Voluntary Reading #4: Searching for Mount Analogue
Discover our curated list, Voluntary Reading #4: Searching for Mount Analogue. Explore profound fiction by Thomas Mann, Juan Rulfo, and Robert Walser in this literary quest for meaning.
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The Magic Mountain
by Thomas Mann
A man visits a cousin in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Switzerland and stays on for seven years.
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Jakob von Gunten
by Robert Walser
The Swiss writer Robert Walser is one of the quiet geniuses of twentieth-century literature. Largely self-taught and altogether indifferent to worldly success, Walser wrote a range of short stories, essays, as well as four novels, of which Jakob von Gunten is widely recognized as the finest. The book is a young man's inquisitive and irreverent account of life in what turns out to be the most uncanny of schools. It is the work of an outsider artist, a writer of uncompromising originality and disconcerting humor, whose beautiful sentences have the simplicity and strangeness of a painting by Henri Rousseau.
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Memoirs of the extraordinary life, works and discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus
No summary available.
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Quicksand and Passing
by Nella Larsen
Two novels of 1920s Harlem describe Helga Crane's search for freedom and personal expression, and Irene's friendship with Clare, who attempts to pass for white.
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The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
by Machado de Assis
"Famous in his lifetime and still revered throughout Latin America, Machado de Assis has remained little known in the English-speaking world. By turns flippant and profound, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas is the story of an unheroic man with half-hearted political ambitions, a harebrained idea for curing the world of melancholy, and a thousand quixotic theories unleashed from beyond the grave. It is a novel that has influenced generations of Latin American writers but remains refreshingly and unforgettably unlike anything written before or after it."--BOOK JACKET.
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Pedro Páramo
by Juan Rulfo
Deserted villages of rural Mexico, where images and memories of the past linger like unquiet ghosts, haunted the imaginations of the author. In one such village of the mind, Comala, he set his classic novel Pedro Páramo, a dream-like tale that intertwines a man's quest to find his lost father and reclaim his patrimony with the father's obsessive love for a woman who will not be possessed, Susana San Juan.
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The Metamorphoses of Ovid
by Ovid
Through Mandelbaum's poetic artistry, this gloriously entertaining achievement of literature-classical myths filtered through the worldly and far from reverent sensibility of the Roman poet Ovid-is revealed anew. " An] extraordinary translation...brilliant" (Booklist). With an Introduction by the Translator.
