Literary theme analysis, by a book like {foo}
Books about Metaphor
Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino
A fantastical exploration of the cities of the imagination and the possibilities of life.
"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young ... (Goodreads)
Locke & Key, Vol. 1: Welcome to Lovecraft
by Joe Hill
A family's mysterious journey of unlocking supernatural secrets, discovering their destiny.
This plot is presented in chronological order. During the American Revolution , a group of Rebels, hiding beneath the future Keyhouse, discover a portal to another dimension, the plains of Leng , ... (Wikipedia)
Moby-Dick or, the Whale
by Herman Melville
A whaling ship's vengeful pursuit of a white whale, with a captivating narrative.
Ishmael travels in December from Manhattan Island to New Bedford, Massachusetts , with plans to sign up for a whaling voyage. The inn where he arrives is overcrowded, so he must share a bed with the ... (Wikipedia)
Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There
by Lewis Carroll
Alice's fantastical journey through a strange and surreal world of her own making.
Chapter One – Looking-Glass House : Alice is playing with a white kitten (whom she calls "Snowdrop") and a black kitten (whom she calls "Kitty") when she ponders what the world is like on the other ... (Wikipedia)
How to Read Literature Like a Professor
by Thomas C. Foster
A guide to exploring literature’s hidden meanings and uncovering the underlying themes.
While many books can be enjoyed for their basic stories, there are often deeper meanings interwoven in these literary texts... How to Read Literature Like a Professor helps us to discover those ... (Goodreads)
The Old Man and the Sea
by Ernest Hemingway
An aging Cuban fisherman's battle with a giant marlin, a journey of courage and determination.
The Old Man and the Sea tells the story of a battle between an aging, experienced fisherman, Santiago, and a large marlin . The story opens with Santiago having gone 84 days without catching a fish, ... (Wikipedia)
The Raven and Other Poems
by Edgar Allan Poe
A collection of dark, gothic poems, exploring the depths of the human psyche.
A chilling, thrilling collection of Edgar Allan Poe's poetry, introduced by best-selling author Philip Pullman The Raven . . . Annabel Lee . . . Ulalume . . . these are some of the spookiest, most ... (Goodreads)
Ocean Sea
by Alessandro Baricco
A poetic exploration of the sea, full of stories and emotions.
This haunting, suspenseful tale of love and vengeance by the author of the international bestseller Silk surges with the hypnotic power of the ocean sea. In Ocean Sea , Alessandro Baricco presents a ... (Goodreads)
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
by Douglas R. Hofstadter
A complex exploration of logic, mathematics and art, exploring their relationships and interconnections.
Douglas Hofstadter's book is concerned directly with the nature of “maps” or links between formal systems. However, according to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity ... (Goodreads)
Ulysses
by James Joyce
Epic narrative following a day in the life of an Irishman living in Dublin.
It is 8 a.m. Buck Mulligan , a boisterous medical student, calls Stephen Dedalus (a young writer encountered as the principal subject of, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ) up to the roof of ... (Wikipedia)
Railsea
by China Miéville
An epic adventure set in a fantastical world of giant moles and mutant creatures.
Sham Yes ap Soorap is a young assistant doctor on a moletrain, captained by Abacat Naphi, that hunts giant moles for meat in a similar fashion to whaling . Naphi is especially obsessed with one mole ... (Wikipedia)
Dance Dance Dance
by Haruki Murakami
A man's journey through a surreal dreamscape in search of meaning and solace.
The novel follows the surreal misadventures of an unnamed protagonist who makes a living as a commercial writer. He is compelled to return to the Dolphin Hotel, a seedy establishment where he once ... (Wikipedia)
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
by Haruki Murakami
A surreal exploration of two separate yet interwoven realities.
The story is split between parallel narratives. The odd-numbered chapters take place in the 'Hard-Boiled Wonderland', although the phrase is not used anywhere in the text, only in page headers. The ... (Wikipedia)
Pale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov
A darkly comic and philosophical exploration of art, sanity, and the nature of reality.
