Here are 100 books that The Elephant Vanishes fans have personally recommended if you like
The Elephant Vanishes.
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For the last decade, I’ve spent the majority of each year traveling. I’ve been to 60 countries across 6 continents and every US state. My love of travel was inspired and encouraged by my parents from a very early age. I’ve also been inspired by a wide variety of other sources, like movies, TV, photography, and, of course, books. Often, I’ll plan an adventure around a cool location I saw or read about and then just go. I’ll just show up and see what happens. All it takes is that little initial nudge, like what I found in these books.
No book has had a bigger influence on me as a person or a writer than this one. I suppose a lot of hoopy froods could say the same. It’s an adventure on a galactic scale, and yet, at its core, it’s just about a guy who wants to go home and have a cup of tea.
It’s a brilliantly funny satire and full of jokes and moments I’ll never forget. All four books in the series are amazing, and I’ve re-read them countless times. The fifth and final book is a downer worth skipping.
This box set contains all five parts of the' trilogy of five' so you can listen to the complete tales of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Bebblebrox and Marvin the Paranoid Android! Travel through space, time and parallel universes with the only guide you'll ever need, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Read by Stephen Fry, actor, director, author and popular audiobook reader, and Martin Freeman, who played Arthur Dent in film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He is well known as Tim in The Office.
The set also includes a bonus DVD Life, the Universe and…
I have always been drawn to the weird, fantastic, supernatural, and unexplained. Whether it’s film or TV (The Twilight Zone, the X-files, Ingmar Bergman) or gothic and speculative literature, I become mesmerized by the mysteries involved. I have written 10 books (poetry and fiction). Of the fiction, most is either speculative, as in magical realism, or somewhat gothic in nature. My newest novel, due out in 2025, is pure gothic and takes place in a haunted abbey inhabited by ghosts and the devil himself. And yet, behind it all is an exploration of human faith and frailty and a search for answers about our beliefs.
I love being taken to places I’ve never been before and being exposed to leaps in imagination. Marquez, the most famous of the school of magical realism, takes the reader on a journey through time and history in an unforgettable tale. The style of writing captures me in this book and has also influenced me. If you read no other book, read this one.
One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, and alive with unforgettable men and women -- brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul -- this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.
When I was a kid, I looked forward to Fridays. Not just because it was the end of a school week, but because that’s when the TV Guide arrived with the morning newspaper. While I ate my cereal, I’d circle the movies I wanted to watch the following week. If they were late-late movies, I’d set my alarm and get up and watch them alone in the living room (with the sound turned way down). I was also an avid reader, and it wasn’t long before I started pairing my reading and my viewing. I still do that, with a special interest in short stories and their film adaptations.
What I find striking about this story is that Faulkner’s depiction of Abner Snopes—the barn burner—is so uncompromising. He’s an angry, disaffected man who, when he can’t find his footing in society, reacts with violence. The reader is given no reason to sympathize with him, just asked to understand that he has a code: Integrity through vengeance. If that’s hard to understand—(it is for me)—that is, I think, the point.For a story published in 1939 about Mississippi in the late 1800s, it feels dishearteningly relevant.
The 1958 film adaptation,The Long, Hot Summer, chops this story up and tosses it in with a few other Faulkner works. It’s far less edgy, but it stars Paul Newman.
Shahrazad’s Gift is a collection of linked short stories set in contemporary Cairo — magical, absurd, and humorous.
The author focuses on the off-beat, little-known stories, far from CNN news: a Swedish belly dancer who taps into the Oriental fantasies of her clientele; a Japanese woman studying Arabic, driven mad…
When I was a kid, I looked forward to Fridays. Not just because it was the end of a school week, but because that’s when the TV Guide arrived with the morning newspaper. While I ate my cereal, I’d circle the movies I wanted to watch the following week. If they were late-late movies, I’d set my alarm and get up and watch them alone in the living room (with the sound turned way down). I was also an avid reader, and it wasn’t long before I started pairing my reading and my viewing. I still do that, with a special interest in short stories and their film adaptations.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about this story. It’s set in Yalta, a resort town located on the Crimean Peninsula—territory that has been caught up in the Russian/Ukrainian war. Chekhov, who suffered from tuberculosis, had a home there, where he wrote much of his last and best work, including this—his most famous—story. It’s a simple tale about normal people—lovers who are married to others—and thus bucked the Russian trend of big societal themes. Chekhov’s political leanings changed so often, he said, that the “absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature” became the first of his six principles for a good story. (The others: objectivity, truthfulness, brevity, originality, and compassion.) Still, lately I’ve been wondering what this story would be like if Chekhov were writing it today.
