Books like Steppenwolf
A middle-aged intellectual in Weimar Germany is torn between bourgeois respectability and the wildness inside him, guided by a mysterious figure through the theatres of his psyche.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Steppenwolf
Nausea
A philosopher in 1930s France discovers that the sheer existence of objects fills him with revulsion, and his diary charts the horror of a world without meaning.
Demian
A young man in pre-war Germany is guided by a mysterious inner voice through a Jungian journey of self-realisation, rebelling against his father and his era.
The Book of Disquiet
A Lisbon bookkeeper's fragmentary diary of dreams, observations, and existential unease.
The Castle
A land surveyor arrives at a village to work at the castle above it, but the castle's bureaucracy ensures he can never reach the people who summoned him.
The Passion According to G.H.
G.H., a well-off sculptor in Rio de Janeiro, goes to tidy the room her maid has just left, finds a cockroach in the wardrobe, and in the hours that follow loses hold of everything she thought she was.
Hopscotch
An Argentine intellectual drifts through bohemian 1950s Paris with his lover La Maga and then returns to Buenos Aires, in a novel that can be read straight through or by hopping among its chapters.
Rosshalde
On the estate of Rosshalde, the celebrated painter Johann Veraguth lives estranged from his wife, his one joy their small son Pierre, as a friend urges him to leave for India.
The Pigeon
Jonathan Noel, a Parisian bank guard who has lived by strict routine for decades, finds a pigeon in the corridor outside his room, and his ordered existence begins to collapse.
Malina
A woman living in Vienna with a silent man named Malina and loving a violent one named Ivan writes her own disappearance in a book that is part novel, part score.
The Double
A man discovers his exact double in a rented film, and the encounter destabilises his identity, his marriage, and his grip on what's real.
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.
Notes from Underground
A bitter clerk in St. Petersburg writes a confession that swings between self-loathing and grandiosity, inventing the template for every unreliable narrator who followed.