Kafka: The Decisive Years
10 best books like Kafka: The Decisive Years (Reiner Stach): Doctor Zhivago, Underground Time, Endgame, Billiards at Half-Past Nine, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, James Joyce, Pornografia, Little Wilson and Big God, Rimbaud: A Biography, Blake
| Author | Boris Pasternak |
| ISBN | 0679774386 |
This epic tale about the effects of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath on a bourgeois family was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987. One of the results of its publication in the West was Pasternak's complete rejection by Soviet authorities; when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature...
| Author | Delphine de Vigan |
| ISBN | 1608197123 |
Every day, Mathilde takes the Metro to her job at a large multinational, where she has felt miserable and isolated ever since getting on the wrong side of her bullying boss. Every day, Thibault, a paramedic, drives where his dispatcher directs him, fighting traffic to attend to disasters. For many of...
| Author | Samuel Beckett |
| ISBN | 0571070671 |
Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969; his literary output of plays, novels, stories, and poetry has earned him an uncontested place as one of the greatest writers of our time. Endgame, originally written in French and translated into English by Beckett himself, is now considered...
Billiards at Half-Past Nine
| Author | Heinrich Böll |
| ISBN | 0140187243 |
Heinrich Böll's well-known, vehement opposition to fascism and war informs this moving story of Robert Faehmel. After being drawn into the Second World War to command retreating German forces despite his anti-Nazi feelings, Faehmel struggles to re-establish a normal life at the end of the war....
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
| Author | Mark Fisher |
| ISBN | 1846943175 |
After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological...
| Author | Richard Ellmann |
| ISBN | 0195033817 |
Although several biographers have thrown themselves into the breach since this magisterial book first appeared in 1959, none have come close to matching the late Richard Ellmann's achievement. To be fair, Ellmann does have some distinct advantages. For starters, there's his deep mastery of the...
| Author | Witold Gombrowicz |
| ISBN | 0714529885 |
Gombrowicz's strange, bracing final novel probes the divide between young and old while providing a grotesque evocation of obsession. While recuperating from wartime Warsaw in the Polish countryside, the unnamed narrator and his friend, Fryderyk, attempt to force amour between two local youths,...
| Author | Anthony Burgess |
| ISBN | 0802132405 |
The first volume of the two-volume autobiography.
In an extraordinarily candid book of confessions, Anthony Burgess tells the story of a disaffected Manchester Catholic from his birth in 1917 up to 1959 and the commencement of his career as a professional writer. He details his burgeoning...
Unknown beyond the avant-garde at the time of his death, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) has been one of the most destructive and liberating influences on twentieth-century culture. During his lifetime he was a bourgeois-baiting visionary, and the list of his known crimes is longer than the list of his...
| Author | Peter Ackroyd |
| ISBN | 0345376110 |
Born in 1757, the son of a London hosier was William Blake -- poet, painter, and engraver -- possessed one of the most original and fertile creative geniuses of his age. Yet his strange aloofness and claims of supernatural visions caused many in his own time and since to doubt his sanity, and much of his...
On Earth and in Hell: Early Poems
| Author | Thomas Bernhard |
| ISBN | 1941110231 |
The first English translation of the earliest poetry of brilliant and disruptive Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, widely considered one of the most innovative and original authors of the twentieth century and often associated with fellow mavericks Beckett, Kafka and Dostoevsky. A master of language,...
