Easy fiction for complex types
Discover the best easy fiction books tailored for complex personality types. Explore our curated list of engaging reads perfect for deep thinkers and sensitive souls.
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Vernon God Little
by D. B. C. Pierre
After a school shooting where sixteen kids are shot Vernon Little's best friend turns the gun on himself, leaving Vernon to be accused as an accessory to murder.
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Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth
by Chris Ware
The first and now critically-acclaimed book from Chicago artist Chris Ware. A lonely and emotionally impaired everyman, Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, is provided with the opportunity to meet his father for the first time when he is 36 years old. The story, set in 1890s Chicago and 1980s small-town Michigan, is told in hundreds of small, precisely drawn panels that regularly expand to reveal stunning draughtsmanship, and supported by fold-out instructions, an index, paper cutouts and beautifully drawn period adverts.
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Caricature
by Daniel Clowes
While exploring the adventures of 'Ghost World', Dan Clowes created a cycle of dramatic, funny and touching short stories, including 'Caricature' (an undisputed modern classic about a travelling caricaturist), the semi-autobiographical 'Blue Italian Shit' and 'Immortal, Invisible', the wry super-hero take-off 'Black Nylon', as well as the colour 'The Gold Mommy' and 'Green Eyeliner', which originally ran in Esquire. Having sold out in hardcover last year, the success of 'Ghost World' has made this paperback reprint, with a new cover by Clowes, the most in-demand of the year.
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Notes from Underground; the Double
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
âIt is best to do nothing! The best thing is conscious inertia! So long live the underground!âAlienated from society and paralysed by a sense of his own insignificance, the anonymous narrator of Dostoyevskyâs groundbreaking Notes from Underground tells the story of his tortured life. With bitter sarcasm, he describes his refusal to become a worker in the âant-hillâ of society and his gradual withdrawal to an existence âundergroundâ. The seemingly ordinary world of St Petersburg takes on a nightmarish quality in The Double when a government clerk encounters a man who exactly resembles him â his double perhaps, or possibly the darker side of his own personality. Like Notes from Underground, this is a masterly study of human consciousness.Jessie Coulsonâs introduction discusses the storiesâ critical reception and the themes they share with Dostoyevksyâs great novels.
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Mr. Dynamite
by Meredith Brosnan
Jarieth Prendergast is an ex-pat Irishman, an aging punk rocker, a film snob, a copy-shop employee, and a truly desperate man. His marriage is in tatters and his career as an avant-garde artist is a non-starter. As the book opens, Jarleth receives a letter from his lawyer about a possible inheritance from his Aunt, and promptly falls into fits of delusion as hilarious as they are utterly pathetic. An extraordinary first novel that melds an Irish writer's high style and penchant for belly laughs with the grotesque smash-and-grab energy of pre-9/11 New York.
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And the Ass Saw the Angel
by Nick Cave
Hidden away to escape the town's self-righteous rage, mute Euchrid Eucrow finds more compassion in the family's mule than in his fellow men. But it is he who grasps the cruel fate of a beautiful prostitute, and it is he who seeks a terrible vengeance.
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On the Road
by Jack Kerouac
Chronicles the way of life of the beat generation as Dean Moriarty speeds across America.
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The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
J.D. Salinger's classic of adolescent angst is now available for the first time in trade paperback. Holden Caulfield, knowing he is to be expelled from school, decides to leave early. He spends three days in New York City and tells the story of what he did and suffered there.
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The Arrival
by Shaun Tan
"In this wordless graphic novel, a man leaves his homeland and sets off for a new country, where he must build a new life for himself and his family."--
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Perfume
by Patrick Suskind
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER ⢠Set in eighteenth-century France, the classic novel that provokes a terrifying examination of what happens when one manâs indulgence in his greatest passionâhis sense of smellâleads to murder. In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime giftâan absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouilleâs genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and fresh-cut wood. Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the âultimate perfumeââthe scent of a beautiful young virgin. Told with dazzling narrative brilliance, Perfume is a hauntingly powerful tale of murder and sensual depravity. Translated from the German by John E. Woods.
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The Metamorphosis
by Franz Kafka
A novel about a man who finds himself transformed into a huge insect, and the effects of this change upon his life. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man.
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Misery Loves Comedy
by Ivan Brunetti
A psychiatric case study masquerading a fancy-pants graphic novel, Misery Loves Comedy collects Ivan Brunetti's early issues (no pun intended) wait, let's rephrase that. Misery Loves Comedy collects the first three issues of the legendary comic book series Schizo in their entirety, as well as a host of miscellaneous flotsam and jetsam from various anthologies, c. 1992-2005. Readers will find the author's unwitting self-caricature as a paranoid, deluded young man intriguingly repugnant and often chuckle-inducing. Besides Brunetti's trademark nihilism, self-loathing, relentless depression, and inchoate, spittle-soaked misanthropy, these earlier comics offer a dollop of scatology and blasphemy for that extra puerile, lowbrow tang. These are comics for those who enjoy witnessing one man's sanity in its final death rattle, swinging its tail from anhedonia to schadenfreude and back again. Also: lots and lots of filthy jokes. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 13.9px Arial; color: #424242}
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The Fall
by Albert Camus
NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR ⢠One of the most widely read novels of all timeâfrom one of the best-known writers of all timeâabout a lawyer from Paris who brilliantly illuminates the human condition. Elegantly styled, Camus' profoundly disturbing novel of a Parisian lawyer's confessions is a searing study of modern amorality.
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Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
Exam board: EdexcelLevel & Subject: AS and A Level English LiteratureFirst teaching: September 2015First examination: June 2017
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American Psycho
by Bret Easton Ellis
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER ⢠In this modern classic, the acclaimed author of The Shards explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. "A seminal book.â âThe Washington Post One of The Atlanticâs Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront. âA masterful satire and a ferocious, hilarious, ambitious, inspiring piece of writing.... An important book.â âKatherine Dunn, bestselling author of Geek Love Look for Bret Easton Ellisâs latest novel, The Shards!
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Fight Club: A Novel
by Chuck Palahniuk
"Fight Club's estranged narrator leaves his lackluster job when he comes under the thrall of Tyler Durden, an enigmatic young man who holds secret after-hours boxing matches in the basement of bars."--P. [3] of cover.
