A Rage to Live

10 best books like A Rage to Live (John O'Hara): Night at the Fiestas, The Tiger's Wife, Chronicles of a Radical Hag (with Recipes), We Were the Mulvaneys, Hex, The Wangs vs. the World, Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, Home for Erring and Outcast Girls, Play It As It Lays, The Last Brother

Night at the Fiestas

Author	Kirstin Valdez Quade
ISBN	0393352218

With intensity and emotional precision, Kirstin Valdez Quade's unforgettable stories plunge us into the fierce, troubled hearts of characters defined by the desire to escape the past or else to plumb its depths. The deadbeat father of a pregnant teenager tries to transform his life by playing the...

The Tiger's Wife

Author	Téa Obreht
ISBN	0385343833

Weaving a brilliant latticework of family legend, loss, and love, Téa Obreht, the youngest of The New Yorker’s twenty best American fiction writers under forty, has spun a timeless novel that will establish her as one of the most vibrant, original authors of her generation.

In a Balkan...

Chronicles of a Radical Hag (with Recipes)

Author	Lorna Landvik
ISBN	1452959617

A bittersweet, seriously funny novel of a life, a small town, and a key to our troubled times traced through a newspaper columnist’s half-century of taking in, and taking on, the world


The curmudgeon who wrote the column “Ramblin’s by Walt” in the Granite Creek Gazette dismissed...

We Were the Mulvaneys

Author	Joyce Carol Oates
ISBN	0452282829

The Mulvaneys of High Point Farm in Mt. Ephraim, New York, are a large and fortunate clan, blessed with good looks, abundant charisma, and boundless promise. But over the twenty-five year span of this ambitious novel, the Mulvaneys will slide, almost imperceptibly at first, from the pinnacle of happiness,...

Hex

Author	Thomas Olde Heuvelt
ISBN	0765378809

Whoever is born here, is doomed to stay 'til death. Whoever settles, never leaves.

Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a 17th century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Muzzled, she walks the streets and enters your homes...

The Wangs vs. the World

Author

Jade Chang

A hilarious debut novel about a wealthy but fractured Chinese immigrant family that had it all, only to lose every last cent - and about the road trip they take across America that binds them back together.

Charles Wang is mad at America. A brash, lovable immigrant businessman who built a cosmetics...

Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam

Author	Andrew X. Pham
ISBN	0312267177

Catfish and Mandala is the story of an American odyssey—a solo bicycle voyage around the Pacific Rim to Vietnam—made by a young Vietnamese-American man in pursuit of both his adopted homeland and his forsaken fatherland.

Andrew X. Pham was born in Vietnam and raised in California. His...

Home for Erring and Outcast Girls

Author

Julie Kibler

An emotionally raw and resonant story of love, loss, and the enduring power of friendship, following the lives of two young women connected by a home for “fallen girls,” and inspired by historical events.

In turn-of-the-20th century Texas, the Berachah Home for the Redemption and Protection...

Play It As It Lays

Author	Joan Didion
ISBN	0374529949

A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil - literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren...

The Last Brother

Author	Nathacha Appanah
ISBN	1555975755

In The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah, 1944 is coming to a close and nine-year-old Raj is unaware of the war devastating the rest of the world. He lives in Mauritius, a remote island in the Indian Ocean, where survival is a daily struggle for his family. When a brutal beating lands Raj in the hospital of...

Charming Billy

Author	Alice McDermott
ISBN	2264031115

The late Billy Lynch's family and friends gather at a small bar and grill in the Bronx to remember better times. His widow, Maeve, is there and everyone admires the way she is holding up, just as they always admired the way she cared for Billy after the alcohol had ruined him. But one cannot think of Billy...