100 Books Like Complete Stories

This novel about a fifteen-year-old girl’s affair with an older, wealthy man is a provocative exploration of memory. The novel’s language is arch and lyric, always making me feel as if I’ve been hypnotized.

The book is a love story, but in this story, love doesn’t lead to salvation. Still, the splendid, haunting language lifts the tale into the realm of the mythic.

This is one of the most fascinating and beautiful books I've read.

It gently leads the reader into the lives of three protagonists (told in loosely connected stories), whose relationships start seemingly real but get increasingly confusing, enigmatic, and almost psychotic. After I read this book, winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt, I read all books by Marie NDiaye, and I loved them all.

Her language is original and amazing, and her characters are presented in such a caring and dignified way that the reader can empathize with and appreciate the difficult struggles of these women's disturbed and endlessly searching minds. Reading N'Diaye is an extraordinary experience. I am always waiting for her next publication.

This is a book like no other! With its first sentences it gripped me, and I couldn't put it down till the very end. The same happened to everybody I recommended it to.

Formally it is part of a trilogy. Its style is dry and almost merely reporting, and yet it is emotionally involving in a powerful way.

Is what we are told meant to be real? Or is it only the product of a traumatized mind trying to cope with war, poverty, pain, abuse, and the endless yearning for what is lost? Are the twins, the protagonists of this trilogy, really two separate fictional characters or rather one with a dissociated mind?

In the first sentence of this novel Anna Lore falls madly in love with a man she happens to run into on the street of her hometown.

Even though she only vaguely recognizes him as they strike up a brief conversation, she becomes so obsessed with him that she is willing to give up everything for him, including her marriage of twenty years with a loving and reliable husband who she loves too.

Reading this novel, I was fascinated with Anna Lore's struggle to understand what's driving her towards a man, who almost against his will has such irresistable power over her. To follow her thinking as it makes her crazy infatuation appear reasonable and compelling is a fascinating experience of the uncanny nature of the unconscious.

This collection reads like realistic stories from the perspective of a single point-of-view that throws common life into the realm of the weirdly uncommon.

In fact, I kept reading to figure out what I was reading. What changed in the process? My own perception of the world in which we live. These people may be like us, but the writer looks at them with new and different eyes. These stories sneak up on you and take over your mind for a marvelously short time because it’s a short book of short stories—one I recommend because it’s so unusual.

This essay collection is not strictly about Jo Jo’s childhood but the pieces like “Bulldozing the Baby,” that are, are indelible. Some might argue that her childhood is not all that impossible, nothing that horrendous happens. The most tragic event for the narrator is when she accidentally damages her doll Hal, a prized transitional object, and her aunt responds by throwing him into the trash. And yet, from the perspective of the toddler JoJo, it feels tragic. Her grief is as deep as any adult’s. If the piece shows us anything, it is that the feelings of childhood are to be taken seriously. Other than that, her father drinks too much, and there is an emotional mismatch between mother and daughter. They don’t understand each other, and not having a parent who sees who you are, even if you grow up relatively privileged – not beaten, not starved, not materially… show more.

This book is the first-person narrative of a young woman experiencing the shock of incapacitating grief after the death of her grandmother, who had been her only family. 

When I was a young woman myself, I lost someone close to me. I had trouble getting out of bed and lost interest in other people and activities. I had just graduated from college and, due to the impending death, had not made plans; as a result, I had no structure to fall back on, no concept of the future to keep me going. There was a sensation that time had stopped.

While stuck in this emotional space, one of the only books that helped me was a translation of this book. Yoshimoto depicts in striking and lyrical detail the sense of apartness and timelessness that grief can engender, and the ways that focusing on details of daily living—like cooking—can assist with… show more.

The Power of Concentration is a practical guide for developing concentration. I liked this book because it helped me through graduate school when stress was high. The book contributes to a discussion of positive psychology. Concentration is placed within the grasp of each person. The author links concentration to the development of desirable habits while overcoming bad habits." Theron Q. Dumont noted, "Concentration is paying attention to a chosen thought." His work is relevant today given distractions from many corners of life. 

This book is in a category all its own, and I love it.

It's so dark sometimes, it's painful to read. That’s what makes it great to me. Three men, brothers, fight for a hard-scrabble life, and they don’t always take the high road. At times, it feels like an adventure novel.

At other times, it felt like I might need to take a shower after reading—it’s that gritty. But it’s so unique, so well-constructed, so unlike anything else, I couldn’t stop reading it. 

There cannot be a more brilliant or more shattering evocation of what it feels like to gradually realise you are forgetting yourself and vanishing from your own life: the mind observes the mind’s deterioration. Bernleff’s pioneering novel, published in 1984, follows the journey of its narrator Maarten from the first days of confusion into a darkness of self-loss. A beautiful, poignant masterpiece about memory and forgetting.