Authors Like Tom Robbins

Christopher Moore

American · Practical Demonkeeping (1992), Lamb (2002), A Dirty Job (2006)

Moore was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1957. His comic novels put demons, gods and death into ordinary lives; Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal is narrated, as the title says, by the childhood friend of Jesus. He lists Tom Robbins among his main influences, alongside Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams and Ray Bradbury. His most recent novel, Anima Rising, came out in 2025.

Kurt Vonnegut

American · Cat’s Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Breakfast of Champions (1973)

Vonnegut (1922–2007) was captured at the Battle of the Bulge and held in Dresden, where he survived the February 1945 firebombing in an underground meat locker. Cat’s Cradle invents a religion, Bokononism, and ends with most of humankind wiped out by ice-nine, a form of water that freezes the water it touches. Slaughterhouse-Five, drawn from Dresden, was his breakthrough.

Mikhail Bulgakov

Russian, born in Kyiv · The Master and Margarita (written 1928–1940, published 1966–67)

Bulgakov (1891–1940) spent his writing life under Soviet censorship, and Stalin personally banned some of his work. He burned the first draft of The Master and Margarita in 1930, rewrote it from memory and had nearly finished it by 1938. The novel, in which Satan visits 1930s Moscow while a second story follows Pontius Pilate’s interrogation of Jesus, was not published until 1966–67.

Every book by Mikhail Bulgakov →

Laurence Sterne

Anglo-Irish · Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), A Sentimental Journey (1768)

Sterne (1713–1768) was an Anglican clergyman when the first two volumes of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman appeared in 1759; the ninth and last came out in 1767. The narrator is not born until the third volume, and the book includes an entirely black page and a marbled one. Pamphleteers of the 1760s attacked its bawdy humour.

Thomas Pynchon

American · The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Inherent Vice (2009)

Pynchon, born in 1937, has avoided reporters and cameras for most of his career. His novels are crowded with satirical songs and absurd names, such as Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49 and Doc Sportello in Inherent Vice, and the Pulitzer board overruled its jury rather than give the prize to Gravity’s Rainbow. His newest novel, Shadow Ticket, set in 1932, came out on 7 October 2025.

Every book by Thomas Pynchon →

Ken Kesey

American · One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), Sometimes a Great Notion (1964)

Kesey (1935–2001) grew up in Oregon and worked as a night aide at a veterans’ hospital in Menlo Park, California, where he took part, apparently without knowing its purpose, in a CIA-financed study of LSD and other hallucinogens. With his friends the Merry Pranksters he held the parties known as Acid Tests and took a cross-country bus trip in 1964. He later settled on the family farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon.

Douglas Adams

English · The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979), Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987), Last Chance to See (1990)

Adams (1952–2001) was born in Cambridge. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy began as a radio series in March 1978 before it became a novel the following year. Last Chance to See, written with Mark Carwardine, grew out of a radio series about endangered animals.

Every book by Douglas Adams →

Angela Carter

English · The Bloody Chamber (1979), Nights at the Circus (1984), Wise Children (1991)

Carter (1940–1992) rewrote fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber and in the same year published The Sadeian Woman, a study of pornography. In Nights at the Circus, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the aerialiste Sophie Fevvers claims to have hatched from an egg and grown wings at puberty, and an American journalist joins the circus to find out whether she is telling the truth.

Every book by Angela Carter →

Haruki Murakami

Japanese · A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–95), Kafka on the Shore (2002)

Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and from 1974 to 1981 ran Peter Cat, a coffeehouse and jazz bar in Tokyo, with his wife, Yōko Takahashi. His novels let talking animals, wells and parallel worlds into flat, ordinary days, usually through a narrator who drifts into the strange without much protest. His newest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, was published in Japanese in 2023.

Every book by Haruki Murakami →

Patrick Süskind

German · Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (1985), The Pigeon (1988)

Süskind was born in Bavaria in 1949, rarely gives interviews and has turned down several literary prizes. Perfume follows Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born in Paris in 1738 with a prodigious sense of smell and no scent of his own, who kills young women to capture their scent. John E. Woods’s English translation appeared in 1986, and Tom Tykwer filmed the novel in 2006.