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Zuckerman Unbound

Philip Roth · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath · 258 pages

The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature, with over two million copies sold in this country. This extraordinary work chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful - but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time. Step by careful step, Sylvia Plath takes us with Esther through a painful month in New York as a contest-winning junior

Writer ProtagonistDeath of a ParentNew York CityDry Humor
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Muse

Jonathan Galassi · 254 pages

"The story of an editor caught up in a publishing scandal around the manuscript of a renowned and beautiful female poet"--

Writer ProtagonistNew York CityDry HumorLiterary Fiction
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The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

Adelle Waldman · 242 pages

"In this 21st-century literary world, wit and conversation are not at all dead. Is romance? Novelist Adelle Waldman plunges into the psyche of a modern man--who thinks of himself as beyond superficial judgment, yet constantly struggles with his own status anxiety, who is drawn to women, yet has a habit of letting them down"--Dust jacket flap.

Writer ProtagonistNew York CityCharacter-DrivenDry Humor
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That Old Cape Magic

Richard Russo · 272 pages

Following Bridge of Sighs--a national best seller hailed by The Boston Globe as "an astounding achievement" and "a masterpiece"--Richard Russo gives us the story of a marriage, and of all the other ties that bind, from parents and in-laws to children and the promises of youth.Griffin has been tooling around for nearly a year with his father's ashes in the trunk, but his mother is very much alive a

Writer ProtagonistDeath of a ParentCharacter-DrivenDry Humor
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Florence Gordon

Brian Morton · 320 pages

"Meet Florence Gordon: blunt, brilliant, cantankerous and passionate, feminist icon to young women, invisible and underappreciated by most everyone else. At seventy-five, Florence has earned her right to set down the burdens of family and work and shape her legacy at long last. But just as she is beginning to write her long-deferred memoir, her son Daniel returns to New York from Seattle with his

Writer ProtagonistNew York CityCharacter-DrivenDry Humor
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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Mark Haddon · 240 pages

This is Christopher's murder mystery story. There are no lies in this story because Christopher can't tell lies. Christopher does not like strangers or the colours yellow or brown or being touched. On the other hand, he knows all the countries in the world and their capital cities and every prime number up to 7507. When Christohper decides to find out who killed the neighbour's dog, his mystery st

Writer ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenDry HumorDeath of a Parent
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The Emperor's Children

Claire Messud · 478 pages

Friends at Brown University, Marina, Danielle, and Julius are still looking to make their marks as they approach their 30s. Marina lives with her celebrated parents on the Upper West Side while trying to complete her book. TV producer Danielle's success is due to the puff pieces she churns out. Freelance critic Julius can barely make ends meet. Into this mix comes Bootie, Marina's college dropout

Writer ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenDry HumorNew York City
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Fates and Furies

Lauren Groff · 400 pages

Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years. At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the env

Writer ProtagonistDeath of a ParentCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Road to Los Angeles

John Fante · 171 pages

I had a lot of jobs in Los Angeles Harbor because our family was poor and my father was dead. My first job was ditchdigging a short time after I graduated from high school. Every night I couldn't sleep from the pain in my back. We were digging an excavation in an empty lot, there wasn't any shade, the sun came straight from a cloudless sky, and I was down in that hole digging with two huskies who

Writer ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenDeath of a ParentLiterary Fiction
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My Struggle Book One

Karl Ove Knausgård

Writer ProtagonistDeath of a ParentCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Anthologist

Nicholson Baker · 186 pages

The book is a study of how a reader engages with an author's work: partly an appreciation of John Updike, and partly a kind of self-exploration.

Writer ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenDry HumorLiterary Fiction
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The Shipping News

Annie Proulx · 337 pages

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Shipping News is a celebration of Annie Proulx's genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing

Dry HumorDeath of a ParentWriter ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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10:04

Ben Lerner · 250 pages

A beautiful and utterly original novel about making art, love, and children during the twilight of an empire. Ben Lerner's first novel, *Leaving the Atocha Station*, was hailed as "one of the truest (and funniest) novels. of his generation" (Lorin Stein, The New York Review of Books), "a work so luminously original in style and form as to seem like a premonition, a comet from the future" (Geoff Dy

Writer ProtagonistNew York CityCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
❤️

The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing

Melissa Bank · 274 pages

After following the advice from a manual called "How to Meet and Marry Mr Right", Jane learns that in love there is neither pattern nor promise. This is a funny collection of connected stories and a portrait of Jane, a woman manoeuvring her way through love, sex and relationships.

Death of a ParentNew York CityCharacter-DrivenDry Humor
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'Tis A Memoir

Frank McCourt · 512 pages

Death of a ParentCharacter-DrivenDry HumorNew York City
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Women

Charles Bukowski · 297 pages

Low-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at fifty, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life, running three hundred hangovers a year, and maintaining a sex life that woul

Writer ProtagonistDry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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You Can't Go Home Again

Thomas Wolfe · 638 pages

A twentieth-century classic, Thomas Wolfes magnificent novel is both the story of a young writer longing to make his mark upon the world and a sweeping portrait of America and Europe from the Great Depression through the years leading up to World War II. Upon the publication of You Cant Go Home Again in 1940, two years after Wolfes death,The New York Times Book Review declared that it “will stand

Writer ProtagonistNew York CityCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Beautyland

Marie-Helene Bertino · 327 pages

Death of a ParentCharacter-DrivenDry HumorNew York City
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Surrender The Pink

Carrie Fisher · 286 pages

Writer ProtagonistDry HumorCharacter-DrivenNew York City
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Harriet the Spy

Louise Fitzhugh · 298 pages

Harriet the Spy is a children's novel written and illustrated by Louise Fitzhugh that was published in 1964. It has been called "a milestone in children's literature" and a "classic". In the U.S. it ranked number 12 in The 50 Best Books for Kids and number 17 in The Top 100 Children's Novels on two lists generated in 2012.

Writer ProtagonistNew York CityCharacter-DrivenDry Humor
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The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

Kristopher Jansma · 354 pages

"Can a leopard ever really change his spots? Can a person ever change? These are the timeless questions that Kristopher Jansma asks in this enchanting debut novel about three great friends--two men and one woman--their triumphs and failures in life and love and their globe-spanning adventures. From the jazz clubs of Manhattan to the villages of Sri Lanka, these three remarkably engaging characters

Writer ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenNew York CityLiterary Fiction
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Humboldt's Gift

Saul Bellow · 487 pages

For many years, the great poet Von Humboldt Fleisher and Charlie Citrine, a young man inflamed with a love for literature, were the best of friends. At the time of his death, however, Humboldt is a failure, and Charlie's life has reached a low point: his career is at a standstill, and he's enmeshed in an acrimonious divorce, infatuated with a highly unsuitable young woman, and involved with a neur

Writer ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenDry HumorLiterary Fiction
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Summertime

J.M. Coetzee · 266 pages

A rich, funny, and deeply affecting autobiographical new novel from one of the world's greatest living writers.A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972–1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period w

Writer ProtagonistDry HumorCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Shoplifting from American Apparel

Tao Lin · 112 pages

Set mostly in Manhattan--although also featuring Atlantic City, Brooklyn, GMail Chat, and Gainsville, Florida--this autobiographical novella, spanning two years in the life of a young writer with a cultish following, has been described by the author as "A shoplifting book about vague relationships," "2 parts shoplifting arrest, 5 parts vague relationship issues," and "An ultimately life-affirming

Writer ProtagonistNew York CityDry HumorLiterary Fiction

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