around his late 50s, with a business in legal documents. He already employs two scriveners , Nippers and Turkey, to copy legal documents by hand, but ... (Wikipedia)
Ferdydurke
by Witold Gombrowicz
A man is magically regressed to adolescence, exploring the absurdities of adulthood.
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 Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon
A surreal journey of uncovering the truth of a mysterious organization.
In the mid-1960s, Oedipa Maas lives a fairly comfortable life in the (fictional) northern Californian village of Kinneret, despite her lackluster marriage with Mucho Maas, a rudderless radio jockey , ... (Wikipedia)
The Innocents Abroad
by Mark Twain
An account of an American tour group as they travel through Europe and the Middle East.
The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims' Progress is a travel book by American author Mark Twain published in 1869 which humorously chronicles what Twain called his "Great Pleasure Excursion" on ... (Goodreads)
Them: Adventures with Extremists
by Jon Ronson
Exploration of extreme political and fringe groups by an inquisitive journalist.
Ronson chronicles his travels and interviews with "extremists" and attempts to uncover the mystery behind the "tiny elite that rules the world from inside a secret room". The book is written on the ... (Wikipedia)
VALIS
by Philip K. Dick
A man's quest to uncover the meaning behind a series of mystical visions.
VALIS is the first book in Philip K. Dick's incomparable final trio of novels (the others being The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer ). This disorienting and bleakly funny ... (Goodreads)
Look Who's Back
by Timur Vermes
A satirical novel about a fictional Adolf Hitler, who wakes up in modern-day Germany.
Berlin, Summer 2011. Adolf Hitler wakes up from a 66-year sleep in his subterranean Berlin bunker to find the Germany he knew entirely changed: Internet-driven media spreads ideas in minutes and ... (Goodreads)
John Dies at the End
by David Wong
A bizarre supernatural adventure, blending horror and sci-fi elements.
John and Dave, two perpetual slackers and long-time friends, encounter strange phenomena in an undisclosed small city in the Midwestern United States and gain a reputation for dealing with paranormal ... (Wikipedia)
The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror
by Christopher Moore
A bizarre Christmas tale of an angel's misadventure to save a small town.
An angel named Raziel (previously in Moore's novel, Lamb, ) is sent to Earth to grant the wish of a child; he decides to help a boy who had witnessed the death of a man dressed as Santa Claus . ... (Wikipedia)
Sacré Bleu
by Christopher Moore
A fantastical and humorous journey through the art world of 19th century Paris.
“Christopher Moore is a very sick man, in the very best sense of that word.” —Carl Hiassen “[Moore’s novels] deftly blend surreal, occult, and even science-fiction doings with laugh-out-loud satire ... (Goodreads)
The Broom of the System
by David Foster Wallace
A humorous exploration of modern life as a young woman struggles to make sense of the world.
Published when Wallace was just twenty-four years old, The Broom of the System stunned critics and marked the emergence of an extraordinary new talent. At the center of this outlandishly funny, ... (Goodreads)
Wilt
by Tom Sharpe
A hilarious comedy of errors, as an Englishman struggles to keep his sanity while escaping his chaotic life.
Henry Wilt, tied to a daft job and a domineering wife, has just been passed over for promotion yet again. Ahead of him at the Polytechnic stretch years of trying to thump literature into the heads of ... (Goodreads)
The Strange Library
by Haruki Murakami
A young boy's surreal journey inside a mysterious library, discovering its secrets.
From internationally acclaimed author Haruki Murakami—a fantastical illustrated short novel about a boy imprisoned in a nightmarish library. Opening the flaps on this unique little book, readers will ... (Goodreads)
Sideways Stories from Wayside School
by Louis Sachar
A collection of humorous tales set in an offbeat school, featuring a cast of eccentric characters.
There was a terrible mistake - Wayside School was built with one classroom on top of another, thirty stories high (The builder said he was sorry.) Maybe that's why all kinds of funny things happened ... (Goodreads)
Finnegans Wake
by James Joyce
A dream-like exploration of the subconscious, featuring wordplay, puns, and allusions.
A story with no real beginning or end (it ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence), this "book of Doublends Jined" is as remarkable for its prose as for its ... (Goodreads)
Cronopios and Famas
by Julio Cortázar
A surrealist collection of short stories, exploring the absurdities of the world.
"The Instruction Manual," the first chapter, is an absurd assortment of tasks and items dissected in an instruction-manual format. "Unusual Occupations," the second chapter, describes the obsessions ... (Goodreads)
One, No One and One Hundred Thousand
by Luigi Pirandello
A man's exploration of identity, uncovering the illusions of the external world.
