Books like 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.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Idiot
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.
This Side of Paradise
A Princeton undergraduate moves through love affairs and literary ambitions in the disillusioned aftermath of the Great War.
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.
Enlightenment
In an Essex town in 1997, Thomas Hart, a closeted journalist, and Grace Macaulay, the teenage daughter of a strict chapel family, share a love of astronomy as the Hale-Bopp comet crosses the sky, and over the years their friendship is tested by love, faith and a local ghost story.
The Rules of Attraction
Three college students orbit each other in a haze of parties, sex, and emotional vacancy at a New England liberal arts school.
Pnin
A displaced Russian professor at an American college bumbles through faculty politics and small-town life with a dignity that makes the comedy ache.
Heart the Lover
Years later, a writer looks back at her final year of college, when she fell in with Sam and Yash, two brilliant best friends from her seventeenth-century literature class, and at the love triangle and the choices after graduation that changed all three lives.
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.
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.
Hangsaman
A troubled young woman leaves home for college and begins to unravel in ways that may or may not be real.
Banal Nightmare
After a decade in the city with a domineering partner, Moddie moves back to her hometown and falls in with old friends now nearing middle age, until an artist arrives for a residency at the local university.
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.