Shade's poem digressively describes many aspects of his life. Canto 1 includes his early encounters with death and glimpses of what he takes to be the supernatural. Canto 2 is about his family and ... (Wikipedia)
Worlds' End
by Neil Gaiman
A mythical road trip through a surreal landscape of forgotten stories and folk tales.
A "reality storm" draws an unusual cast of characters together. They take shelter in a tavern, where they amuse each other with their life stories. Although Morpheus is never a focus in these ... (Goodreads)
The Pilgrim's Progress
by John Bunyan
A Christian allegory of a journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City.
The entire book is presented as a dream sequence narrated by an omniscient narrator . The allegory's protagonist, Christian , is an everyman character, and the plot centres on his journey from his ... (Wikipedia)
The Aleph and Other Stories
by Jorge Luis Borges
A collection of stories featuring metaphysical and philosophical explorations of the human condition.
Full of philosophical puzzles and supernatural surprises, these stories contain some of Borges's most fully realized human characters. With uncanny insight, he takes us inside the minds of an ... (Goodreads)
Hag-Seed
by Margaret Atwood
A modern retelling of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" with a cast of unique characters.
Hag-Seed follows the life of Felix, once experimental Artistic Director of the Makeshiweg theatre festival, now an exiled man who speaks to his daughter's ghost. Felix's fall from the theatrical ... (Wikipedia)
The Woman Who Died a Lot
by Jasper Fforde
A humorous detective story set in a parallel universe, with eccentric characters and a mysterious plot.
The BookWorld's leading enforcement officer Thursday Next is four months into an enforced semi-retirement following an assassination attempt. She returns home to Swindon for what you'd expect to be a ... (Goodreads)
The Street of Crocodiles
by Bruno Schulz
A surreal and dreamlike collection of short stories set in a small town in Poland, exploring themes of memory, identity, and the decay of society.
The collection tells the story of a merchant family from a small Galician town which resembles the writer's home town, Drohobycz , in many respects. The story abounds in mythical elements, introduced ... (Wikipedia)
After Dark
by Haruki Murakami
A night in Tokyo filled with mysterious events and surreal encounters.
Set in metropolitan Tokyo over the course of one night, characters include Mari Asai, a 19-year-old student, who is spending the night reading in a Denny's . There she meets Takahashi Tetsuya, a ... (Wikipedia)
The Cloven Viscount
by Italo Calvino
The Viscount Medardo of Terralba and his squire Kurt ride across the plague-ravaged plain of Bohemia en route to join the Christian army in the Turkish wars of the seventeenth century. On the first ... (Wikipedia)
The Luzhin Defense
by Vladimir Nabokov
A chess grandmaster battles his inner demons as he struggles to understand the game of life.
The plot concerns the title character, Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin. As a boy, he is considered unattractive, withdrawn, and an object of ridicule by his classmates. One day, when a guest comes to his ... (Wikipedia)
Metaphors We Live By
by George Lakoff
A groundbreaking exploration of how metaphors shape our understanding of the world and influence our actions.
The now-classic, Metaphors We Live By, changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows ... (Goodreads)
Whit
by Iain Banks
A young woman's journey to self-discovery and independence, set in a small Scottish town.
Isis, otherwise The Blessed Very Reverend Gaia-Marie Isis Saraswati Minerva Mirza Whit of Luskentyre, Beloved Elect of God III, is the 19-year-old granddaughter and designated spiritual heir of ... (Wikipedia)
The Strange Library
by Haruki Murakami
A young boy's surreal journey inside a mysterious library, discovering its secrets.
From internationally acclaimed author Haruki Murakami—a fantastical illustrated short novel about a boy imprisoned in a nightmarish library. Opening the flaps on this unique little book, readers will ... (Goodreads)
The Sandman: The Dream Hunters
by Neil Gaiman
A meditation on dreams and storytelling, exploring the realms of nightmares, fantasy and imagination.
