Books like Change the name by Anna Kavan

Lolita tells the story of an English professor, Humbert Humbert, who becomes obsessed with his 12‑year‑old stepdaughter, Dolores Haze, nicknamed "Lolita," and the disturbing consequences of their relationship.

The Bell Jar is the sole novel by Sylvia Plath, a psychologically intense and autobiographical look at a young woman’s decline into mental illness.

Oedipa Maas, executor of Pierce Inverarity’s will, uncovers a hidden network of conspiracies, jazz clubs, and beatnik culture while navigating her own psyche.

In a world buried under ice after a nuclear war, a man seeks a lost woman in a surreal, dreamlike landscape.

Nightwood traces the complex love affairs of Robin Vote as she moves through relationships with Felix Volkbein, Nora Flood, and Jenny Petherbridge, exploring erotic obsession and identity in a richly symbolic, New York Times–reviewed work of American fiction.

André Breton’s "Nadja" blends surrealist romance with first‑person observation of a Parisian affair, interwoven with thirty‑plus photographs of the strange and uncanny.

A Brooklyn-born Irish‑American woman’s life—her family, neighborhood, and daily trials and triumphs—is traced from childhood through old age in this coming‑of‑age bildungsroman.

A Charmed Circle follows a family confined to a country house near a 1920s industrial town, exploring repression, family conflict, and the struggle for self‑expression amid a sinister patriarch.

Anna Kavan’s experimental novel explores identity and reality through repeated lives, asking who we truly are amid shifting circumstances.

Mike Halchin, in Driver's Side Airbag vol. 17, 1994, wrote this: "… some good quiet reflective material…where you can only walk outside and think…and hope this feeling never ends…" Meanwhile, Frank Allen described it in the Library Journal vol. 2 (1994?) as such: "An introspective, autobiographical glimpse of a working class hero/loner." Probably one of this author's more tranquil books of poems -- a break between previous surviving in the streets, social outrage and activism, some occasional (raunchy?) low brow humor to the later total insanity portrayed in works that would follow this book in a few years.

I am Lazarus is a collection of post‑war short stories by Anna Kavan, set in Blitz‑era London and reflecting her experiences working with invalided soldiers at a military neurosis centre.

FROM THE BOOK JACKET: A Stranger Still was first published in 1935 under Anna Kavan’s early married name of Helen Ferguson. An intriguing, well-plotted story, it was much acclaimed at the time, and its freshness and vigour remain undiminished. The wealthy Lewison family occupy centre stage. William, a widower, presides forcefully over his empire of Greater London stores, as well as over his sons, Cedric and Martin, and his impressionable daughter, Gwenda. A fictional ‘Anna Kavan’ appears as a young girl adrift from her husband and now in pursuit of romantic fulfillment. The story takes us from fashionable and Bohemian London to Paris, the South of France and Italy. The autobiographical element is implicit for those familiar with the author’s enigmatic life. Anna Kavan captures the ambience of the thirties with conviction, yet her pre-hallucinogenic writing has the uninhibitedness and immediacy of a novel of today. (From the book jacket, british reprint published in 1995).

"Is there a "female Bildungsroman"? Can the story of Elizabeth Bennet's development be yoked to a genre conceived in terms of Wilhelm Meister and David Copperfield? Unbecoming Women unpacks the ideological baggage of the Bildungsroman, and turns to novels of development and conduct books by women for a new poetics of growing up." "In subtle readings of works by Frances Burney, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and George Elliot, Susan Fraiman argues that a heroine's progress toward masterful selfhood is by no means assured. Focusing on "counternarratives" in which girls do not enter the world so much as flounder on its doorstep, Fraiman suggests that becoming a woman involves de-formation, disorientation, and the loss of authority." "By stressing the rival stories in a single text, Unbecoming Women provides a fresh assessment of the Bildungsroman. Instead of the usual question - "How does the hero of this novel come of age?"--Fraiman asks "What are the divergent developmental narratives at work, and what can they tell us about competing ideologies concerning the feminine?"" "Written with grace and theoretical mastery, Unbecoming Women emphasizes the subversive as well as dialectical aspects of a genre long considered homogeneous. The result is a compelling work of literary criticism that, charting female destiny in Georgian and Victorian texts, also post-modernizes the novel of development."--Jacket.