Book picks similar to
The Human Tragedy by Anatole France


french-lit
nobel-prize
read-in-czech
19-century

The West Pier


Patrick Hamilton - 1951
    Realising that she and Ryan are strongly attracted to each other, he at first relishes the simple challenge of stealing her from his rival; but after the discovery that Esther possesses a reasonable sum of money, he sets in motion a plan that is ruthlessly calculated to destroy her.

The Citadel of Weeping Pearls


Aliette de Bodard - 2015
    Thirty years ago, threatened by an invading fleet from the Dai Viet Empire, the Citadel disappeared and was never seen again. But now the Dai Viet Empire itself is under siege, on the verge of a war against an enemy that turns their own mindships against them; and the Empress, who once gave the order to raze the Citadel, is in desperate needs of its weapons. Meanwhile, on a small isolated space station, an engineer obsessed with the past works on a machine that will send her thirty years back, to the height of the Citadel's power. But the Citadel's disappearance still extends chains of grief and regrets all the way into the fraught atmosphere of the Imperial Court; and this casual summoning of the past might have world-shattering consequences... A new book set in the award-winning, critically acclaimed Xuya universe.

Locus Solus


Raymond Roussel - 1913
    One by one he introduces, demonstrates and expounds the discoveries and inventions of his fertile, encyclopaedic mind. An African mud-sculpture representing a naked child; a road-mender's tool which, when activated by the weather, creates a mosaic of human teeth; a vast aquarium in which humans can breathe and in which a depilated cat is seen stimulating the partially decomposed head of Danton to fresh flights of oratory. By each item in Cantarel's exhibition there hangs a tale - a tale such as only that esteemed genius Roussel could tell. As the inventions become more elaborate, the richness and brilliance of the author's stories grow to match them; the flow of his imagination becomes a flood and the reader is swept along in a torrent of wonder and hilarity.

The Most Precious of Cargoes


Jean-Claude Grumberg - 2019
    The woodcutter is very poor and a war rages around them, making it difficult for them to put food on the table. Yet every night, his wife prays for a child.A Jewish father rides on a train holding twin babies. His wife no longer has enough milk to feed both children. In hopes of saving them both, he wraps his daughter in a shawl and throws her into the forest.While foraging for food, the wife finds a bundle, a baby girl wrapped in a shawl. Although she knows harboring this baby could lead to her death, she takes the child home.Set against the horrors of the Holocaust and told with a fairytale-like lyricism, The Most Precious of Cargoes is a fable about family and redemption which reminds us that humanity can be found in the most inhumane of places.

The Governesses


Anne Serre - 1992
    The governesses, however, seem to spend more time running around in a state of frenzied desire than attending to the children’s education. One of their main activities is lying in wait for any passing stranger, and then throwing themselves on him like drunken Maenads. The rest of the time they drift about in a kind of sated, melancholy calm, spied upon by an old man in the house opposite, who watches their goings-on through a telescope. As they hang paper lanterns and prepare for the ball in their own honor, and in honor of the little boys rolling hoops on the lawn, much is mysterious: one reviewer wrote of the book’s “deceptively simple words and phrasing, the transparency of which works like a mirror reflecting back on the reader.”Written with the elegance of old French fables, the dark sensuality of Djuna Barnes and the subtle comedy of Robert Walser, this semi-deranged erotic fairy tale introduces American readers to the marvelous Anne Serre."Each sentence evokes a dream logic both languid and circuitous as the governesses move through a fever of domesticity and sexual abandon. A sensualist, surrealist romp."—Kirkus

Primeval and Other Times


Olga Tokarczuk - 1996
    Told in short bursts of "Time," the narrative takes the form of a stylized fable, an epic allegory about the inexorable grind of time and the clash between modernity (the masculine) and nature (the feminine) in which Poland's tortured political history from 1914 to the contemporary era and the episodic brutality visited on ordinary village life is played out. A novel of universal dimension that does not dwell on the parochial, Primeval and Other Times was hailed as a contemporary European classic and heralded Tokarczuk as one of the leading voices in Polish as well as world literature.

HellCorp


Jonathan Whitelaw - 2018
    Satan's got his work cut out in this darkly comic crime tale. A cracking read!" - Mark Leggatt Life is hard for The Devil and he desperately wants to take a holiday. Growing weary from playing the cosmic bad guy, he resolves to set up a company that will do his job for him so the sins of the world will tick over while he takes a vacation. God tells him he can have his vacation just as soon as he solves an ancient crime. But nothing is ever easy and before long he is up to his pitchfork in solving murders, desperate to crack the case so he can finally take the holiday he so badly needs... This is a perfectly-pitched darkly comic crime novel that is ideal for fans of Christopher Fowler and Ben Aaranovitch.

Everwood Academy: Demonic Creatures


J.E. Cluney - 2021
    For years, the monsters of my imagination have plagued me, until now. When I learn that they are real and protecting me, everything changes.I’m thrown into a world of demonics and angelics, discovering powers within myself and learning more about the monsters that have been by my side since my mother’s death.But there’s something more I’m not being told.Just what is Everwood Academy, and what are these strange dreams I’ve started having?***This is a why choose medium burn***

Eternal Endings (Prophesized, #5)


Kaitlyn Hoyt - 2015
    Follow the Prophesized characters as they attempt to pick up the pieces after the death and destruction of war. Coming out of the war alive creates more struggles and complications for the characters that they did not train for. They are turning the page and starting a new chapter of their lives, because their stories are eternal. Eternal Endings is the last book in the Prophesized Series.

Promise at Dawn


Romain Gary - 1960
    Alone and poor, she fights fiercely to give her son the very best. Gary chronicles his childhood with her in Russia, Poland, and on the French Riviera. And he recounts his adventurous life as a young man fighting for France in the Second World War. But above all, he tells the story of the love for his mother that was his very life, their secret and private planet, their wonderland "born out of a mother's murmur into a child's ear, a promise whispered at dawn of future triumphs and greatness, of justice and love." A romantic, thrilling memoir that has become a French classic.

In the Time of the Blue Ball


Manuela Draeger - 2002
    Translated from the French by Brian Evenson. With the calm strangeness of dreams, and humor deepened by a hint of melancholy, these wonderful stories fool around on the frontiers of the imagination. All musical dogs, woolly crabs, children and other detectives of the not-yet-invented should own this book.--Shelley JacksonHumane, impossible, homely and alien, Draeger's extraordinary stories are as close to dreams as fiction can be.--China Mi�ville

Of River and Raynn - The Catalyst


Rebecca Ethington - 2014
    I couldn’t even remember my name. I was tagged, labeled and doomed to cycle through state care for the next twelve years; moving from one family to another. They all rejected me as the dreams began to come, the memories began to return, and things around me began to explode.Now my mind is full of a world of shadows, things that my heart pleads with me to be true, that I hope are only fantasy. That the disturbing past I see is not mine.When I sleep I hear whispers of magic, and of evil queens, and a world that exists alongside our own. Things that could never be. But, there is one thing I know to be true. That there was a boy who was torn from me. A boy that I know means more to me than a brother, or than a lover. But what he is to me, I am not sure. I hear him cry for me in my dreams, I hear people call him The Catalyst.I know I need to find him.I wouldn’t have tried, if I would have known that finding River, would have made all my dreams turn into a haunting reality.