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The Sportswriter

10 best books like The Sportswriter (Richard Ford): The Confessions of Nat Turner, The Man Who Loved Children, The Moviegoer, A House for Mr Biswas, The Berlin Stories: The Last of Mr Norris/Goodbye to Berlin, Big Bad Love, Under the Volcano, The Adventures of Augie March, The Recognitions, The Day of the Locust

The Confessions of Nat Turner
AuthorWilliam Styron
ISBN0679736638
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE

In 1831 Nat Turner awaits death in a Virginia jail cell. He is a slave, a preacher, and the leader of the only effective slave revolt in the history of 'that peculiar institution'. William Styron's ambitious and stunningly accomplished novel is Turner's confession,...
The Man Who Loved Children
AuthorChristina Stead
ISBN0312280440
Gentle warning note added here because it seems fans of this book can find the below review a little disheartening. So if you're a fan, you might want to skip this review. But, everybody knows that one reader's dogpile is another reader's marzipan souffle with attendant hummingbirds. I myself cannot...
The Moviegoer
AuthorWalker Percy
ISBN0375701966
The dazzling novel that established Walker Percy as one of the major voices in Southern literature is now available for the first time in Vintage paperback. The Moviegoer is Binx Bolling, a young New Orleans stockbroker who surveys the world with the detached gaze of a Bourbon Street dandy even as he...
A House for Mr Biswas
AuthorV.S. Naipaul
ISBN0330487191
This one might make you pull your hair out. So if you're already bald you may need to read it wearing a wig. Also, you need a magnifying glass to find the plot. I had to take samples & send them off to a lab. Apparently there are detectable traces of story in here. But not so's you'd notice.

No.

The...
The Berlin Stories: The Last of Mr Norris/Goodbye to Berlin
AuthorChristopher Isherwood
ISBN0811200701
A classic of 20th-century fiction, The Berlin Stories inspired the Broadway musical and Oscar-winning film Cabaret. First published in the 1930s, The Berlin Stories contains two astonishing related novels, The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin, which are recognized today as classics of...
Big Bad Love
AuthorLarry Brown
ISBN0679734910
The whole world seemed to be trying to be decent, and I seemed an indecent thing in it.*


This one was recommended to me by my pal John, who described it as "... a two evening read filled with social misfits." Though I spend most of my evenings surrounded by social misfits, I decided to give a read...
Under the Volcano
AuthorMalcolm Lowry
ISBN0060955228
Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul, has come to Quauhnahuac, Mexico. His debilitating malaise is drinking, an activity that has overshadowed his life. On the most fateful day of the consul's life—the Day of the Dead—his wife, Yvonne, arrives in Quauhnahuac, inspired by a vision of life...
The Adventures of Augie March
AuthorSaul Bellow
ISBN0143039571
Augie comes on stage with one of literature’s most famous opening lines. “I am an American, Chicago born, and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted.” It’s the “Call me Ishmael” of mid-20th-century American...
The Recognitions
AuthorWilliam Gaddis
ISBN0140187081
The book Jonathan Franzen dubbed the "ur-text of postwar fiction" and the "first great cultural critique, which, even if Heller and Pynchon hadn't read it while composing Catch-22 and V., managed to anticipate the spirit of both”—The Recognitions is a masterwork about art and forgery, and the...
The Day of the Locust
AuthorNathanael West
ISBN0451523482
The Day of the Locust is a novel about Hollywood and its corrupting touch, about the American dream turned into a sun-drenched California nightmare. Nathanael West's Hollywood is not the glamorous "home of the stars" but a seedy world of little people, some hopeful, some despairing, all twisted by...
At Swim-Two-Birds
AuthorFlann O'Brien
A wildly comic send-up of Irish literature and culture, At Swim-Two-Birds is the story of a young, lazy, and frequently drunk Irish college student who lives with his curmudgeonly uncle in Dublin. When not in bed (where he seems to spend most of his time) or reading he is composing a mischief-filled novel...
Appointment in Samarra
AuthorJohn O'Hara
ISBN0375719202
O’Hara did for fictional Gibbsville, Pennsylvania what Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi: surveyed its social life and drew its psychic outlines, but he did it in utterly worldly terms, without Faulkner’s taste for mythic inference or the basso profundo of his prose. Julian...
Dog Soldiers
AuthorRobert Stone
ISBN0395860253
In Saigon during the waning days of the Vietnam War, a small-time journalist named John Converse thinks he'll find action - and profit - by getting involved in a big-time drug deal. But back in the States, things go horribly wrong for him. Dog Soldiers perfectly captures the underground mood of America...
Call It Sleep
AuthorHenry Roth
ISBN0374522928
When Henry Roth published Call It Sleep, his first novel, in 1934, it was greeted with critical acclaim. But in that dark Depression year, books were hard to sell, and the novel quickly dropped out of sight, as did its twenty-eight-year-old author. Only with its paperback publication in 1964 did the...
Under the Net
AuthorIris Murdoch
ISBN0140014454
Jake Donaghue, garrulous artist, meets Hugo Belfounder, silent philosopher.

