Books like Infinite Jest
12 books with a reading profile close to Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Deep, inward-looking, open-ended and thought-provoking; a demanding read.
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1
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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2
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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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
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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5
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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6
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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7
Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings
Also deep and open-ended · 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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8
Foucault’s Pendulum
by Umberto Eco
Also deep and open-ended · philosophy, dense
Three editors at a vanity publishing house in Milan—Belbo, Casaubon, and Diotallevi—invent a grand historical conspiracy to amuse themselves.
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9
The Trial
by Franz Kafka
Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, dense
On a typical morning, bank official Josef K.
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10
Absalom, Absalom!
Also deep and inward-looking · dense, literary
Thomas Sutpen arrives in Mississippi in 1833 with a group of enslaved people and a plan to create a vast plantation called Sutpen’s Hundred.
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11
Faust
Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, dense
Heinrich Faust is a scholar who has mastered philosophy, law, medicine, and theology, yet remains dissatisfied with the limits of human knowledge.
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12
The Sound and the Fury
Also deep and inward-looking · dense, literary
Set in early twentieth-century Mississippi, this novel documents the decline of the Compson family, a former aristocratic household now facing financial and moral ruin.
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