A fox spirit and a badger (, tanuki, ) wager that whichever of them drives a Buddhist monk from his temple, can claim the temple as its own. Both of them fail, and the badger flees in disgrace, ... (Wikipedia)
The Nonexistent Knight & The Cloven Viscount
by Italo Calvino
Two novellas exploring the nature of identity, morality, and existence through the stories of a knight made of empty armor and a nobleman split in two.
The protagonists of this novel are two paladins of Charlemagne: the non-existent knight, named Agilulf (he is in fact a lucid empty armor) and an inexperienced and passionate young man, Rambaldo. The ... (Wikipedia)
Finnegans Wake
by James Joyce
A dream-like exploration of the subconscious, featuring wordplay, puns, and allusions.
A story with no real beginning or end (it ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence), this "book of Doublends Jined" is as remarkable for its prose as for its ... (Goodreads)
Cronopios and Famas
by Julio Cortázar
A surrealist collection of short stories, exploring the absurdities of the world.
"The Instruction Manual," the first chapter, is an absurd assortment of tasks and items dissected in an instruction-manual format. "Unusual Occupations," the second chapter, describes the obsessions ... (Goodreads)
The Girl With Glass Feet
by Ali Shaw
A magical realism tale of a girl with glass feet and a boy who falls in love with her.
Strange things are happening on the remote and snowbound archipelago of St. Hauda’s Land. Magical winged creatures flit around the icy bogland, albino animals hide themselves in the snow-glazed ... (Goodreads)
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
by Marcel Proust
A young man's coming of age in a world of high society, exploring the depths of his own heart.
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is Proust’s spectacular dissection of male and female adolescence, charged with the narrator’s memories of Paris and the Normandy seaside. At the heart of the ... (Goodreads)
Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances
by Neil Gaiman
Collection of short stories, exploring the boundaries of the imaginative.
Multiple award winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman returns to dazzle, captivate, haunt, and entertain with this third collection of short fiction following Smoke and Mirrors and ... (Goodreads)
Killing Commendatore
by Haruki Murakami
A painter's surreal journey of self-discovery as he confronts his past, present and future.
The protagonist is an unnamed portrait painter whose wife leaves him at the start of the book. Devastated, he quits portrait painting and goes on a long road trip. In the middle of his road trip he ... (Wikipedia)
Fifteen Dogs
by André Alexis
A group of dogs gain human intelligence and experience the highs and lows of life.
Over drinks at Toronto's Wheat Sheaf Tavern, Hermes and Apollo get into a debate about whether animals could live happily if they had the same cognitive and speech abilities as humans. , They decide ... (Wikipedia)
The Elephant Vanishes
by Haruki Murakami
Collection of short stories depicting the surreal and mysterious aspects of life.
Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780679750536 With the same deadpan mania and genius for dislocation that he brought to his internationally acclaimed novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled ... (Goodreads)
First Among Sequels
by Jasper Fforde
A madcap, comedic detective story featuring a time-traveling protagonist.
It's been fourteen years since Thursday pegged out at the 1988 SuperHoop, and Friday is now a difficult sixteen year old. However, Thursday's got bigger problems. Sherlock Holmes is killed at the ... (Goodreads)
The Hike
by Drew Magary
A man embarks on a surreal journey through a mysterious forest, encountering strange creatures.
“,The Hike, just works. It’s like early, good Chuck Palahniuk. . . . Magary underhands a twist in at the end that hits you like a sharp jab at the bell. . . . It’s just that good.” —NPR.org,“A ... (Barnes & Noble)
The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart
by Mathias Malzieu
A fantastical story of a boy who, in order to survive, has his heart replaced with a mechanical one.