If any writer can be said to have invented the modern short story, it is Anton Chekhov. It is not just that Chekhov democratized this art form; more than that, he changed the thrust of short fiction from relating to revealing. And what marvelous and unbearable things are revealed in these Forty Stories. The abashed happiness of a woman in the presence of the husband who abandoned her years before. The obsequious terror of the official who accidentally sneezes on a general. The poignant astonishment of an aging Don Juan overtaken by love. Spanning the entirety of Chekhov's career and…
When I was a kid, I looked forward to Fridays. Not just because it was the end of a school week, but because that’s when the TV Guide arrived with the morning newspaper. While I ate my cereal, I’d circle the movies I wanted to watch the following week. If they were late-late movies, I’d set my alarm and get up and watch them alone in the living room (with the sound turned way down). I was also an avid reader, and it wasn’t long before I started pairing my reading and my viewing. I still do that, with a special interest in short stories and their film adaptations.
Part of the allure of Chekhov’s story is the unanswered question, Will they, or won’t they? The answer, I think, may depend on where you are in your own life when you read it. Michelle Herman’s novella, “A New and Glorious Life,” reworks and expands the story, letting you linger a while longer with the lovers before they part. I think this gives them a better chance, but who knows? Joyce Carol Oates also reimagined this story in her collection Marriages and Infidelities. Vintage Oates, it reads like a fever dream.
The first film adaptation,The Lady with the Dog, made under the Soviet censor’s watchful eye, is an almost literal translation of the story. Dark Eyes, a later Soviet-Italian coproduction, stars Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni and strays pretty far from the source.
"Reading Michelle Herman's new collection is like eating Godiva chocolates, something so exquisitely enjoyable you can't get enough of it. How often,in this day and age, does one get to read a love story which is also a literary gem? These novellas are the stuff of classics." --Marly Swick
"These novellas have a psychological depth and acute worldliness one associates with continental fiction. Michelle Herman's sympathies bridge generations and genders; her intelligence conveys both the lovingness and coldness of the way we live now. Her work is a sophisticated pleasure." --Philip Lopate
I am a cultural historian, film critic, literary critic, editor, and essayist–and a closeted fiction writer–fascinated by ‘the fantastic’ in art or in life. And Christmas seems to me the perfect example of a time that unites realism and the strange–the time of ghost stories and nativities. I wrote a book on It’s a Wonderful Life (2023) because it triumphantly succeeds at bridging the connection between ordinary life and the marvelous. I have also edited anthologies of Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories, The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce (Penguin, 2010), and Victorian Fairy Tales (Oxford World’s Classics, 2015), both of which include many seasonal classics.
Christmas brings memories of other Christmases and can, therefore, be as much a melancholy time as a wonderful one.
The last story in James Joyce’s Dubliners ends with this burden of memory, and within a marriage, strikes a note of separation at the time of festivity. Before then, he brings to life for us Christmas parties, Edwardian Dublin in late December, conviviality, and the pain and delight of music.
It’s as good a story as anyone ever wrote and as Christmassy in its sadness as Dickens is in its joy.
A shocking confession from his wife prompts Gabriel to reconsider what he knows and understands of his wife and their shared past, whether it is better to die young, and what will be remembered of him when he is gone.
Critically acclaimed author James Joyce’s Dubliners is a collection of short stories depicting middle class life in Dublin in the early twentieth century. First published in 1914, the stories draw on themes relevant to the time such as nationalism and Ireland’s national identity, and cement Joyce’s reputation for brutally honest and revealing depictions of everyday Irish life. At the heart…
A retired English teacher has come home to Appalachia, a land of industrial disaster and natural beauty. He has been enticed with stories of Wildcat’s transformation: of the collective action embodied in Hotel Wildcat as well as the artisanal pursuits springing to life in the old iron mill. But in…
Fiction is oftentimes a difficult genre to recommend, as we are in the area of storytelling. Fiction though is also an important genre as it opens the reader to another perspective. I chose off-tangent books because we crave the mystery and fresh perspective these books have to offer. The books I have recommended are books that will lead you to another place you’ve never been to before.
One of the rare books I have found close to my heart, Jonas Samuelle’s book is poetic, melancholic, but an amazing read. His stories resonate the type of flow I find with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Jonas Samuelle has an amazing flow with his story, and you can feel the emotion of each character. It is a book I still truly treasure to this day.
