What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorWe Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Karen Joy Fowler · 336 pages
Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. "I was raised with a chimpanzee," she explains. "I tell you Fern is a chimp and, already, you aren't thinking of her as my sister. . . . Until Fern's expulsion . . . she was my twin, my fun-house mirror, my whirlwind other half. . . . I loved her as a sister."
The Gate of Angels
Penelope Fitzgerald · 167 pages
Young Fred Fairly, a junior fellow at St. Angelicus College in 1912 Cambridge, falls in love with the dangerously mysterious Daisy, whom he awakens next to one morning after a freak accident.
Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis · 256 pages
Amis’s debut novel, published in 1954, is a satire on academia. The protagonist is a bored and disinterested history lecturer at a provincial university, trapped in a joyless and sexless relationship with a depressive fellow lecturer. The book immediately elevated Amis to fame as one of the leading writers of his generation.
The Marriage Plot
Jeffrey Eugenides · 406 pages
The story concerns three college friends from Brown University—Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell—beginning in their senior year, 1982, and follows them during their first year post-graduation.
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
The Group
Mary McCarthy · 378 pages
THE GROUP follows eight graduates from exclusive Vassar College as they find love and heartbreak, forge careers, gossip and party in 1930s Manhattan. THE GROUP can be seen as the original SEX AND THE CITY. It is the first novel to frankly portray women's real lives, exploring subjects such as sex, contraception, motherhood and marriage.
Pnin
Vladimir Nabokov · 191 pages
Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is a tireless lover who writes to his treacherous Liza: "A genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do." Pnin is the focal point of subtle academic conspiracies he cannot begin to comprehend, yet he stages a facu
A Question of Upbringing
Anthony Powell · 226 pages
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
The Idiot
Elif Batuman · 427 pages
Embarking on her freshman year at Harvard in the early tech days of the 1990s, a young artist and daughter of Turkish immigrants begins a correspondence with an older mathematics student from Hungary while struggling with her changing sense of self, first love and a daunting career prospect.
Emotionally Weird
Kate Atkinson · 352 pages
On a peat and heather island off the west coast of Scotland, Effie and her mother Nora take refuge in the large mouldering house of their ancestors and tell each other stories. Nora, at first, recounts nothing that Effie really wants to hear, like who her father was - variously Jimmy, Jack, or Ernie. Effie tells of her life at college in Dundee, the land of cakes and William Wallace, where she liv
A Gate at the Stairs
Lorrie Moore · 336 pages
In her best-selling story collection, Birds of America ("[it] will stand by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability" --James McManus, front page of The New York Times Book Review), Lorrie Moore wrote about the disconnect between men and women, about the precariousness of women on the edge, and about loneliness and loss.Now, in her dazzling new novel--h
Asterios Polyp
David Mazzucchelli · 344 pages
Asterios Polyp, its arrogant, prickly protagonist, is an award-winning architect who's never built an actual building, and a pedant in the midst of a spiritual crisis. After the structure of his own life falls apart, he runs away to try to rebuild it into something new.
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
Truth and Consequences
Alison Lurie · 236 pages
University director Jane Mackenzie is dismayed when her injured husband falls for Delia, a beautiful writer who has recently joined the center's staff, a situation that is complicated when Jane develops feelings for Delia's husband.
Mislaid
Nell Zink · 257 pages
Startlingly radical, dazzlingly witty, unlike anything that has come before - this is the most exciting debut novel published this year. 'Nell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know.' Jonathan Franzen Virginia, 1966.
Mrs. Fletcher
Tom Perrotta · 309 pages
"From one of the most popular and bestselling authors of our time, a penetrating and hilarious new novel about sex, love, and identity on the frontlines of America's culture wars. Eve Fletcher is trying to figure out what comes next. A forty-six-year-old divorcee whose beloved only child has just left for college, Eve is struggling to adjust to her empty nest when one night her phone lights up wit
Penelope
Rebecca Harrington · 284 pages
Misfit freshman Penelope is rapidly overwhelmed by the aggressive competitiveness of Harvard University's environment in and out of the classrooms, a situation that is complicated by her crush on an upper classman and her participation in an absurdist production of Caligula.
Hangsaman
Shirley Jackson · 260 pages
Seventeen-year-old Natalie Waite longs to escape home for college. Her father is a domineering and egotistical writer who keeps a tight rein on Natalie and her long-suffering mother. When Natalie finally does get away, however, college life doesn’t bring the happiness she expected. Little by little, Natalie is no longer certain of anything—even where reality ends and her dark imaginings begin. Chi
Elizabeth and Her German Garden
Elizabeth von Arnim · 137 pages
Told in a series of diary entries, Elizabeth and Her German Garden recounts one year in the life of an Englishwoman determined to revitalize the neglected garden of their German estate. It is in the process of laying out flower beds, ordering rose varietals, and supervising the planting that she finds peace and escape from her three young children (referred to simply as the April, May, and June ba
The Ponder Heart
Eudora Welty · 156 pages
Edna Earle Ponder, who runs a hotel in a small Mississippi town, tells the story of her beloved, softhearted, but trying Uncle Daniel.