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Wonder Boys

Michael Chabon · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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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 ProtagonistMidlife CrisisInfidelityDark Comedy
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Blue Angel

Francine Prose · 314 pages

It's been years since Swenson, a professor in a New England creative writing program, has published a novel.It's been even longer since any of his students have shown promise. Enter Angela Argo, a pierced, tattooed student with a rare talent for writing. Angela is just the thing Swenson needs. And, better yet, she wants his help. But, as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intenti

Midlife CrisisCollege CampusWriter ProtagonistInfidelity
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I See You've Called in Dead

John Kenney · 294 pages

Writer ProtagonistMidlife CrisisCharacter-DrivenDark Comedy
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The Anatomy Lesson

Philip Roth · 291 pages

Midlife CrisisWriter ProtagonistDark ComedyCharacter-Driven
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Straight Man

Richard Russo · 391 pages

William Henry Devereaux, Jr., spiritually suited to playing left field but forced by a bad hamstring to try first base, is the unlikely chairman of the English department at West Central Pennsylvania University. Over the course of a single convoluted week, he threatens to execute a goose, has his nose slashed by a feminist poet, discovers that his secretary writes better fiction than he does, s

Midlife CrisisCollege CampusDark ComedyCharacter-Driven
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The Zahir

Paulo Coelho · 320 pages

Set in Paris and in the enchanting landscape of central Asia, this new novel by the author of the international bestsellers The Alchemist and Eleven Minutes follows the journey of a man obsessed with finding the wife who left him without an explanation.The narrator of The Zahir is a bestselling novelist who lives in Paris and enjoys all the privileges that money and celebrity bring. His wife of te

Midlife CrisisWriter ProtagonistInfidelityCharacter-Driven
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The World According to Garp

John Irving · 568 pages

Writer ProtagonistInfidelityDark ComedyCharacter-Driven
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This is Where I Leave You

Jonathan Tropper · 376 pages

International bestseller Jonathan Tropper joins Dutton with the book his fans in the trade have been waiting for him to write: an uproarious, sophisticated, and deeply moving breakout novel.Those who have already discovered Jonathan Tropper have called his novels "hilarious, but emotion-packed,"1 "fantastically funny,"2 "surprisingly moving,"3 and "utterly magnificent."4 With his Dutton debut, Tro

Midlife CrisisDark ComedyInfidelityCharacter-Driven
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Domestic Violets

Matthew Norman · 329 pages

"In the vein of Jonathan Tropper and Tom Perrotta comes DOMESTIC VIOLETS, Matthew Norman's darkly comic family drama about love, loss, and ambition"--Provided by publisher.

Writer ProtagonistMidlife CrisisDark ComedyCharacter-Driven
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The Art of Fielding

Chad Harbach · 512 pages

At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended. Henry’s fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight, a longtime bachelor, has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love

Midlife CrisisCollege CampusInfidelityCharacter-Driven
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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 ProtagonistInfidelityDark ComedyCharacter-Driven
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The Rules of Attraction

Bret Easton Ellis · 283 pages

First Sentence: “And it’s a story that might bore you, but you don’t have to listen, she told me, because she always knew it was going to be like that, and it was, she thinks, her first year, or actually weekend, really a Friday, in September, and Camden, and this was three or four years ago, and she got so drunk that she ended up in bed, lost her virginity (late, she was eighteen) in Lorna Slavin

College CampusInfidelityDark ComedyCharacter-Driven
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Less

Andrew Sean Greer · 273 pages

Receiving an invitation to his ex-boyfriend's wedding, Arthur, a failed novelist on the eve of his fiftieth birthday, embarks on an international journey that finds him falling in love, risking his life, reinventing himself, and making connections with the past.

Midlife CrisisWriter ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
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Texasville

Larry McMurtry · 544 pages

Jacy, the high school beauty, returns to Thalia from a career as a Hollywood star and changes the lives of her fellow townspeople.

Midlife CrisisInfidelityDark ComedyContemporary Fiction
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While I Was Gone

Sue Miller · 291 pages

Midlife CrisisCollege CampusInfidelityCharacter-Driven
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The Nix

Nathan Hill · 640 pages

"An epic novel about a son, the mother who left him as a child, and how his search to uncover the secrets of her life leads him to reclaim his own"--

Writer ProtagonistCollege CampusDark ComedyCharacter-Driven
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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

College CampusInfidelityDark ComedyCharacter-Driven
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The Forty Rules of Love

Elif Shafak, lyf shfq · 354 pages

Midlife CrisisWriter ProtagonistInfidelityCharacter-Driven
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The Age of Desire

Jennie Fields · 352 pages

Reimagines the midlife world of Edith Wharton and the impact of her affair with a young journalist on her longtime friendship with disapproving literary secretary Anna Bahlmann, in a tale told against the backdrop of Gilded Age Paris.

Midlife CrisisWriter ProtagonistInfidelityCharacter-Driven
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Stoner

John Williams · 278 pages

Midlife CrisisCollege CampusInfidelityCharacter-Driven
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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

InfidelityDark ComedyWriter ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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Solar

Ian McEwan · 296 pages

Michael Beard ist Physiker und Frauenheld. Er hat den Nobelpreis erhalten, doch ist er alles andere als nobel: Im Beruf ruht er sich auf seinen Lorbeeren aus, privat hält es ihn auf Dauer bei keiner Frau. Bis die geniale Idee eines Rivalen für Zündstoff in seinem Leben sorgt. In Solar geht es nicht nur um Sonnen-, sondern auch um kriminelle Energie.

Midlife CrisisDark ComedyCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
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Thinks...

David Lodge · 341 pages

"Ralph Messenger is a man who knows what he wants and generally gets it. As director of the prestigious Holt Belling Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Gloucester, he is much in demand as a pundit on developments in artificial intelligence and the study of human consciousness. Known to his colleagues as a womanizer, he has reached a tacit understanding with his American wife Carrie

College CampusWriter ProtagonistInfidelityCharacter-Driven
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The Jane Austen Book Club

Karen Joy Fowler · 296 pages

"In California's Central Valley, five women and one man join together to discuss Jane Austen's novels. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, and love happens." "Dedicated Austen readers will delight in unearthing the echoes of Austen that run through this novel, but many readers will simply enjoy the vision and voice that, desp

Midlife CrisisInfidelityCharacter-DrivenWriter Protagonist

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