Recommendations
Books Like Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar
The path to heaven is a game, not a journey
If you were challenged by Cortázar's invitation to read a novel twice, in two different orders, thinking about how you read while you read — these works share the same metafictional ambition and the same refusal to let the reader remain a passive consumer of the story.
- 1
Buy on AmazonFicciones
by Jorge Luis Borges
Borges's story collection — the philosophical companion to Hopscotch; Borges creates labyrinths in concentrated form that Cortázar extends to novel length.
- 2
Buy on AmazonIf on a winter's night a traveler
by Italo Calvino
Calvino's metafictional novel — the most directly Borgesian and Cortázarian novel in Italian; the 'you' who is reading replaces Cortázar's 'you' who is hopscotching.
- 3
Buy on AmazonOne Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez
García Márquez's masterpiece — written four years after Hopscotch and in dialogue with it; the other great Boom novel in a totally different register.
- 4
Buy on AmazonPale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov
Nabokov's novel-as-commentary — published the same year as Hopscotch; the two most formally radical novels of 1962.
- 5
Buy on AmazonThe Magus
by John Fowles
Fowles's labyrinthine Greek island novel — a man drawn into an elaborate game that may be real or fiction; the Cortázarian predicament as thriller.
- 6
Buy on AmazonBlow-Up and Other Stories
by Julio Cortázar
Cortázar's short story collection — the basis for Antonioni's 1966 film; shows his fantastical and psychological range in a more concentrated form.
- 7
Buy on AmazonThe House of the Spirits
by Isabel Allende
Allende's magical realist family saga — the Latin American Boom novel in a more accessible form; the political and historical dimensions Cortázar's more experimental mode makes implicit.
- 8
Buy on AmazonTristram Shandy
by Laurence Sterne
Sterne's eighteenth-century comic novel — the formal ancestor of Hopscotch; the novel that most thoroughly disrupted linear narrative before the twentieth century.
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