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Alabama native Daniel Wallace is the author of eight novels, including "Big Fish," the 1998 best-seller adapted into a Tim Burton film. Wallace's memoir "This Isn't Going to End Well," about his brother-in-law and mentor, is now out in paperback.
'The Baron in the Trees' by Italo Calvino (1957)
Cosimo, an 18th-century Italian nobleman, rebels as a boy one day by climbing into a tree and telling his parents he will never come down. And he doesn't — not for the rest of the novel or his life. Calvino makes this so much fun and utterly believable. Even Voltaire makes an appearance. Buy it here.
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I have never met anyone else who has read this novel. I don't know if it's still in print. I don't even know who wrote it; the author's name is probably a pseudonym. A family's plane crashes in the Amazon and they're captured by a Stone Age tribe that believes the strange-looking foreigners are freshwater dolphins in human form. See? Why isn't this on everyone's bedside table? Buy it here.
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'The Suicide Index' by Joan Wickersham (2008)
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