Books like The Pale King
An unfinished novel about examiners at an IRS centre in Peoria, Illinois, where the most boring job in the world becomes a spiritual discipline.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Pale King
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.
The Castle
A land surveyor arrives at a village to work at the castle above it, but the castle's bureaucracy ensures he can never reach the people who summoned him.
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.
Oblivion
Eight long stories about consciousness, suffering, and the impossibility of escaping one's own mind, Wallace at his most claustrophobic and technically dazzling.
The Rabbit Hutch
In the last summer of a decaying Indiana tenement called La Lapinière, a 19-year-old foster-care graduate and her three male housemates try to hold a life together.
The Time Regulation Institute
Hayri İrdal, a man of no particular ability, tells how he came to help run an institute devoted to setting all the clocks of Istanbul to the same time.
The Twenty-Seventh City
St. Louis's new police chief, a former Bombay officer, quietly takes over the city through a conspiracy of influence, blackmail and real estate, and only one civic leader resists.
English, August
Agastya Sen, a young Indian civil servant raised on Western books and marijuana, is posted to a small, sweltering provincial town for a year's training, and does as little as he can.
The Topeka School
In 1990s Topeka, Adam Gordon, a high school debate champion whose parents are psychologists at a renowned clinic, navigates competition, toxic masculinity and a lonely classmate's slow-burning anger, in a novel about where today's American speech came from.
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.
Rusty Brown
Set at a Nebraska private school across decades, Ware's mosaic novel gives each chapter to a different character in orbit around the lonely Rusty Brown.
The Sound and the Fury
Four sections, three of them narrated by the Compson brothers, one with an intellectual disability, tell the story of a Mississippi family's decline, and the fragmented telling enacts the disintegration.