Books like 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.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Wonder Boys
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.
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.
The World According to Garp
T. S. Garp, the son of a famous feminist nurse who conceived him on her own terms, grows up at a New England boarding school, becomes a novelist and spends his life trying to protect his family from a violent world.
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.
Quicksand
Liam, a failed writer turned police officer, tries to write a novel about his best friend Aldo, a man so unlucky that his life has become a catalogue of catastrophe.
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.
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.
Deacon King Kong
An elderly church deacon in a 1969 Brooklyn housing project shoots a drug dealer in broad daylight, and the whole neighbourhood gets tangled in the fallout.
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.
Humboldt's Gift
Charlie Citrine, a successful writer in 1970s Chicago, is losing his money to an ex-wife, a small-time gangster and a demanding girlfriend while he mourns Von Humboldt Fleisher, the brilliant, self-destructive poet who was his mentor.
The Wedding People
Phoebe Stone arrives at a grand old inn in Newport, Rhode Island, alone and in despair, and finds every other room booked for a lavish wedding, whose exacting bride is not pleased to have her there.
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.