The Topeka School
By: Ben Lerner
3.50
Format: 282 pages, Hardcover
From the award-winning author of 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station, a tender and expansive famil…
Want to Read $ 19.99"The problem for him in high school was that debate made you a nerd and poetry made you a pussy – even if both could help you get to the vaguely imagines East Coast city from which your experiences in Topeka would be recounted with great irony. The key was to narrate participation in debate as a form of linguistic combat; the key was to be a bully, quick and vicious and ready to spread an interlocutor with insults at the at the smallest provocation. Poetry could be excused if it upped your game, became cipher and flow, if it was part of why Amber was fucking you and not Reynolds et al. If linguistic prowess could do damage and get you laid, then it could be integrated into the adolescent social realm without entirely departing from the household values of intellect and expression. It was not a reconciliation, but a workable tension. His disastrous tonsorial compromise. The migraines. Fortunately for Adam, this shifting of aggression to the domain of language was sanctioned by one of the practices the types had appropriated: after several hours of drinking, if no fight or noise complain had broken up the party, you were likely to encounter freestyling. In many ways, this was the most shameful of all the poses, the clearest manifestation of a crisis in white masculinity and its representational regimes, a small group of privileged crackers often arrhythmically recycling the genre’s dominant and to them totally inapplicable clichés. But it was socially essential for him: the rap battle transmuted his prowess as a public speaker and aspiring poet into something cool. His luck was dizzying: that there was a rapid, ritualized poetic insult exchange bridging the gap between his Saturday afternoons in abandoned high schools and his Saturday nights in unsupervised houses, allowing him to transition from one contest to the other."-Ben Lerner, The Topeka School
If you liked the fiction plot in The Topeka School by Ben Lerner , here is a list of 24 books like this:
1. The Idiot
By: Elif Batuman
3.66
Format: 423 pages, Hardcover
A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself… read more
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- literary fiction
- literature
- fiction
- historical fiction
- contemporary
- novels
- audiobook
"For a while now, I have been conscious of a tension in my relationship with you,"-Elif Batuman, The Idiot
"Lighting a match felt exciting and a little bit dangerous, and when the flame came into contact with the paper, it made a sound like the needle coming down on a record player—like the music was about…"-Elif Batuman, The Idiot
"For the first time in my life, I couldn't think of anything I particularly wanted to study or to do. I still had the old idea of being a writer, but that was being, not doing. It didn't say what you …"-Elif Batuman, The Idiot
"Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe the point of writing wasn't just to record something past but also to prolong the present, like in One Thousand and One Nights, to stretch out the time until the…"-Elif Batuman, The Idiot
2. The Flamethrowers
By: Rachel Kushner
3.94
Format: None pages, Hardcover
The year is 1975 and Reno--so-called because of the place of her birth--has come to New York intent… read more
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- literary fiction
- novels
- fiction
- historical fiction
3. Inland
By: Gerald Murnane
4.08
Format: 31 pages,
Is it possible to fall in love with a correspondent based entirely on a fascination with his or her… read more
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- literature
- literary fiction
- fiction
- novels
4. Outline
By: Rachel Cusk
4.20
Format: 488 pages, Hardcover
A woman writer goes to Athens in the height of summer to teach a writing course. Though her own cir… read more
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5. Erasure
By: Percival Everett
3.62
Format: 280 pages, Paperback
"Thelonious (Monk) Ellison has never allowed race to define his identity. But as both a writer and … read more
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6. The Last Samurai
By: Helen DeWitt
3.77
Format: None pages, Paperback
Helen DeWitt's extraordinary debut, The Last Samurai, centers on the relationship between Sibylla, … read more
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7. Hotels of North America
By: Rick Moody
4.24
Format: 185 pages, Hardcover
From the acclaimed Rick Moody, a darkly comic portrait of a man who comes to life in the most unexp… read more
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8. Trust
By: Hernan Diaz
3.83
Format: 402 pages, Hardcover
