Books like Chimera
Three linked novellas that retell old stories: Scheherazade's younger sister Dunyazade, Perseus in middle age, and Bellerophon trying to be a hero.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Chimera
Mantissa
A novelist confined to a hospital bed is attended by a muse who transforms into different women, in Fowles' most experimental and playful novel.
Tristram Shandy
Tristram Shandy sets out to tell the story of his life and keeps getting sidetracked by digressions, opinions, black pages and his Uncle Toby's hobbyhorses, in the most modern novel of the eighteenth century.
The Penelopiad
Speaking from the underworld, Penelope gives her own account of waiting twenty years for Odysseus, and the chorus of twelve maids he hanged on his return has its say too.
If on a winter's night a traveler
A Reader begins a novel called If on a winter's night a traveler, but the book keeps breaking off and restarting as a different novel, ten times.
Villa Incognito
Three American soldiers listed as MIA in Vietnam have been living quietly in Laos for decades, until one of them is arrested in a Bangkok airport.
Green Grass, Running Water
Four very old Indians walk out of a mental hospital to fix the world, while the people of a small Alberta town head for the Sun Dance, and Coyote causes trouble.
The Broom of the System
A Cleveland switchboard operator searches for her great-grandmother, who has vanished from a nursing home with several other residents, while her boss courts her and her cockatiel starts preaching.
Jitterbug Perfume
A janitor, a waitress, and an immortal perfumer chase the essence of life itself across centuries and continents.
Pale Fire
A deranged scholar's commentary on a 999-line poem by a dead colleague becomes a hallucinatory novel about exile, madness, and the impossibility of knowing another person.
The History of the Siege of Lisbon
A proofreader inserts a 'not' into a history book, changing a siege's outcome, and the act of literary vandalism opens a door to love and imagination.
Return to Ithaca
Odysseus, worn out by twenty years of war and wandering, washes up among the Phaeacians and makes his way home to Ithaca, where suitors are eating through his house.
The Flounder
A talking flounder, first caught by a fisherman in the Stone Age, is put on trial by a feminist tribunal in 1970s Berlin for the advice he has given men through history, while the narrator tells of the cooks he has loved down the ages.