You usually have to pick 2 out of the 3.
However, can you please recommend a book that fits all 3 criteria?
[Why are so many literary fiction novels depressing, dark, and end hopelessly?
Looking for the antidote!]
Thanks in advance…
🙏🏼
EDIT:
Examples I am aware of
– Emma
– Zorba the Greek
– Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
– A bunch of Shakespeare
– Candide
– Almost all of Vonnegut
Keep ‘em comin’
by ProfessionBright3879
4 Comments
You’re so right. A lot of literary fiction is sad wtf
I thought I had recs but all the ones I’ve read are pretty sad
You don’t really need to pick 2/3 at all, much of contemporary litfic is funny. You have Mona Awad (*Bunny*), Ottessa Moshfegh (*My Year of Rest and Relaxation*) and Alexandra Kleeman (*You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine*) just off the top of my head for recently active writers that are funny and literary. That said these are dark comedies, so maybe that doesn’t count to you? *Bunny* isn’t particularly bleak though.
And then the classics are full of funny! *Titus Groan* and the rest of the Gormenghast series are really funny (they’re hopeful too even if dark sometimes), Kurt Vonnegut’s entire body of work is undoubtedly funny and increasingly accepted as literary (admittedly depressing still), Jane Austen was funny and had happy endings, Shakespeare was funny, even the Ancient Greeks had comedy.
*Emma* by Jane Austen. In trying to write her most obnoxious heroine, Austen ended up writing one of her most well loved characters. Emma is delightfully funny!
The Natural Man by Ed McClanahan
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
Candide by Voltaire
The Princess Bride by William Goldman
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
The LOved One by Evelyb Waugh
What A Carve up by Jonathan Coe
Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins
The Master and Margarite by Mikhail Bulgakov
Flashman by George McDonald Fraser