Vitangelo Moscarda discovers by way of a completely irrelevant question that his wife poses to him that everyone he knows, everyone he has ever met, has constructed a Vitangelo, persona, in their own ... (Wikipedia)
Journey to the End of the Night
by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
A darkly comic, nihilistic journey of self-discovery, following a man into the heart of an absurd world.
Céline’s masterpiece—colloquial, polemic, hyper-realistic, boiling over with black humor Céline’s masterpiece—colloquial, polemic, hyper realistic—boils over with bitter humor and revulsion at ... (Barnes & Noble)
The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
by Nikolai Gogol
A collection of bizarre, humorous and satirical stories set in 19th century Russia.
When Pushkin first read some of the stories in this collection, he declared himself "amazed." "Here is real gaiety," he wrote, "honest, unconstrained, without mincing, without primness. And in places ... (Goodreads)
Hocus Pocus
by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
A darkly comedic tale of a man's struggle to cope with the absurdity of life.
Eugene is fired from his job as a college professor after having several of his witticisms surreptitiously recorded by the daughter of a popular conservative commentator. Eugene then becomes a ... (Wikipedia)
The Nonexistent Knight
by Italo Calvino
A knight's surreal quest to find an elusive castle, full of mysterious characters and adventures.
The protagonists of this novel are two paladins of Charlemagne: the non-existent knight, named Agilulf (he is in fact a lucid empty armor) and an inexperienced and passionate young man, Rambaldo. The ... (Wikipedia)
Wayside School Is Falling Down
by Louis Sachar
A humorous tale about the strange and wacky events at an unusual school.
Louis yard teacher starts off 30 tales of unusual students. Comic sketches precede every chapter. Todd brings a cute adorable plastic puppy who bites back when Joy steals it. Cafeteria Mrs Mush ... (Goodreads)
Amerika
by Franz Kafka
A young man's surreal journey through a bizarre and dystopian version of America.
The story describes the bizarre wanderings of sixteen-year-old European immigrant Karl Roßmann, who was forced to go to New York City to escape the scandal of his seduction by a housemaid. As the ... (Wikipedia)
I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays
by Sloane Crosley
A collection of humorous essays depicting the highs and lows of modern life.
Hailed by David Sedaris as "perfectly, relentlessly funny" and by Colson Whitehead as "sardonic without being cruel, tender without being sentimental," from the author of the new collection, Look ... (Barnes & Noble)
The Elephant Vanishes
by Haruki Murakami
Collection of short stories depicting the surreal and mysterious aspects of life.
Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780679750536 With the same deadpan mania and genius for dislocation that he brought to his internationally acclaimed novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled ... (Goodreads)
Leaving the Atocha Station
by Ben Lerner
A young poet's journey of self-discovery, struggling to find a sense of purpose in life.
Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. What is actual when ... (Goodreads)
Lost At Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries
by Jon Ronson
A journalist's adventures as he investigates some of the world's most bizarre stories.
Ronson has spent his life investigating crazy events, following fascinating people and unearthing unusual stories. Collected here from various sources (including the Guardian and GQ America) are the ... (Goodreads)
The Hike
by Drew Magary
A man embarks on a surreal journey through a mysterious forest, encountering strange creatures.
“,The Hike, just works. It’s like early, good Chuck Palahniuk. . . . Magary underhands a twist in at the end that hits you like a sharp jab at the bell. . . . It’s just that good.” —NPR.org,“A ... (Barnes & Noble)
Bestiario
by Julio Cortázar
Collection of surreal and dreamlike stories that explore the boundaries between reality and fantasy.
In these eight masterpieces there is no room for the smallest sign of stumbling or youthful undertones: they are perfect. These stories that speak about objects and daily happenings, pass over to ... (Goodreads)
The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory
by Jorge Luis Borges
A surreal exploration of reality and the power of imagination.
The acclaimed translation of Borges's valedictory stories, in its first stand-alone edition, , Jorge Luis Borges has been called the greatest Spanish-language writer of the twentieth century. Now ... (Barnes & Noble)
Franz Kafka's The Castle
by David Fishelson
A man's struggle against an oppressive bureaucracy in a mysterious castle.
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)
Monday Starts On Saturday
by Arkady Strugatsky
A sci-fi tale of a scientist who enters a mysterious world within a parallel universe.
"Понедельник начинается в субботу. Сказка для научных работников младшего возраста" - под таким заголовком в 1965 году вышла книга, которой зачитывались и продолжают зачитываться все новые и новые ... (Goodreads)
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