When a heart-broken sculptor seeks justice, he finds himself trapped between two immortals. Soon, their feud becomes his, and everyone around them becomes a casualty.
Fiction is oftentimes a difficult genre to recommend, as we are in the area of storytelling. Fiction though is also an important genre as it opens the reader to another perspective. I chose off-tangent books because we crave the mystery and fresh perspective these books have to offer. The books I have recommended are books that will lead you to another place you’ve never been to before.
I’ve read this book before I’ve even watched Fight Club. Choke was the reason I opted to see the movie in the first place. Chuck Palahniuk brings his story to you as if he’s guiding you through a dark, risky alleyway that you’ve always been advised not to visit. He brings information, psychological disorders, and more into a strange normality that is scary to find relatable. It has indeed widened my perspective and brought me to see the absurdity, and observe closely.
Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be “saved” by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor’s life, go on to send checks to support him. When he’s not pulling this stunt, Victor cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops for action, visits his addled mom, and spends his days working at a colonial theme park. His creator, Chuck Palahniuk, is the visionary we need…
Early on, I identified with American short story writers Bernard Malamud and Flannery O’Connor. Though firmly ensconced in the American canon, neither had a fear of allowing the comic or fantastic to play important roles in stories with serious spiritual values. I enjoyed fabulous writers as well, the wildness of Nikolai Gogol, the magic of Ray Bradbury, the comic impulses of Mark Twain. I came across Dune and read it several times. Since those days, I have taken in many stories that do not stick to representations of reality, discovering writers all over the world with the same fascinations. I can’t keep myself from trying to join them.
Isabel Allende shows us marvels from South American traditions, archetypal stories with the excitement of passionate lovers and desperate bandits.
Once you finish the stories—not one a clunker—your mind will have been temporarily readjusted to the dangerous and fantastical world of deeply hidden human motivations. It’s as good as her autobiographical Paula, which is an education between covers. At first, I wouldn’t read Isabel Allende because two friends told me she imitated Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
I later learned they had not actually read any of her books. I decided to see for myself. Not true, I told them. Read the books.
Told in the voice of Isabel Allende’s beloved character Eva Luna, a “distinctive, powerful, and haunting” (Los Angeles Times) collection of short fiction by one of the most iconic and acclaimed writers of our time.
Eva Luna is a young woman whose powers as a storyteller bring her friendship and love. Lying in bed with her European lover, refugee and journalist Rolf Carlé, Eva answers his request for a story “you have never told anyone before” with these twenty-three samples of her vibrant artistry. Interweaving the real and the magical, she explores love, vengeance, compassion, and the strengths of women,…
The Curiosity Cycle is a book for parents and educators who want to teach their children to be active explorers of the world. Learning through curiosity leads to adaptive thinking because your child is continually trying to improve his or her understanding of the world, and new facts and ideas…
Early on, I identified with American short story writers Bernard Malamud and Flannery O’Connor. Though firmly ensconced in the American canon, neither had a fear of allowing the comic or fantastic to play important roles in stories with serious spiritual values. I enjoyed fabulous writers as well, the wildness of Nikolai Gogol, the magic of Ray Bradbury, the comic impulses of Mark Twain. I came across Dune and read it several times. Since those days, I have taken in many stories that do not stick to representations of reality, discovering writers all over the world with the same fascinations. I can’t keep myself from trying to join them.
This collection is an Introduction to an established writer of traditional horror with thirteen stories previously published in magazines, anthologies, or collections. I read these now as a single continuous work (like a symphony) with re-emerging themes.
Weaving in and out throughout the collection, the image of the shape-shifter develops with a wild inventiveness that never spins out of control. The same with the writer’s fascination with music that comes out humorously in the story “Collectable,” disturbingly accurate in “Under Iron.”
There is dark humor working beneath the surface that keeps readers alert and tingling with anticipation, a good effect if you’ve never tingled.
In this way, the fantastic in these stories takes us away from our lives in the present moment, providing a moment’s escape, but brings us back to ourselves in the end, like that ride on the roller coaster. Our feet find purchase once again; the journey has not only been entertaining, as we screamed in delight and fear, it has taken us somewhere and then left us off in strange territory, entertained, yes, perhaps better off for the experience, yet, miraculously, unharmed. This is the pure experience provided by these stories. Each one takes us for that ride, rewards us…
