Books like Ravelstein
Chick, an ageing writer, sets down the memoir he promised his friend Abe Ravelstein, a brilliant, extravagant Chicago professor whose book about the decline of the American mind has made him rich.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Ravelstein
Dangling Man
In Chicago in the winter of 1942, Joseph, who has quit his job to wait for his army call-up, keeps a journal of the months in which nothing happens.
Herzog
Moses Herzog, a middle-aged Jewish academic whose second wife has left him for his best friend, writes frantic, unsent letters to everyone, friends, enemies, philosophers and God, as his life collapses around him.
The Netanyahus
In 1959, an American Jewish professor at a remote college is assigned to host the visiting Israeli historian Benzion Netanyahu and his three unruly sons, one of them a future Prime Minister.
Rabbit, Run
Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, a former high-school basketball star now selling kitchen gadgets in a Pennsylvania town, walks out on his pregnant wife and young son one evening and keeps driving.
Galatea 2.2
A novelist trains a neural network to pass the Turing test using his own literary works, and the AI's emergence mirrors his own midlife dissolution.
Knulp
Three episodes in the life of Knulp, a charming vagabond who drifts from town to town in the German countryside, welcome everywhere and settled nowhere.
The Immoralist
Michel, a young scholar who married without love, nearly dies of tuberculosis on his honeymoon in North Africa, and recovers with a fierce new hunger for life and for the boys around him.
Wellness
Jack and Elizabeth met as young artists in 1990s Chicago, and twenty years later, married with a young son and buying a condo in the suburbs, they find their marriage and the theories they live by quietly cracking.
The Celebrants
Five friends from college once promised to hold a funeral for one another while they were still alive to hear the eulogies, and nearly thirty years on, Jordan calls them to a house in Big Sur to use his.
Cancer Ward
In 1955, in the cancer ward of a hospital in Soviet Central Asia, Oleg Kostoglotov, a former prisoner exiled for life, argues with his doctors and fellow patients about how to live and die.
The Spare Room
Helen gives her spare room in Melbourne to her old friend Nicola, who has come down from Sydney for three weeks of quack cancer treatment, and has to nurse her through it.
Goodbye Tsugumi
Maria spends one last summer in the seaside town where she grew up, at the family inn that is about to close, with her beautiful, sickly cousin Tsugumi, whose tongue is as cruel as her health is fragile.