10 hours, 21 minutes From an award-winning chronicler of our nation's history and its legends co… read more
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- literary fiction
- fiction
- historical fiction
- novels
- audiobook
"Where there's a ventriloquist, there's a dummy."-Hernan Diaz, Trust
"Chaos is a vortex that spins faster with each thing it swallows."-Hernan Diaz, Trust
"Silence between 2 is always shared. But 1 of the 2 owns it and shares it with the other."-Hernan Diaz, Trust
"Sleeplessness kept claiming her nights, and she used books as shields against the onslaught of her abstract terrors."-Hernan Diaz, Trust
9. Prophet Song
By: Paul Lynch
4.10
Format: 259 pages, Kindle Edition
A fearless portrait of a society on the brink as a mother faces a terrible choice, from an internat… read more
Want to Read $ 9.10Similar categories in Paul Lynch's Prophet Song book and Ben Lerner's The Topeka School
- literary fiction
- literature
- fiction
- contemporary
- audiobook
"people are entitled to some small moment of peace."-Paul Lynch, Prophet Song
"the child absorbing the mother’s trauma and storing it in his body for later use,"-Paul Lynch, Prophet Song
"... time is at once addition and subtraction, time adds one day to the next and always takes away from what's left..."-Paul Lynch, Prophet Song
"...knowing how it is so that all boys grow up and pull away from home to unmake the world in the guise of making it, nature decrees it so."-Paul Lynch, Prophet Song
10. Kairos
By: Jenny Erpenbeck
3.46
Format: 379 pages, Hardcover
Die neunzehnjährige Katharina und Hans, ein verheirateter Mann Mitte fünfzig, begegnen sich Ende de… read more
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- literary fiction
- literature
- fiction
- historical fiction
- contemporary
- novels
"She would like a shallow life, swift and shallow, till some day she can start again. Get through her time fast until then. And when will that be? Then."-Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos
11. All Fours
By: Miranda July
3.81
Format: 336 pages, Hardcover
The New York Times–bestselling author of The First Bad Man returns with an irreverently sexy, tende… read more
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- literary fiction
- fiction
- contemporary
- novels
- audiobook
"But maybe the road split between: a life spent longing vs. a life that was continually surprising"-Miranda July, All Fours
"Maybe we shouldn't do that," Jordi said. "Flatten ourselves like that. Erratic doesn't have to mean crazy or irresponsible. Shouldn't we be normalizing change?"-Miranda July, All Fours
"I guess any calling, no mater what it is, is a kind of unresolved ache," I said, giving in to knowing more than him. "It's a problem that you can't fix, but there is some relief in knowing you will c…"-Miranda July, All Fours
"For me lying created just the right amount of problems and what you saw was just one of my four or five faces- each real, each with different needs. The only dangerous lie was one that asked me to co…"-Miranda July, All Fours
12. Trust Exercise
By: Susan Choi
3.14
Format: 257 pages, Paperback
In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high sch… read more
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- literary fiction
- literature
- fiction
- historical fiction
- contemporary
- novels
- audiobook
"Neither can drive."-Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
"Possibly first love, despite all the fuss, is only mating with ideas attached."-Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
"Heartbreak doesn't flow through the heart but along that frail shallow canal of the sternum."-Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
"[..] said Sarah's broken and cynical mother, who for all her superior experience of life knew nothing about how to live."-Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
13. The Guest
By: Emma Cline
3.29
Format: 304 pages, Hardcover
A young woman pretends to be someone she isn't in this stunning novel by the New York Times bestsel… read more
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- literary fiction
- fiction
- contemporary
- novels
- audiobook
"Younger men had to make everything mean something, had to turn every choice and preference into a referendum on their personality."-Emma Cline, The Guest
"He assumed her attention when he spoke. He had his insecurities, his anxieties. But underlying it all was the certainty that the world would be generous in its orientation toward him."-Emma Cline, The Guest
"All the women in the show hated each other, hated each other so much, just so they could avoid hating their husbands. Only their little dogs, blinking from their laps, seemed real: they were the wome…"-Emma Cline, The Guest
14. North Woods
By: Daniel Mason
