Here are 100 books that Dimension of Miracles fans have personally recommended if you like
Dimension of Miracles.
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I've benefited from (or perhaps been cursed by) a diverse life. I've lived and worked in six countries on three continents. I've been an English teacher, copywriter, magazine columnist, internet entrepreneur (in Bangkok, of all places), author, and creativity consultant. But before that, I was a child with an overactive imagination. I delighted in science fiction, surrealism, and humor. Outlandish ideas inspire me. And I love absurdity when done well. It is easy to come up with nonsense. Creating meaningful nonsense is far more difficult. But when it works, it is brilliant!
This book is a brilliant example of absurdist literature that works so well because, while Josef K (the main character) finds himself in an absurd situation, we can all relate to it. It taps into a primal fear of the modern world.
Josef K, an ordinary guy, is arrested. He is not told for what crime or even who is arresting him. He must appear in court on Sunday. But, he is not told what time or where the court is. And it just gets worse from there.
It's a nightmarish situation—indeed, a Kafkaesque one. But you can envision yourself trapped in one, can't you?
"Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested." From its gripping first sentence onward, this novel exemplifies the term ""Kafkaesque." Its darkly humorous narrative recounts a bank clerk's entrapment — based on an undisclosed charge — in a maze of nonsensical rules and bureaucratic roadblocks. Written in 1914 and published posthumously in 1925, Kafka's engrossing parable about the human condition plunges an isolated individual into an impersonal, illogical system. Josef K.'s ordeals raise provocative, ever-relevant issues related to the role of government and the nature of…
I've benefited from (or perhaps been cursed by) a diverse life. I've lived and worked in six countries on three continents. I've been an English teacher, copywriter, magazine columnist, internet entrepreneur (in Bangkok, of all places), author, and creativity consultant. But before that, I was a child with an overactive imagination. I delighted in science fiction, surrealism, and humor. Outlandish ideas inspire me. And I love absurdity when done well. It is easy to come up with nonsense. Creating meaningful nonsense is far more difficult. But when it works, it is brilliant!
I don't normally like melancholic books, but this book touched me as beautiful in its melancholy and thought-provoking. The absurd premise of the novel is that upon an island, objects—such as hats, perfume, and birds—regularly disappear from the island and the inhabitants' memory of these objects. Well, not all of the inhabitants. Very few people continue to remember things that have disappeared. These people are sought out by the memory police.
The saddest aspect of the novel is that people accept their situation as their world becomes smaller and smaller.
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020, an enthralling Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance from one of Japan's greatest writers.
'Beautiful... Haunting' Sunday Times 'A dreamlike story of dystopia' Jia Tolentino __________
Hat, ribbon, bird rose.
To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed.
When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately…
I've benefited from (or perhaps been cursed by) a diverse life. I've lived and worked in six countries on three continents. I've been an English teacher, copywriter, magazine columnist, internet entrepreneur (in Bangkok, of all places), author, and creativity consultant. But before that, I was a child with an overactive imagination. I delighted in science fiction, surrealism, and humor. Outlandish ideas inspire me. And I love absurdity when done well. It is easy to come up with nonsense. Creating meaningful nonsense is far more difficult. But when it works, it is brilliant!
I love the sheer simplicity of this novel's theme and the chaos a simple act can wreck. The novel begins with the main character deciding to shave off the mustache he has had for more than a decade while his wife is out. When she returns, she says nothing about the missing mustache. When he brings it up, she denies he has ever had a mustache. Likewise, friends and colleagues say the main character never had a moustache.
Things get worse from there. The novel raises questions about identity, trust, and memory.
One morning, a man shaves off his long-worn moustache, hoping to amuse his wife and friends. But when nobody notices, or pretends not to have noticed, what started out as a simple trick turns to terror. As doubt and denial bristle, and every aspect of his life threatens to topple into madness - a disturbing solution comes into view, taking us on a dramatic flight across the world.
Translated by Lanie Goodman
Elegant, pocket-sized paperbacks, VINTAGE Editions celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world…
I've benefited from (or perhaps been cursed by) a diverse life. I've lived and worked in six countries on three continents. I've been an English teacher, copywriter, magazine columnist, internet entrepreneur (in Bangkok, of all places), author, and creativity consultant. But before that, I was a child with an overactive imagination. I delighted in science fiction, surrealism, and humor. Outlandish ideas inspire me. And I love absurdity when done well. It is easy to come up with nonsense. Creating meaningful nonsense is far more difficult. But when it works, it is brilliant!
