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🧲 Books like this

Fences

August Wilson · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

Death of a Salesman

Arthur Miller · 139 pages

The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman’s deferred American dream Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupporta

Stage PlayFather and SonWorking-Class ProtagonistInfidelity
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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Tennessee Williams · 158 pages

Members of a neurotic Southern family gather to face the impending death of their patriarch, Big Daddy, and battle over the inheritance of his vast estate.

Stage PlayFather and SonInfidelityTragic
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Stoner

John Williams · 278 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistInfidelityMarriage in TroubleTragic
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Third Life Of Grange Copeland

Alice Walker · 302 pages

"Despondent over the futility of life in the South, black tenant farmer Grange Copeland leaves his wife and son in Georgia to head North. After meeting an equally humiliating existence there, he returns to Georgia, years later, to find his son, Brownfield, imprisoned for the murder of his wife. As the guardian of the couple's youngest daughter, Grange Copeland is looking at his third and final cha

RacismWorking-Class ProtagonistFather and SonTragic
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Disgraced

Ayad Akhtar · 88 pages

New York. Today. Corporate lawyer Amir Kapoor is happy, in love, and about to land the biggest career promotion of his life. But beneath the veneer, success has come at a price. When Amir and his artist wife, Emily, host an intimate dinner party at their Upper East Side apartment, what starts out as a friendly conversation soon escalates into something far more damaging.

Stage PlayRacismTragicMarriage in Trouble
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Jude the Obscure

Thomas Hardy · 440 pages

Hardy's last work of fiction, Jude the Obscure is also one of his most gloomily fatalistic, depicting the lives of individuals who are trapped by forces beyond their control. Jude Fawley, a poor villager, wants to enter the divinity school at Christminster. Sidetracked by Arabella Donn, an earthy country girl who pretends to be pregnant by him, Jude marries her and is then deserted. He earns a liv

Working-Class ProtagonistInfidelityTragicMarriage in Trouble
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The Good Earth

Pearl S. Buck · 316 pages

This tells the poignant tale of a Chinese farmer and his family in old agrarian China. The humble Wang Lung glories in the soil he works, nurturing the land as it nurtures him and his family. Nearby, the nobles of the House of Hwang consider themselves above the land and its workers; but they will soon meet their own downfall. Hard times come upon Wang Lung and his family when flood and drought

Working-Class ProtagonistTragicInfidelityEmotional
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Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Edward Albee · 242 pages

George, a disillusioned academic, and Martha, his caustic wife, have just come home from a faculty party. When a handsome young professor and his mousy wife stop by for a nightcap, an innocent night of fun and games quickly turns dark and dangerous. Long-buried resentment and rage are unleashed as George and Martha turn their rapier-sharp wits against each other, using their guests as pawns in the

Stage PlayInfidelityTragicMarriage in Trouble
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Agamemnon

Aeschylus, Judith Affleck · 269 pages

Stage PlayInfidelityMarriage in TroubleTragic
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Topdog/Underdog

Suzan-Lori Parks · 109 pages

A darkly comic fable of brotherly love and family identity is Suzan-Lori Parks latest riff on the way we are defined by history. The play tells the story of Lincoln and Booth, two brothers whose names were given to them as a joke, foretelling a lifetime of sibling rivalry and resentment. Haunted by the past, the brothers are forced to confront the shattering reality of their future. Suzan-Lori

Stage PlayWorking-Class ProtagonistTragicRacism
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Look Back in Anger

John Osborne · 96 pages

Osborne led the surge of the 'angry young men' with this play about a disaffected young man railing against what he sees as the sterility of middle class married life in post-war Britain.

Stage PlayWorking-Class ProtagonistMarriage in TroubleClassics
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Long Day's Journey Into Night

Eugene O'Neill · 179 pages

Author Eugene O'Neill gives an autobiographical account of his explosive homelife. Fused by a drug-addicted mother, a father who wallows in drink after realizing he is no longer a famous actor, and an older brother who is emotionally unstable and misfit, the family is reflected by their youngest son, who at 23 is a sensitive and aspiring writer.

Stage PlayFather and SonTragicEmotional
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The Kite Runner

Khaled Hosseini · 368 pages

The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacri

Father and SonTragicRacismClassics
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The Bonfire of the Vanities

Tom Wolfe · 690 pages

RacismInfidelityMarriage in TroubleTragic
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East of Eden

John Steinbeck · 602 pages

Steinbeck considered East of Eden to be his masterpiece. In his journal, Journal of a Novel (often read as a companion to the novel) he notes that “this is the book I have always wanted and have worked and prayed to be able to write.” Set primarily in the Salinas Valley in the early twentieth century, the novel traces three generations of two families – the Trasks and the Hamiltons – as they grapp

Father and SonTragicInfidelityMarriage in Trouble
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Wait Until Spring, Bandini

John Fante · 230 pages

He came along, kicking the snow. Here was a disgusted man. His name was Svevo Bandini, and he lived three blocks down that street. He was cold and there were holes in his shoes. That morning he had patched the holes on the inside with pieces of cardboard from a macaroni box. The macaroni in that box was not paid for. He had thought of that as he placed the cardboard inside his shoes.

Father and SonWorking-Class ProtagonistInfidelityClassics
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Song of Solomon

Toni Morrison · 338 pages

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s ori

RacismFather and SonTragicEmotional
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A Doll's House

Henrik Ibsen · 87 pages

Stage PlayTragicMarriage in TroubleEmotional
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Oedipus Rex

Sophocles · 115 pages

Oedipus Rex chronicles the story of Oedipus, a man that becomes the king of Thebes and was always destined from birth to murder his father Laius and marry his mother Jocasta. The play is an example of a classic tragedy, noticeably containing an emphasis on how Oedipus's own faults contribute to the tragic hero's downfall, as opposed to having fate be the sole cause. Over the centuries, Oedipus Rex

Stage PlayFather and SonTragicEmotional
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The Father

August Strindberg · 79 pages

Stage PlayMarriage in TroubleTragicClassics
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The Chosen

Chaim Potok · 284 pages

It's about two jewish boys from different jewish sects with very differing doctrine. The kids meet in the unlikely circumstance of a baseball game, and a terrible accident, that leads them to be lifelong friends

BaseballFather and SonEmotionalClassics
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Othello

William Shakespeare · 186 pages

"This book is a substantial revision of the Norton Critical Othello published in 2004. Beginning with a new Preface, it reprints Shakespeare's tragedy based on the First Folio text of 1623, with modified and expanded explanatory notes reflecting recent scholarly and critical discussion. A section on "Textual Sources and Cultural Contexts" includes a translation of the sixteenth-century Italian nov

Stage PlayRacismTragicEmotional
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Master Harold...and the boys

Athol Fugard · 61 pages

"Master Harold," or Hally, learns that his alcoholic father is to be released from the hospital and struggles with his emotions during a confrontation with the two black men who help in the family's restaurant in 1950s South Africa.

Stage PlayRacismEmotionalClassics
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Sounder

William H. Armstrong · 116 pages

Angry and humiliated when his sharecropper father is jailed for stealing food for his family, a young black boy grows in courage and understanding by learning to read and through his relationship with his devoted dog Sounder.

RacismFather and SonWorking-Class ProtagonistTragic

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