Books like An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures
12 books with a reading profile close to An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector. Deep, inward-looking, contemplative, open-ended and thought-provoking; a demanding read.
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1
Água Viva
Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, dense
Água Viva functions as a sustained internal monologue delivered by an anonymous female painter who abandons representational art to pursue the instantaneous "now." The text rejects traditional narrative progression, ins…
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2
The Book of Disquiet
Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, dense
Published long after the author’s death, this fragmented prose collection serves as the autobiography of Bernardo Soares, one of Fernando Pessoa’s many heteronyms.
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3
Austerlitz
by W.G. Sebald
Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, dense
The narrator meets Jacques Austerlitz in the waiting room of the Antwerp railway station in the 1960s, and the two begin to talk about architecture.
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4
Immortality
Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, dense
A woman in her sixties waves goodbye to a lifeguard at a pool, and the gesture is enough to give Kundera's narrator the idea for Agnès, a character he follows through the whole book.
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5
The Glass Bead Game
Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, dense
Set in the future province of Castalia, the narrative follows Joseph Knecht as he rises to the rank of Magister Ludi within an elitist intellectual order.
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6
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, dense
Milan Kundera's novel is composed of seven parts which are linked by themes of memory, forgetting and the exercise of power.
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7
Infinite Jest
Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, dense
Set in a near-future North America where years are named after corporate sponsors, the narrative centers on the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House and the Enfield Tennis Academy.
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8
Selected Poems
Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, dense
Centering on the posthumous 1890 collection edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, this volume organizes Dickinson’s verse into four thematic categories: Life, Love, Nature, and Time and Eternity.
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9
Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings
Also deep and contemplative · philosophy, dense
Labyrinths is a compilation of Jorge Luis Borges’s short fiction, essays, and parables, characterized by mathematical puzzles and philosophical paradoxes.
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10
Lincoln in the Bardo
Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary
During the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln visits a Georgetown cemetery to mourn his young son, Willie, who has just died of typhoid fever.
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11
Bluets
Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary
Maggie Nelson constructs this book as a series of 240 numbered prose poems centered on her obsession with the color blue.
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12
Time Shelter
Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary
Gospodinov's novel imagines a Swiss-run clinic that treats Alzheimer's patients by recreating the decade of their youth, with floors that look like the 1960s, 1970s and so on.
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