Le jour de la naissance de Jack, en 1874 à Edimbourg, est si froid que son coeur en reste gelé. La sage-femme qui l'a mis au monde, mi-sorcière mi-chaman, remplace l'organe défectueux par une horloge ... (Goodreads)
Selected Poems
by E.E. Cummings
A compilation of lyrical poetry that explores the beauty and complexity of life.
E.E. Cummings is without question one of the major poets of this century, and this volume, first published in 1959, is indispensable for every lover of modern lyrical verse. It contains one hundred ... (Barnes & Noble)
Welcome to Night Vale
by Joseph Fink
A mysterious small town in the desert, where strange happenings are the norm.
From the creators of the wildly popular Welcome to Night Vale podcast comes an imaginative mystery of appearances and disappearances that is also a poignant look at the ways in which we all struggle ... (Goodreads)
Monkey Beach
by Eden Robinson
A young woman returns to her Haisla community in British Columbia, haunted by the disappearance of her brother.
The story of Monkey Beach is relayed through the eyes of Lisamarie Hill, a feisty young woman. Lisamarie's brother, Jimmy, has gone missing at sea under questionable circumstances. Lisamarie reflects ... (Wikipedia)
The Ersatz Elevator
by Lemony Snicket
A mysterious series of events surrounding a hidden elevator and a secret society.
NOW A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES In their most daring misadventure, the Baudelaire orphans are adopted by very, very rich people, whose penthouse apartment is located mysteriously close to the place ... (Barnes & Noble)
First the Egg
by Laura Vaccaro Seeger
A simple and beautifully illustrated book that explores the life cycle of various animals and objects, showing how everything evolves from something else.
WHICH CAME FIRST? The chicken or the egg? Simple die-cuts magically present transformation– from seed to flower, tadpole to frog, caterpillar to butterfly. The acclaimed author of Black? White! Day? ... (Goodreads)
The Blue Fox
by Sjón
A fable-like story set in 19th century Iceland, where a hunter pursues a rare blue fox.
The book takes place in Iceland in 1883. It opens with a priest hunting a blue fox, then jumps backward to the days leading up to the hunt. An herbalist buries the recently deceased woman with Down ... (Wikipedia)
Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography
by Lemony Snicket
A mysterious narrator's tongue-in-cheek account of his own life, filled with dark humor.
A Warning from the Publisher: Many readers have questions about Lemony Snicket, author of the distressing serial concerning the trials of the charming but unlucky Baudelaire orphans, published under ... (Goodreads)
The Eye
by Vladimir Nabokov
A man becomes obsessed with a young girl's eye and spirals into madness.
Nabokov's fourth novel, The Eye is as much a farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Nabokov's protagonist, Smurov, is a ... (Goodreads)
The Trouble With Poetry - And Other Poems
by Billy Collins
A collection of witty and accessible poems that explore the joys and challenges of writing and reading poetry.
Playfulness, spare elegance, and wit epitomize the poetry of Billy Collins. With his distinct voice and accessible language, America's two-term Poet Laureate has opened the door to poetry for ... (Goodreads)
Trout Fishing in America / The Pill vs. the Springhill Mine Disaster / In Watermelon Sugar
by Richard Brautigan
A collection of three surreal and experimental novels exploring the counterculture of the 1960s.
An omnibus edition of three counterculture classics by Richard Brautigan that embody the spirit of the 1960s. Trout Fishing in America is by turns a hilarious, playful, and melancholy novel that ... (Goodreads)
Bestiario
by Julio Cortázar
Collection of surreal and dreamlike stories that explore the boundaries between reality and fantasy.
In these eight masterpieces there is no room for the smallest sign of stumbling or youthful undertones: they are perfect. These stories that speak about objects and daily happenings, pass over to ... (Goodreads)
The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory
by Jorge Luis Borges
A surreal exploration of reality and the power of imagination.
The acclaimed translation of Borges's valedictory stories, in its first stand-alone edition, , Jorge Luis Borges has been called the greatest Spanish-language writer of the twentieth century. Now ... (Barnes & Noble)
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