Books like The Sellout

01

The Sympathizer

Viet Thanh Nguyen · Literary fiction

The Sympathizer is narrated by a nameless communist spy who is also the aide-de-camp to a South Vietnamese general.

A kindred literary fiction read.

02

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

Katherine Boo · History

Behind the Beautiful Forevers is Katherine Boo's account of three years spent in Annawadi, a Mumbai slum built on reclaimed land next to the international airport.

A kindred literary fiction read.

03

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates · Memoir

Between the World and Me is a letter from Ta-Nehisi Coates to his teenage son, Samori, about what it means to live in a Black body in the United States.

A kindred literary fiction read.

04

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

Ibram X. Kendi · History

Stamped from the Beginning is Ibram X.

A kindred literary fiction read.

05

Cutting for Stone

Abraham Verghese · Literary fiction

Cutting for Stone is Abraham Verghese's debut novel, a multigenerational saga set largely in Addis Ababa from the 1950s through the 1990s.

Both dig into father and son.

06

My Struggle: Book 1

Karl Ove Knausgaard · Literary fiction

My Struggle: Book 1 opens with a long meditation on death — the image of a dead face on television, the cultural rituals that hide corpses from view — before settling into what the book is actually about: Knausgaard's childhood in Norway in the 1970s and early 80s, and his adult journey to clean out the house where his alcoholic father died.

Both dig into father and son.

07

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin · Memoir

Benjamin Franklin's autobiography is one of the earliest and most influential self-improvement texts in American literature, written in four separate parts across the last decades of his life.

Both dig into american identity.

08

The Boys of Summer

Roger Kahn · Memoir

The Boys of Summer is Roger Kahn's account of covering the Brooklyn Dodgers for the New York Herald Tribune in the early 1950s, followed by his return visits in the late 1960s to find out what had happened to the players since.

Both dig into american identity.

09

A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway · Literary fiction

A Farewell to Arms is set during the First World War in northern Italy and follows Frederic Henry, an American serving as a lieutenant in the Italian ambulance corps, who falls in love with Catherine Barkley, a British nurse.

A kindred literary fiction read.

10

A Fine Balance

Rohinton Mistry · Literary fiction

A Fine Balance is set in an unnamed Indian city during Indira Gandhi's Emergency of 1975–1977, a period of suspended democracy, forced sterilization, and slum clearances that is barely taught in the West and barely taught in India.

A kindred literary fiction read.

11

A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara · Literary fiction

A Little Life follows four men from college into middle age and beyond — Willem, an actor; JB, a painter; Malcolm, an architect; and Jude, a lawyer with a past that is revealed in increasingly devastating detail as the novel progresses.

A kindred literary fiction read.

12

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce · Literary fiction

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man traces the intellectual and spiritual development of Stephen Dedalus from early childhood to the edge of adulthood, when he leaves Ireland to pursue life as an artist.

A kindred literary fiction read.