Books like The Human Stain
A classics professor in late-1990s New England takes a young mistress and watches his carefully constructed life collapse under the weight of a secret he's kept for fifty years.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Human Stain
On Beauty
Two academic families, the liberal mixed-race Belseys and the conservative Trinidadian-British Kippses, collide in a New England college town in Zadie Smith's update of Howards End.
Sabbath's Theater
A sixty-four-year-old puppeteer of unspeakable depravity refuses to apologise for a life devoted to art, sex, and the refusal of every social norm.
Invisible Man
A nameless Black narrator, living underground in a hole lit by stolen electricity, tells how he went from a Southern college to Harlem and a political brotherhood, and came to see himself as invisible.
The Marriage Plot
At Brown in the early 1980s, Madeleine, an English major, is caught between Leonard, a brilliant, troubled biologist, and Mitchell, a religious-studies student who believes she is meant for 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.
Real Life
Wallace, a queer Black biochemistry graduate student from Alabama at a mostly white Midwestern university, spends a late-summer weekend in which his friendships, his work and his past are all tested.
Wonder Boys
Over one chaotic weekend, a stalled middle-aged novelist and writing teacher tries to manage a troubled student, a dead dog, a pregnant mistress, and the 2,600-page novel he cannot finish.
Minor Feelings
Hong writes about Asian-American shame, Richard Pryor, friendship, and why the minor feelings of a model-minority life refuse to stay put.
Passing
Irene Redfield, a doctor's wife in Harlem, runs into her childhood friend Clare Kendry in a Chicago hotel and learns that Clare has been passing as white, married to a white man who knows nothing of her past.
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.
The Idiot
A Harvard freshman falls for a maths major she emails constantly, and her overanalysis of every interaction becomes a comedy of intellectual self-consciousness.
Stoner
A Missouri farm boy becomes a literature professor at the University of Missouri and lives a quiet, thwarted life that only gains shape in its retelling.