Books like The Box Man
12 books with a reading profile close to The Box Man by Kōbō Abe. Deep, inward-looking, open-ended and thought-provoking; a demanding read.
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1
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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2
Outline
by Rachel Cusk
Also deep and open-ended · philosophy, literary
Faye, a British novelist, travels to Athens during a summer heatwave to teach a week-long creative writing course.
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3
Invisible Cities
Also deep and open-ended · philosophy, literary
In a garden within the Mongol dynasty, the aging ruler Kublai Khan listens to Marco Polo describe the far-flung outposts of an expanding empire.
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4
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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5
Weather
by Jenny Offill
Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary
Lizzie Benson is a university librarian and former addict who begins answering mail for a climate change podcast hosted by her old mentor.
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6
Ficciones
Also deep and open-ended · philosophy, literary
Ficciones consists of seventeen short stories divided into two sections, The Garden of Forking Paths and Artifices.
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7
100 Selected Poems
Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary
This collection showcases Edward Estlin Cummings’s rejection of standard grammar and punctuation in favor of visual typography.
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8
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary
Toru Okada is an unemployed man in suburban Tokyo whose mundane life fractures after his cat vanishes and his wife, Kumiko, leaves him without explanation.
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9
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary
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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10
White Noise
by Don DeLillo
Also deep and open-ended · philosophy, literary
Jack Gladney is a professor of Hitler studies at a Midwestern college, living with his fourth wife, Babette, and their brood of children from various marriages.
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11
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12
Immortality
Also deep and inward-looking · philosophy, literary
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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