4.15
Format: 372 pages, Hardcover
A sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those … read more
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- literary fiction
- fiction
- historical fiction
- novels
- audiobook
15. Wandering Stars
By: Tommy Orange
3.89
Format: 315 pages, Hardcover
The eagerly awaited follow-up to Pulitzer Prize-finalist Tommy Orange’s breakout best seller There … read more
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- literary fiction
- fiction
- historical fiction
- contemporary
- audiobook
"And in the year 1924 Indian citizenship will have been granted, even though they will mean to dissolve tribes by giving citizenship, dissolve being another word for disappearance, a kind of chemical …"-Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars
16. Birnam Wood
By: Eleanor Catton
3.82
Format: 432 pages, Hardcover
Birnam Wood is on the move . . . Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening gro… read more
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- literary fiction
- fiction
- contemporary
- novels
- audiobook
"...wondering, not for the first time, when exactly she had become so technologically dependent that her first instinct in every unpredicted circumstance was to outsource her imagination to her phone."-Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood
"Not at all,’ he said. ‘I was just going to remark that being a cliche can be very useful. You ought to consider it some time.’ ’Oh yeah?’ ’Yeah,’ he said. ‘It means people underestimate you. They thi…"-Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood
"As his rhetoric and reading life matured, he grew intensely scornful of what passed at his high school for 'education' - the mania for testing; the intolerance of real dissent; and the conformist cel…"-Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood
"... his future, had either been sold or laid to waste by his parents' generation, trapping him in a perpetual adolescence that was further heightened by the infantilising unreality of the Internet as…"-Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood
17. The Bee Sting
By: Paul Murray
3.96
Format: 656 pages, Hardcover
From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and … read more
Want to Read $ 12.99Similar categories in Paul Murray's The Bee Sting book and Ben Lerner's The Topeka School
- literary fiction
- literature
- fiction
- contemporary
- novels
- audiobook
"It is for love. You are doing this for love."-Paul Murray, The Bee Sting
"We all have problems. But often instead of accepting the truth about ourselves, we cover it up. We try to make ourselves the way we think we’re expected to be."-Paul Murray, The Bee Sting
"Maybe every era has an atrocity woven into its fabric. Maybe every society is complicit in terrible things and only afterwards gets around to pretending they didn’t know. When the kids ask, tell them…"-Paul Murray, The Bee Sting
"Maybe that’s how it will go – instead of one definitive cataclysm, a series of ‘anomalies’, each time lasting longer, with the stretches of what you call normal life becoming further and further apar…"-Paul Murray, The Bee Sting
18. Martyr!
By: Kaveh Akbar
4.24
Format: 352 pages, Hardcover
Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves… read more
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- literary fiction
- fiction
- contemporary
- novels
- audiobook
19. The Fraud
By: Zadie Smith
3.30
Format: 464 pages, Hardcover
The extraordinary first historical novel from bestselling author of White Teeth Zadie Smith It i… read more
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- literary fiction
- unfinished
- fiction
- historical fiction
- novels
- audiobook
"Eliza had long understood her cousin to be beyond the reach of editorial intervention."-Zadie Smith, The Fraud
"What possesses people? Unhappiness, always. Happiness is otherwise occupied. It has an object on which to focus. It has daisies, it has snowdrifts. Unhappiness opens up the void, which then requires …"-Zadie Smith, The Fraud
"I know this country well. Well enough to understand that justice takes time, and that the freedoms of a minority are rarely self-evident to the majority. What is perfectly selfevident to God is – unf…"-Zadie Smith, The Fraud
"God preserve me from novel-writing, thought Mrs Touchet. God preserve me from that tragic indulgence, that useless vanity, that blindness! In a cold dormitory, two hundred miles away, three heartbrok…"-Zadie Smith, The Fraud
20. Biography of X
By: Catherine Lacey
3.85
Format: 416 pages, Hardcover
From one of our fiercest stylists, a roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a not… read more
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- literary fiction
- fiction
- contemporary
- novels
- audiobook
