The Human Comedy: Selected Stories

10 best books like The Human Comedy: Selected Stories (Honoré de Balzac): The Book of Delights, Darkness at Noon, Victory, Tortilla Flat, Essays and Aphorisms, Paterson, Dangerous Visions, Symposium / Phaedrus, Recyclopedia: Trimmings / S*PeRM**K*T / Muse and Drudge, Schloß Gripsholm

The Book of Delights

Author	Ross Gay
ISBN	1616207922

Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights is a genre-defying book of essays—some as short as a paragraph; some as long as five pages—that record the small joys that occurred in one year, from birthday to birthday, and that we often overlook in our busy lives. His is a meditation on delight that takes a clear-eyed...

Darkness at Noon

Author	Arthur Koestler
ISBN	0553265954

Darkness at Noon (from the German: Sonnenfinsternis) is a novel by the Hungarian-born British novelist Arthur Koestler, first published in 1940. His best-known work tells the tale of Rubashov, a Bolshevik 1917 revolutionary who is cast out, imprisoned and tried for treason by the Soviet government...

Victory

Author	Joseph Conrad
ISBN	0140189785

Axel Heyst, a dreamer and a restless drifter, believes he can avoid suffering by cutting himself off from others. Then he becomes involved in the operation of a coal company on a remote island in the Malay Archipelago, and when it fails he turns his back on humanity once more. But his life alters when he...

Tortilla Flat

Author	John Steinbeck
ISBN	0582461502

"Steinbeck is an artist; and he tells the stories of these lovable thieves and adulterers with a gentle and poetic purity of heart and of prose." -- New York Herald Tribune

Adopting the structure and themes of the Arthurian legend, Steinbeck created a "Camelot" on a shabby hillside above the...

Essays and Aphorisms

Author	Arthur Schopenhauer
ISBN	0140442278

One of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer believed that human action is determined not by reason but by 'will' - the blind and irrational desire for physical existence. This selection of his writings on religion, ethics, politics, women and many other themes is taken...

Paterson

Author

William Carlos Williams

Paterson is both a place—the New Jersey city in whom the person (the poet's own life) and the public (the history of the region) are combined. Originally four books (published individually between 1946 and 1951), the structure of Paterson (in Dr. Williams' words) "follows the course of the Passaic...

Dangerous Visions

Author	Harlan Ellison
ISBN	0743452615

The most honored anthology of fantastic fiction ever published, featuring the works of such luminaries as Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg, Philip Jose Farmer, Robert Bloch, Philip K. Dick, Larry Niven, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Damon Knight, J.G. Ballard, John Brunner, Frederik Pohl, Roger...

Symposium / Phaedrus

Author	Plato
ISBN	0486277984

On the Symposium:
First things first, the reason I found this translation so smooth and entertaining is the language, this is by far the easiest English book I've read.
In the Symposium, Agathon holds a supper with his friends (writers and philosophers) and they all decide to make their devotions...

Recyclopedia: Trimmings / S*PeRM**K*T / Muse and Drudge

Author	Harryette Mullen
ISBN	1555974562

Three important poetry collections brought together under one cover by Harryette Mullen, author of Sleeping with the Dictionary


if you turned down the media
so I could write a book
then you could look me up
in your voluminous recyclopedia
-from Muse & Drudge

Recyclopedia...

Schloß Gripsholm

Author	Kurt Tucholsky
ISBN	3938484713

Um den Berliner Sorgen zu entfliehen, verbringen der Ich-Erzähler und seine Geliebte, »Prinzessin« Lydia, einen mehrwöchigen Urlaub auf dem wunderschönen schwedischen Schloss Gripsholm. Besuch aus der Hauptstadt von Lydias Freundin Billie bricht die romantische Zweisamkeit auf und...

Moderan

Author	David R. Bunch
ISBN	0380024039

Come to Moderan...

Moderan is one of the most startingly original, provocative & fascinating future worlds in all of science fiction.

In Moderan, men are made mostly of metal. They retain strips of flesh to contain their humanity. They live in Strongholds. They prowl the war...

Phosphor in Dreamland

Author	Rikki Ducornet
ISBN	1564780848

Wildly comic, erotic, and perverse, Rikki Ducornet s dazzling novel, Phosphor in Dreamland, explores the relationship between power and madness, nature and its exploitation, pornography and art, innocence and depravity. Set on the imaginary Caribbean island of Birdland, the novel takes the form...

Fever and Spear

Author	Javier Marías
ISBN	0811216128

Part spy novel, part romance, part Henry James, Your Face Tomorrow is a wholly remarkable display of the immense writing gifts of Javier Marias. With Fever and Spear, Volume One of his unfolding novel Your Face Tomorrow, he returns us to the rarified world of Oxford (the delightful setting of All Souls...