Books like A Frolic of His Own
Oscar Crease, a middle-aged college teacher and would-be playwright, is suing a Hollywood studio for stealing his play about his grandfather in the Civil War, and soon he is suing almost everyone.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of A Frolic of His Own
J R
An eleven-year-old boy on Long Island, starting from a school trip to the stock exchange and working from a pay phone, builds a vast paper empire, told almost entirely in unattributed dialogue.
The Recognitions
Wyatt Gwyon, a New England minister's son who was meant for the church, becomes a painter of flawless forgeries of the Flemish masters, and around him a crowd of New York and European bohemians, critics and frauds argue about what is authentic.
Breakfast of Champions
Kilgore Trout meets his creator in a Holiday Inn bar, and the meeting becomes a reckoning with free will, American madness, and the author's own despair.
White Noise
A professor of Hitler Studies at a Midwestern college faces an 'airborne toxic event' and discovers that the white noise of American consumer culture can't drown out the fear of death.
Nazi Literature in the Americas
A fake reference work of thirty invented right-wing Americas writers, their books and journals and enemies, by the author who turned bibliography into menace.
The Time Regulation Institute
Hayri İrdal, a man of no particular ability, tells how he came to help run an institute devoted to setting all the clocks of Istanbul to the same time.
The Corrections
A Midwestern family buckles under the weight of a domineering father, a depressed mother, and three adult children whose failures mirror America's at the millennium.
Mumbo Jumbo
In 1920s America a craze called Jes Grew sets people dancing, and PaPa LaBas, a Harlem houngan, races to find its lost sacred text before the Wallflower Order, an ancient society defending Western civilisation, can destroy it.
Bleak House
A vast web of people, from a crossing sweeper to a baronet's wife, is connected by Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a lawsuit that has consumed generations, exposing the rot at the heart of Victorian institutions.
John Henry Days
A freelance junket writer covers a 1996 West Virginia festival for a John Henry postage stamp, while the novel roams across a century of people who sang, studied and sold the legend.
Erasure
Thelonious Ellison, a Black experimental novelist told his work is not Black enough, writes a grotesque parody of a ghetto novel under a pseudonym, and it becomes a bestseller.
Green Grass, Running Water
Four very old Indians walk out of a mental hospital to fix the world, while the people of a small Alberta town head for the Sun Dance, and Coyote causes trouble.