18 books like The magic barrel
Bitter lemons
With the publication of Justine Lawrence Durrell became, almost overnight, one of the most talked about, widely acclaimed novelists of the decade. Now, in Bitter Lemons, his focus has shifted from the world of his imagination to life itself. Writing in the exquisite poetic prose that critics have hailed as unequalled in contemporary literature, he tells the perceptive, often humorous story of his…
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Our Old Home
Our Old Home, a series of English sketches by Nathaniel Hawthorne. This volume of charming sketches was published in 1863, and (in the words of the author) presents “a few of the external aspects of English scenery and life, especially those that are touched with the antique charm to which our countrymen are more susceptible than are the people among whom it is of native growth.”
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The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
A short story collection featuring, in the title story, one of Sillitoe’s very best. The story concerns a teenaged boy from a poor working class background who is sent to a borstal for robbery and takes up long-distance running as a way of temporarily escaping from both his present situation and his bleak future prospects. Seeing his natural ability the institution Governor enters him into a race…
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Tent-life in Siberia and adventures among the Koraks and other tribes in Kamchatka and northern Asia
An account of a period living in Siberia in pursuit of a plan to carry a telegraph line across land to Europe through Siberia in consequence of the failure of efforts to carry a telegraph line to Europe under the Atlantic.
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![Cover of The complete works of O. Henry [pseud.]](/covers/9566966.jpg)
The complete works of O. Henry [pseud.]
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China Road
Route 312 is the Chinese Route 66. It flows three thousand miles from east to west, passing through the factory towns of the coastal areas, through the rural heart of China, then up into the Gobi Desert, where it merges with the Old Silk Road. The highway witnesses every part of the social and economic revolution that is turning China upside down.In this utterly surprising and deeply personal…
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The troll garden
"This collection of Willa Cather stories - her first book of fiction and the capstone of her early career - is as relevant today as at the time of its initial publication. As different and individually distinguished as the seven stories may be, they share as their subject the role and status of the artist in American society.
The passions, ambitions, and pretensions, the cant and the pathos of…
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Venetian life
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The road to Little Dribbling
Twenty years ago, Bill Bryson went on a trip around Britain to discover and celebrate that green and pleasant land. The result was Notes from a Small Island, one of the bestselling travel books ever written. Now he has traveled about Britain again, by bus and train and rental car and on foot, to see what has changed -- and what hasn't. Following a route he dubs the Bryson Line, from Bognor Regis…
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暁の寺
A young man expends his spirit in the obsessive pursuit of a beautiful woman and a passionate search for mystical enlightenment.
"Yukio Mishima's The Temple of Dawn is the third novel in his masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. Here, Shigekuni Honda continues his pursuit of the successive reincarnations of Kiyoaki Matsugae, his childhood friend. Travelling in Thailand in the early 1940s,…
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The Memoirs of Cleopatra
The Memoirs of Cleopatra
The mesmerizing story of Queen Cleopatra in her own words - by bestselling novelist Margaret George, author of *The Autobiography of Henry VIII* and *Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles*. Told in the first person - from the young queen's earliest memories of her father's tenuous rule to her own reign over one of the most glittering kingdoms in the world - this is an enthralling saga of ambition…
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Gravity's Rainbow
Winner of the National Book Award"The most profound and accomplished American novel since the end of World War II." —The New Republic“A screaming comes across the sky. . .” A few months after the Germans’ secret V-2 rocket bombs begin falling on London, British Intelligence discovers that a map of the city pinpointing the sexual conquests of one Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, U.S. Army, corresponds…
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On a Chinese screen
On a Chinese Screen was first published in 1922 by Heinemann Publishers, London. Its 58 short vignettes are based on Maugham’s travels along the Yangtze River from 1919 to 1920. Although later editions of the book added the subtitle “Sketches of Life in China,” there are actually only a few descriptions of the places he visited and the local Chinese people he met; rather, Maugham focuses on…
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Openings in the Old Trail
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Twilight in Italy
In these impressions of the Italian countryside, Lawrence transforms ordinary incidents into passages of intense beauty. "Twilight in Italy" is a vibrant account of Lawrence's stay among the people of Lake Garda, whose decaying lemon gardens bear witness to the twilight of a way of life centuries old.
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Waiting
For more than seventeen years, Lin Kong, a devoted and ambitious doctor, has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Manna Wu. But back in the traditional world of his home village lives the wife his family chose for him when he was young. Every year he visits her in order to ask, again and again, for a divorce. In a culture in which the ancient ties of tradition and family still…
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Chimera
Barth retells the tales of Scheherezade of the Thousand and One Nights, Perseus, and Bellerophon from varying perspectives, examining the myths' relationship to reality and their resonance with the contemporary world. Dunyazade, Scheherazade's kid sister, holds the destiny of herself and the prince who holds her captive. Perseus, the demigod who slew the Gorgon Medusa, finds himself at forty…
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La fête du mais
It was almost as if time had not touched the village of Cornwall Coombe. The quiet, peaceful place was straight out of a bygone era, with well-cared-for Colonial houses, a white-steepled church fronting a broad Common. Ned and Beth Constantine chanced upon the hamlet and immediately fell in love with it. This was exactly the haven they dream of. Or so they thought.
For Ned and his family,…
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