What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Interestings
Meg Wolitzer · 560 pages
The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age fifteen is not always enough to propel someone through life at age thirty. Their friendships endure and even prosper, but also underscore the differences in their fates, in what their tal
The Great Man
Kate Christensen · 312 pages
From the acclaimed author of The Epicure's Lament, a novel of literary rivalry in which two competing biographers collide in their quest for the truth about a great artist.Oscar Feldman, the "Great Man," was a New York city painter of the heroic generation of the forties and fifties. But instead of the abstract canvases of the Pollocks and Rothkos, he stubbornly hewed to painting one subject--the
Among the Ten Thousand Things
Julia Pierpont · 322 pages
A former ballet dancer struggles to protect her children before receiving an anonymous package revealing her weak artist husband's infidelities, a discovery that leads to a difficult breakup during a New York summer.
Tuesday Nights in 1980
Molly Prentiss · 296 pages
Welcome to SoHo at the onset of the eighties: a gritty, not-yet-gentrified playground for artists and writers looking to make it in the big city. Among them: James Bennett, a synesthetic art critic for The New York Times whose unlikely condition enables him to describe art in profound, magical ways, and Raul Engales, an exiled Argentinian painter running from his past and the Dirty War that has en
Clara and Mr. Tiffany
Susan Vreeland · 448 pages
At the dawn of the 20th century, Louis Comfort Tiffany wants to honor his father and the family business with innovative glass designs. But it is the freethinking Clara Driscoll, head of his women's division, who develops the iconic Tiffany lamp and earns Tiffany the critical acclaim and financial success he's dreamed of. Yearning for recognition, Clara must decide between the professional world o
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
By Nightfall
Michael Cunningham · 238 pages
The whole course of one’s life really can change in an instant. Peter is forty-four, prosperous, the owner of a big New York apartment, a player in the NY contemporary art dealing scene. He has been married to Rebecca for close on twenty years. Their marriage is sound, in the way marriages are. Peter might even describe himself to be happy. But when Mizzy, Rebecca’s much younger brother, com
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf · 241 pages
This novel is an extraordinarily poignant evocation of a lost happiness that lives on in the memory. For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever.In this, her most autobiographical novel, Virginia Woolf captures the intensity of childhood longing and delight, and the shifting complexity of adult relationships.
The Swan Thieves
Elizabeth Kostova · 564 pages
Psychiatrist Andrew Marlowe, devoted to his profession and the painting hobby he loves, has a solitary but ordered life. When renowned painter Robert Oliver attacks a canvas in the National Gallery of Art and becomes his patient, Marlow finds that order destroyed. Desperate to understand the secret that torments the genius, he embarks on a journey that leads him into the lives of the women closest
Astonish Me
Maggie Shipstead · 356 pages
From the author of the widely acclaimed debut novel *Seating Arrangements,* winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Price for First Fiction: a gorgeously written, fiercely compelling glimpse into the demanding world of professional ballet and its magnetic hold over two generations. *Astonish Me* is the irresistible story of Joan, a young American dancer who helps a Sovie
A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara · 736 pages
Sunset Park
Paul Auster · 288 pages
After falling in love with an underage girl and stirring the wrath of her older sister, New York native Miles Heller flees to Brooklyn and shacks up with a group of artists squatting in the borough's Sunset Park neighborhood.
The Cranes Dance
Meg Howrey · 373 pages
Kate is conflicted after she is offered her sister Gwen's starring role in a ballet, especially since her jealously prevented her from seeing the signs of the mental breakdown that made Gwen lose the role.
Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keeffe
Dawn Tripp · 336 pages
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Michael Chabon · 639 pages
The novel begins in 1939 with the arrival of 19-year-old Josef "Joe" Kavalier as a refugee in New York City, where he comes to live with his 17-year-old cousin Sammy Klayman. Joe escaped from Prague with the help of his teacher Kornblum by hiding in a coffin along with the inanimate Golem of Prague, leaving the rest of his family, including his younger brother Thomas, behind. Besides having a shar
Villa America
Liza Klaussmann · 448 pages
A tale based on the real-life inspirations for Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night finds expats Sara and Gerald Murphy sharing freewheeling days, hosting parties and hiding heartbreaking secrets in the 1920s French Riviera.
Everything Beautiful Began After
Simon Van Booy · 404 pages
While in Athens, Rebecca--young, beautiful and lost--finds a confidant in George, a translator whose closest friends are Aristophanes and Jack Daniels, but their blossoming relationship becomes complicated when they meet Henry, a happy-go-lucky archaeologist who changes their lives forever.
Plays Well with Others
Allan Gurganus · 337 pages
**From Amazon.com:** With great narrative inventiveness and emotional amplitude, Allan Gurganus gives us artistic Manhattan in the wild 1980s, where young artists--refugees from the middle class--hurl themselves into playful work and serious fun. Our guide is Hartley Mims Jr., a Southerner whose native knack for happiness might thwart his literary ambitions. Through his eyes we encounter the c
What I Loved
Siri Hustvedt · 384 pages
"What I Loved begins in New York in 1975, when art historian Leo Hertzberg discovers an extraordinary painting by an unknown artist in a SoHo gallery. He buys the work and tracks down the artist, Bill Wechsler, and the two men embark on a lifelong friendship.". "Leo's story, which spans twenty-five years, follows the evolution of the growing involvement between his family and Bill's - an intric
The Other Side of the World
Stephanie Bishop · 269 pages
In the tradition of Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work or Maggie O'Farrell's The Hand That First Held Mine comes a complex, tender and gorgeously written novel of parenthood, love and marriage that is impossible to put down. Cambridge 1963. Charlotte struggles to reconnect with the woman she was before children, and to find the time and energy to paint. Her husband, Henry, cannot face the thought of anot
The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt · 817 pages
"The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind....Donna Tartt has delivered an extraordinary work of fiction."--Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review Composed with the skills of a master, The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present day America and a drama of enthra
Hikikomori and the Rental Sister
Jeff Backhaus · 246 pages
Estranged from the husband who cloistered himself in his bedroom three years earlier after a devastating tragedy, Silke hires a young Japanese woman to draw him back into the world by establishing a deeply intimate relationship with him.
The Electric Michelangelo
Sarah Hall · 352 pages
"In the lyrical prose that has already become her trademark, Sarah Hall's new novel tells the story of Cy Parks, from his childhood years spent in a seaside guest house for consumptives with his mother, Reeda, to his apprenticeship as a tattoo-artist with Eliot Riley - a scraper with a reputation as a Bolshevik and a drinker to boot." "His skills acquired and a thirst for experience burning within

