Books like Speedboat
A young New York journalist narrates the 1970s in loose, dry, jumpy paragraphs about parties, assignments, and the peculiar etiquette of being alive in the city then.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Speedboat
Dept. of Speculation
A wife and mother in New York tracks her disintegrating marriage in spare, telegraphic fragments that add up to a devastating portrait of modern domestic life.
NW
Four Londoners' lives intersect in the northwest neighbourhood of Kilburn, spanning three decades of British class, race, and the stories we tell about our futures.
No One Is Talking About This
A poet's life is split between a pre-internet childhood and the social media hellscape of the present, told in fragments that capture the vertigo of the timeline.
Weather
A Brooklyn university librarian takes a side job answering mail for a doom-laden climate podcast while trying to keep her family steady in a country sliding towards dread.
Blackouts
A young queer man keeps vigil at the deathbed of an older one, and together they rewrite the redacted margins of a 1940s study of sexual deviance.
The Box Man
A nameless man cuts a window in a cardboard box, puts it over his head and begins to live inside it, writing the notebook the reader holds.
Asymmetry
Two stories that seem unconnected, a young editor's affair with a much older, famous writer and an Iraqi-American economist held at Heathrow airport, turn out to speak to each other.
The Flamethrowers
A young motorcycle racer and artist moves to New York in 1975, falls for the heir to an Italian tyre empire, and follows him to Italy as the radical movements of 1977 erupt.
Pale Fire
A deranged scholar's commentary on a 999-line poem by a dead colleague becomes a hallucinatory novel about exile, madness, and the impossibility of knowing another person.
Ilustrado
A young Filipino writer in New York investigates the death of his mentor, a famous exiled novelist pulled from the Hudson, and his own story tangles with fragments of the dead man's work.
Miss Lonelyhearts
A male newspaper columnist who answers desperate letters as Miss Lonelyhearts in Depression-era New York takes his readers' suffering to heart, while his cynical editor mocks his growing religious crisis.
Let the Great World Spin
On the day Philippe Petit walks a wire between the Twin Towers, a dozen New Yorkers' lives intersect in a novel about connection in the vertical city.