Books like

Books like Letter to His Father

12 books with a reading profile close to Letter to His Father by Franz Kafka. Deep, inward-looking, contemplative and open-ended; a moderate read.

1

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

by James Joyce, James Joyce

Also deep and inward-looking · dense, classic literature

Stephen Dedalus grows up in Ireland, navigating the strictures of a Catholic education and the turbulent political climate of Irish nationalism.
2

The Portrait of a Lady

by Henry James

Also deep and inward-looking · dense, classic literature

Isabel Archer, a spirited young American, travels to Victorian England to seek independence rather than a conventional marriage.
3

Ariel

by Sylvia Plath

Also deep and inward-looking · dense, classic literature

Ariel contains the poems Sylvia Plath wrote during the final months of her life, focusing on domestic confinement, creative rebirth, and mental disintegration.
4

Tender is the Night

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Also deep and inward-looking · dense, classic literature

Dick Diver is a promising American psychiatrist living on the French Riviera during the 1920s.
5

The Collected Poems

by Sylvia Plath

Also deep and inward-looking · dense, classic literature

This chronological assembly spans Plath’s creative output from 1956 until her death in 1963.
6

Villette

by Charlotte Brontë

Also deep and inward-looking · dense, classic literature

Lucy Snowe, a plain, reserved young Englishwoman with no family, leaves for the town of Villette in the fictional country of Labassecour, a thinly disguised Belgium.
7

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

by Edward Albee

Also deep and inward-looking · classic literature, psychology

Middle-aged history professor George and his wife Martha return home after a campus party and invite a younger couple, Nick and Honey, for late-night drinks.
8

Crime and Punishment

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Also deep and inward-looking · dense, classic literature

Rodion Raskolnikov, a destitute former student living in a cramped St.
9

Kokoro

by Natsume Sōseki, Edwin McClellan

Also deep and inward-looking · classic literature, psychology

The narrative centers on a university student in Tokyo who befriends an older, cynical intellectual he calls Sensei.
10

Lolita

by Vladimir Nabokov

Also deep and inward-looking · dense, classic literature

Humbert Humbert is an academic who feels an intense attraction to young girls he calls nymphets.
11

Shakespeare's Sonnets

by William Shakespeare

Also deep and inward-looking · dense, classic literature

This sequence of 154 sonnets follows a tripartite structure involving three distinct figures.
12

Mrs. Dalloway

by Virginia Woolf

Also deep and inward-looking · dense, classic literature

Clarissa Dalloway spends a June Wednesday in 1925 London purchasing flowers and preparing her home for an evening gala.

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