This book takes Japanese magical realism to a whole new level of absurdity. A man's wife is taken away by ambulance at four in the morning—even though nothing is wrong with her. He goes to the hospital to find her and, instead, finds himself in a seemingly endless complex. As he tracks his wife, he encounters bizarre characters, freakish sexual experiments, and more.
Although the novel is more than a little dark, I was fascinated by the imaginativeness of the setting and situation and the underlying logic.
From the acclaimed author of Woman in the Dunes comes Secret Rendezvous, the bizarrely erotic and comic adventures of a man searching for his missing wife in a mysteriously vast underground hospital.
From the moment that an ambulance appears in the middle of the night to take his wife, who protests that she is perfectly healthy, her bewildered husband realizes that things are not as they should be. His covert explorations reveal that the enormous hospital she was taken to is home to a network of constant surveillance, outlandish sex experiments, and an array of very odd and even violent…
My first job upon graduating from college was working for an invention-marketing firm. This wasn’t my intention; armed with a degree in journalism, I was ready to take on the world. Unfortunately, the country was enduring a recession, and after six months of unemployment, I was happy to be offered a copywriting position. So often during the two years I spent there, I would think to myself, “This could make such a great novel.” It took me a while—and with more than a few rejections along the way—but inspired by the writers and books I’ve included in my collection, I finally got around to penning my own tale.
My son’s a young adult now, but I treasure the memories of the hours we spent reading together. We went down all the well-trodden paths and shared countless joyful hours with J.K. Rowling and Dav Pilkey and The Mysterious Benedict Society, but the creativity of this book is exceeded only by its humor. Also, it clocks in at around 700 pages, so it’ll entertain you and your children for a good while. I always enjoy a laugh as a reader, and if my work elicits a chuckle from you, then I feel my mission is complete.
Unlike cats, bluebears have 27 lives, which can be very handy when one considers the manner in which the hero of this story repeatedly manages to avoid death only by a paw's breadth. The story describes Captain Bluebear's first 13 and a half lives.
I’m an Irish novelist and occasional screenwriter. My latest book, Duffy and Son, is my sixth. I can be drawn in by any well-told tale, of course, but I’ve always had the strongest reaction to stories with at least some element of comedy. I don’t know, I just find books in which no one says anything funny to be deeply unrealistic. It infuriates me when any piece of fiction is viewed as ‘lesser’ because there’s a chance it might make you smile. The books listed here will definitely make you smile. If you give them a chance, I hope you find them as worthy of your time as I did.
I could have picked anything by George Saunders, really. He’s the closest thing I have to a personal deity. Such is the level of awe and wonder that he invokes in me, I actually find him difficult to discuss. It’s like trying to look directly at the sun.
Suffice it to say that CivilWarLand in Bad Decline—the title refers to a failing theme park—is like all of his other short story collections. It’s beautiful and wise and heart-breaking and deeply intelligent and, yes, desperately funny. I would pay a lot of money to be able to read it again for the first time.
Since its publication in 1996, George Saunders’s debut collection has grown in esteem from a cherished cult classic to a masterpiece of the form, inspiring an entire generation of writers along the way. In six stories and a novella, Saunders hatches an unforgettable cast of characters, each struggling to survive in an increasingly haywire world. With a new introduction by Joshua Ferris and a new author’s note by Saunders himself, this edition is essential reading for those seeking to discover or revisit a virtuosic, disturbingly prescient voice.
Praise for George Saunders and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
I’ve long been fascinated with the dark side of science and human behavior, and grew up on a combination of dystopian classics and horror fiction. When I started writing for publication, apocalyptic themes quickly emerged. As the world around us grows more fraught by the day, I find a strange sort of comfort in reading and writing fiction that doesn’t shy away from depicting the negative aspects of social media, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, or any other technology that has the capacity to create manmade disasters beyond our understanding. And as a small-press author myself, I’m always on the lookout for books that didn’t get enough love.
Told as a series of movie reviews, A Short Film About Disappointment unfurls its dystopia gradually. A hacker attack kicks off a global multi-decade economic depression, and to prevent this from ever happening again the Internet is abolished and replaced with the “Betternet,” a neutered and highly censored version of the Internet. Personal screens are also banned in this nanny state, leading to a robust cinema culture that the unread reviewer wants to contribute to with a dense art film of his own. The hilarious capsule descriptions of eighty (fictional) films serve as an oblique way of introducing the world, while the numerous tangents of the writer “Noah Body” tell a personal story of love, filmmaking, and a literal haunting by an ex-friend.