Jake, hack writer and sponger, now penniless flat-hunter, seeks out an old girlfriend, Anna Quentin, and her glamorous actress sister, Sadie. He resumes acquaintance with formidable Hugo, whose ‘philosophy’...
The Death of the Heart
AuthorElizabeth Bowen
ISBN0385720173
The Death of the Heart is perhaps Elizabeth Bowen's best-known book. As she deftly and delicately exposes the cruelty that lurks behind the polished surfaces of conventional society, Bowen reveals herself as a masterful novelist who combines a sense of humor with a devastating gift for divining human...
A Fan's Notes
AuthorFrederick Exley
ISBN0679720766


Fredrick Exley (1929-1992) – Photo of the writer as a vulnerable, sensitive young man. In many ways, much too vulnerable and sensitive for mid-20th century American society, a society where a man’s prime virtue is being tough.

A Fan's Notes is the odyssey of one man’s unending...
Loving
AuthorHenry Green
ISBN0099285096
One of his most admired works, Loving describes life above and below stairs in an Irish country house during the Second World War. In the absence of their employers the Tennants, the servants enact their own battles and conflict amid rumours about the war in Europe, invading one another's provinces...
A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement
AuthorAnthony Powell
ISBN0226677141
Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill...
The Sot-Weed Factor
AuthorJohn Barth
ISBN1903809509
Considered by critics to be Barth's most distinguished masterpiece, The Sot-Weed Factor has acquired the status of a modern classic. Set in the late 1600s, it recounts the wildly chaotic odyssey of hapless, ungainly Ebenezer Cooke, sent to the New World to look after his father's tobacco business...
The Assistant
AuthorBernard Malamud
ISBN0374504849
Bernard Malamud’s second novel, originally published in 1957, is the story of Morris Bober, a grocer in postwar Brooklyn, who “wants better” for himself and his family. First two robbers appear and hold him up; then things take a turn for the better when broken-nosed Frank Alpine becomes his...
Falconer
AuthorJohn Cheever
ISBN0679737863
Falconer Correctional Facility certainly sounds dreary and no place I’d want to spend any time, but it doesn’t seem nearly as bad as many fictional prisons. In fact, it seems pretty dull. There weren’t any beatings from brutal guards. There’s no racial tension evident. No one gets shivved...
Going Native
AuthorStephen Wright
Going Native is Stephen Wright’s darkly comic take on the road novel, in which one man’s headlong escape from the American Dream becomes everybody’s worst nightmare. Wylie Jones is set: lovely wife, beautiful kids, barbecues in the backyard of his tastefully decorated suburban Chicago house...
The Professional
AuthorW.C. Heinz
ISBN0306810581
Originally published in 1958, The Professional is the story of boxer Eddie Brown's quest for the middleweight championship of the world. But it is so much more. W. C. Heinz not only serves up a realistic depiction of the circus-like atmosphere around boxing with its assorted hangers-on, crooked promoters,...
Ninety-two in the Shade
AuthorThomas McGuane
ISBN0679752897
Tiring of the company of junkies and burn-outs, Thomas Skelton goes home to Key West to take up a more wholesome life. But things fester in America's utter South. And Skelton's plans to become a skiff guide in the shining blue subtropical waters place him on a collision course with Nichol Dance, who has...
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