Book picks similar to
Lost Souls by Honoré de Balzac
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Platform
Michel Houellebecq - 2001
But following his father’s death he takes a group holiday to Thailand where he meets a travel agent—the shyly compelling Valérie—who begins to bring this half-dead man to life with sex of escalating intensity and audacity. Arcing with dreamlike swiftness from Paris to Pattaya Beach and from sex clubs to a terrorist massacre, Platform is a brilliant, apocalyptic masterpiece by a man who is widely regarded as one of the world’s most original and daring writers.
The Erasers
Alain Robbe-Grillet - 1953
The Erasers, his first novel, reads like a detective story but is primarily concerned with weaving and then probing a complete mixture of fact and fantasy. The narrative spans the twenty-four-hour period following a series of eight murders in eight days, presumably the work of a terrorist group. After the ninth murder, the investigation is then turned over to a police agent, who may in fact be the assassin.Both an engrossing mystery and a sinister deconstruction of reality, The Erasers intrigues and unnerves with equal force as it pull us along to its ominous conclusion.
Mygale
Thierry Jonquet - 1984
He has an operating theatre in the basement of his chateau and keeps his partner Eve imprisoned in her bedroom, a room he has equipped with an intercom and 300-watt speakers through which he bellows orders. Eve is only allowed out to be paraded at cocktail parties and on the last Sunday of each month, when the couple visit a young woman in a mental asylum. Following these outings, Lafargue humiliates Eve by forcing her to perform lewd sexual acts with strangers while he watches through a one-way mirror. In alternating chapters, Jonquet introduces seemingly unrelated characters - a criminal on the run after murdering a policeman, and an abducted young man who finds himself chained naked in a dark chamber, forced to endure all manner of physical torture at the hands of a mysterious stranger, whom he calls 'Mygale', after a type of tropical spider. All of these characters are caught in a deceitful web, doomed to meet their fate.
குறிஞ்சி மலர் [Kurinji Malar]
Na. Parthasarathy - 1960
This is a story which take place in thiruparankundram,Madurai.This story tells the characters of purani and aravindan,who lived in present world with tamil culture(panbadu) in them.main characters includes *Purani*Aravindan*Muruganandam*Mangalashwary ammal*Vasantha*Bharama karar
Dreams of My Russian Summers
Andreï Makine - 1995
Every summer he visits his grandmother in a dusty village overlooking the vast steppes. Here, during the warm evenings, they sit on Charlotte's narrow, flower-covered bacony and listen to tales from another time, another place: Paris at the turn of the century. She who used to see Proust playing tennis in Neuilly captivates the children with stories of Tsar Nicholas's visit to Paris in 1896, of the great Paris flood of 1910, of the death of French president Felix Faure in the arms of his mistress. But from Charlotte the boy also learns of a Russia he has never known, of famine and misery, of brutal injustice, of the hopeless chaos of war. He follows her as she travels by foot from Moscow half the way to Siberia; suffers with her as she tells of her husband - his grandfather - a victim of Stalin's purges; shudders as she describes her own capture by bandits, who brutalize her and left her for dead. Could all this pain and suffering really have happened to his gentle, beloved Charlotte? Mesmerized, the boy weaves Charlotte's stories into his own secret universe of memory and dream. Yet, despite all the deprivations and injustices of the Soviet world, he like many Russians still feels a strong affinity with and "an indestructible love" for his homeland.
Yakada Yaka (The Burgher Trilogy, Book 2)
Carl Muller - 1994
The smoke-spewing, banshee-wailing, fearsome black thing hisses like a thousand cobras... and the villagers declare that this Thing is an Iron Demon—a yakada yaka.The Burghers who drive these Iron Demons have a penchant for challenging authority and courting trouble, sometimes just to liven things up in the railway outposts... and so it is that Sonnaboy and Meerwald chase a large group of villagers all across Anuradhapura, mother-naked but not much bothered by it, Ben Godlieb conjures up a corpse in his cowcatcher, Dickie Byrd single-handedly demolishes a Pentecostal Mission and is hailed as the messiah of the Railway fraternity, and Basil Van der Smaght filches a human heart and feeds it to the Nawalapitiya railway staff ...and to cap it all, Sonnaboy takes French Leave to act in The Bridge on the River Kwai!
Story of the Eye
Georges Bataille - 1928
It's something of an underground classic, rediscovered by each new generation. Most recently, the Icelandic pop singer Björk Guðdmundsdóttir cites Story of the Eye as a major inspiration: she made a music video that alludes to Bataille's erotic uses of eggs, and she plans to read an excerpt for an album.Warning: Story of the Eye is graphically sexual, and is only suited for adults who are not easily offended.
Cat's Cradle
Maurice Baring - 1925
With subtle twists and turns in a fascinating portrait of society, Maurice Baring conveys the moral that love is too strong to be overcome by mere mortals.
The Bachelors
Henry de Montherlant - 1934
This is a story of family intrigues and physical and mental disintegration. Neglected and humiliated by society, each lives in his private world of near madness. Finally one is helped by a rich relative whilst the other dies of neglect. Montherlant portrays with a mixture of irony and sympathy and a terrifying realism the strange twilight world inhabited by these two characters.
This Is Not a Story and Other Stories
Denis Diderot - 1773
This volume presents his five remarkable philosophical tales including This Is Not a Story, On the Inconsistency of Public Opinion Regarding Our Private Action, and Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage, as well as The Two Friends From Bourbonne and Conversation of a Father with His Children: or the Danger of Setting Oneself Above the Law, both of which are here translated into English for the first time.
Zazie in the Metro
Raymond Queneau - 1959
All she really wants to do is ride the metro, but finding it shut because of a strike, Zazie looks for other means of amusement and is soon caught up in a comic adventure that becomes wilder and more manic by the minute. In 1960 Queneau's cult classic was made into a hugely successful film by Louis Malle. Packed full of word play and phonetic games, 'Zazie in the Metro' remains as stylish and witty today as it did back then.
A Simple Heart
Gustave Flaubert - 1877
In A Simple Heart, the poignant story that inspired Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot, Felicite, a French housemaid, approaches a lifetime of servitude with human-scaled but angelic aplomb. No other author has imparted so much beauty and integrity to so modest an existence. Flaubert's "great saint" endures loss after loss by embracing the rich, true rhythms of life: the comfort of domesticity, the solace of the Church, and the depth of memory. This novella showcases Flaubert's perfectly honed realism: a delicate counterpoint of daily events with their psychological repercussions.