An ingenious novel about art and revenge, insisting on your dreams and hitting on your doctor, told in the form of 80 movie reviews
In near-future America, film critic Noah Body uploads his reviews to an underread content aggregator. His job is dreary routine: watch, seethe, pan. He dreams of making his own film, free of the hackery of commercial cinema. Faced with writing on lousy movies for a website that no one reads, Noah smuggles into his reviews depictions of his troubled life on the margins.
Amid his movie reviews, we learn that his apartment in the vintage slum…
As a child, all I wanted to read were books about adventure. I also had an adventurous childhood, growing up in the Louisiana swamps with a father who actually hunted alligators and took me with him. As I came of age, I longed to tell stories, and, as they say, it’s best to write about what you know. To date, I’ve penned six novels, all set in the exotic wetlands of Cajun, Louisiana. I feel missionary about this—that my writing gifts allow me to decode my homeplace in a way that makes it easier for outsiders to see the singular niche it occupies on the American landscape.
Twain’s classic may be out of favor in certain circles, but it is a big, imaginative, sprawling narrative that slyly deals with the thorny issues of race relations in the antebellum South while being, I believe, one of the greatest and fondest depictions of boyhood ever penned.
I love how Twain captured not just the regional southern vernacular but painted a picture of a world now lost to us. To be clear, Twain’s portrayal of Jim, the black protagonist, and his friendship with Huck, a young white boy, is an arch sendup of the racism of the day, for at the end of the day, Jim and Huck are the moral centers of the story—truly, the only gentlemen in the book.
Some creative writers believe that stories carry a responsibility. The duty to entertain, of course, but also to educate, challenge and question the character(s) of the most powerful, the wealthiest. I am one of them. As an author, screenwriter, stage, and film actor, I’ve always believed in using stories as a platform to convey positively disruptive ideas, to highlight potentially destructive ideologies, to combat imperialism, expansionism, racism, and other toxic practices while delivering a neutral message devoid of political affiliations and emotional responses with no logical ground. Not unlike my latest novel, America is a Zoo, I am the product of a passionate soul, one who’s apolitical by design, yet political by conviction.
If I had to use one word to describe The Sellout, it would be “charged”.
The Sellout tells the story of a young black man who lost his father to a police shooting. As he attempts to cope with this new reality, his hometown is gradually fading into oblivion. To salvage what’s left of it, he decides on the craziest plan: reinstating slavery. An action that will drag our protagonist to the Supreme Court’s doorsteps.
Unconventional and wild, The Sellout is one of the best social commentaries on America’s racial issues you’ll ever read. I guarantee it, I stand behind it.
'Outrageous, hilarious and profound.' Simon Schama, Financial Times
'The longer you stare at Beatty's pages, the smarter you'll get.' Guardian
'The most badass first 100 pages of an American novel I've read.' New York Times
A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game.
Born in Dickens on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles, the narrator of The Sellout spent his childhood as the subject in his father's racially charged…
I consider myself not only a student of satire, but also as a master practitioner with an innate and instinctive aptitude for it—like those born with perfect pitch or hand-eye coordination, kind of like an idiot savant, only hopefully without the idiot part. Satire is the perfect literary platform because it allows both the writer and the reader to explore the landscape of the human experience, the absurdity, the grandeur, the mystery, the horror—not with a sermon or a polemic or a sigh, but with a laugh and a nodding smile of recognition.
Once again, I’d never read anything like it before. He was having a conversation with me. I was now a character in an Amsterdam bar with him, the war had just ended, we were smoking cigarettes and drinking gin.
He would respond to my silent questions, and wax and wane philosophically, metaphysically, morally, ethically, and occasionally comically.
And the beauty was that it had happened so randomly—a roommate had thrown the book in the trash, declaring it to be “bullshit.” I knew the lad to be an imbecile (an acceptable term at the time), so I fished the book out of the trash, read the first sentence, and loved it.
It was the quantumly entangled counter particle to Candide: one particle from the age of reason, the other particle from the age of existentialism.
Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith
Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil.
Jean-Baptiste Clamence - refined, handsome, forty, a former successful lawyer - is in turmoil. Over several drunken…
