“Bartleby, the Scrivener”

• Albert Camus’s The Stranger and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis are novels about existential angst, incorporating the theme of meaning and purpose vs. meaninglessness and purposelessness.

“The Blue Hotel”

• Willa Cather’s My Antonia offers a strikingly different view of life on the prairie, yet one that includes similar types of alienation.
• Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold also explores the issue of collective guilt when a death occurs and people who could possibly have prevented it do nothing.

“The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”

• Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a more serious exploration of the impact of changes in culture on various individuals.
• Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried varies its chronology also: The narration of events that happen simultaneously, but in different places.
• Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five experiments with narrative structure, especially nonlinear plots and parallel timelines.

“The Cask of Amontillado”

• Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo is similar in its telling of a revenge story.
• William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is also a revenge story, but the revenge is delayed.
• J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is a confessional with, perhaps, some undertones of mental illness.

“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”

• Yann Mertel’s Life of Pi explores the nature of truth and the purposes served by various versions of what the truth really is.

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”

• Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five distorts time and offers alternate and parallel story lines.
• Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain is an unconventional story about the Civil War and longing for home.

“Rappaccini’s Daughter”

• The Scarlet Letter, also by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is also about destructive love, but with a different slant.
• Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World also deals with the consequences of misapplied technology.

“A White Heron”

• Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is a story about young girl’s coming of age that deals with the theme of learning what is valuable and what is not.
• Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees and Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street both tell coming-of-age stories.

“The Open Boat” and “To Build a Fire” (available soon)

• Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild is a book about survival, with the theme of nature as neither helpful nor benevolent, but neutral and indifferent.
• The Call of the Wild is another Jack London story. It explores the role of adaptation to one's environment in order to survive, in addition to the idea that one’s life is shaped by forces/factors beyond one’s control.