"One of the armed guards smiled and said, “God bless,"-Catherine Lacey, Biography of X
"Who can say who I are, how many I are, which I is the most I of my I’s?"-Catherine Lacey, Biography of X
"She could not hurt me. I had no more space, at the time, to hold any new hurts."-Catherine Lacey, Biography of X
"She kept losing track of the people she loved, and losing track of herself along with them."-Catherine Lacey, Biography of X
21. Stay True
By: Hua Hsu
4.03
Format: 208 pages, Hardcover
From the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for se… read more
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- audiobook
"My parents are great, I said. Unbelievably non-stereotypical."-Hua Hsu, Stay True
"The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories."-Hua Hsu, Stay True
"You were describing people we had not yet met, maybe people we ourselves would become."-Hua Hsu, Stay True
"It was a sign of personal growth, I thought to myself, that I could be friends with someone who liked Pearl Jam this much."-Hua Hsu, Stay True
22. Blackouts
By: Justin Torres
3.77
Format: 306 pages, Hardcover
From the bestselling author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories--personal and collect… read more
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- literary fiction
- fiction
- historical fiction
- contemporary
- novels
- audiobook
23. My First Book
By: Honor Levy
3.27
Format: 224 pages, Hardcover
From groundbreaking debut author Honor Levy, stories to delight and ensnare Walking the wire betwe… read more
Want to Read $ 14.99Similar categories in Honor Levy's My First Book book and Ben Lerner's The Topeka School
- literary fiction
- american
- literature
- fiction
- contemporary
"I HAV3 CHOS3N T3H WAY OF FA3THFUL3SS"-Honor Levy, My First Book
"Nerf is a verb now. I'm gonna nerf all you faggots, give me that grenade."-Honor Levy, My First Book
"1 like = 1 prayer. 1 like = 1 prayer. 1 like = 1 prayer. 1 like = 1 prayer. 1 like = 1 prayer."-Honor Levy, My First Book
"Zoe laughs like Tinkerbell, the air whistling between the gaps in her teeth. She’s definitely not a dog."-Honor Levy, My First Book
24. The Netanyahus
By: Joshua Cohen
3.80
Format: 240 pages, Paperback
Corbin College, not-quite-upstate New York, winter 1959-1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian - but … read more
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- literary fiction
- american
- literature
- fiction
- historical fiction
- novels
- audiobook
25. Těla
By: Klára Vlasáková
3.92
Format: 192 pages, Hardcover
Matky a dcery. Jejich těla, jejich pouto, jejich rozepře, jejich strachy. Ovdovělá šedesátnice Mari… read more
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- fiction
- contemporary
26. The Topeka School
By: Ben Lerner
3.50
Format: 282 pages, Hardcover
From the award-winning author of 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station, a tender and expansive famil… read more
Want to Read $ 19.99Similar categories in Ben Lerner's The Topeka School book and Ben Lerner's The Topeka School
- literary fiction
- american
- unfinished
- the united states of america
- literature
- fiction
- contemporary
- historical fiction
- novels
- audiobook
"The problem for him in high school was that debate made you a nerd and poetry made you a pussy – even if both could help you get to the vaguely imagines East Coast city from which your experiences in…"-Ben Lerner, The Topeka School
27. Telephone
By: Percival Everett
3.98
Format: 216 pages, Paperback
Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in a very narrow ar… read more
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- literary fiction
- american
- literature
- fiction
- contemporary
- novels
- audiobook
28. Affinities: On Art and Fascination
By: Brian Dillon
3.89
Format: 320 pages, Paperback
A meditation on the power and pleasures of the image, from paintings to photographs to migraine aur… read more
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29. Early Sobrieties
By: Michael Deagler
3.85
Format: 272 pages, Hardcover
Don’t worry about what Dennis Monk did when he was drinking. He’s sober now, ready to rejoin the wo… read more
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- contemporary
- literary fiction
- fiction
- audiobook
30. Godwin
By: Joseph O'Neill
3.60
Format: 288 pages, Hardcover
The odyssey of two brothers crossing the world in search of an African soccer prodigy who might cha… read more
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- literary fiction
- literature
- fiction
- contemporary
- audiobook
31. Ekstase
By: Jakub Šponer
3.88
Format: 128 pages, Paperback
Jediná jistota je Ona. Ta, se kterou vede neustálý dialog. Ta, k níž se sbíhají všechny jeho myšlen… read more
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