Books like Straight Man
12 books with a reading profile close to Straight Man by Richard Russo. Balanced in tone; a moderate read.
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1
Utopia Avenue
entertainment, narrative
Set in London’s psychedelic folk-rock scene of the late 1960s, the novel follows the rapid ascent of a fictional band named Utopia Avenue.
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2
French Exit
entertainment, narrative
Frances Price is a New York widow whose husband died years earlier, leaving her a wealthy woman.
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3
Black Buck
entertainment, narrative
Darren Vender is a nineteen-year-old Black Brooklyn kid with a dead-end job at Starbucks, until a chance meeting with Rhett, the leader of a mostly white sales team at a start-up called Sumwun.
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4
Happy Hour
entertainment, narrative
Set in New York City during a sweltering summer, the story follows Isa Epley and her best friend Gala as they navigate the underground social hierarchies of the city without any stable income.
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5
City of Thieves
entertainment, narrative
During the devastating Siege of Leningrad in 1942, Lev Beniov is arrested for looting a dead German paratrooper.
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6
Bluebeard
entertainment, narrative
Rabo Karabekian is an old, once-famous abstract expressionist painter, living in a house in the Hamptons.
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7
Solar
by Ian McEwan
entertainment, narrative
Michael Beard, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist based in London, has spent decades coasting on a single early achievement while his personal life collapses through five failed marriages.
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8
The Bandit Queens
entertainment, narrative
In a rural Indian village, Gehna remains an outcast because her neighbors believe she murdered her husband, Ramesh, who actually vanished years ago.
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9
Batman: Year One
by Frank Miller
entertainment, narrative
The narrative follows Bruce Wayne’s return to Gotham City after twelve years of training abroad, documenting his amateurish early attempts at vigilantism and his eventual adoption of the bat persona.
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10
Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books
entertainment, narrative
In the small town of Troy, Georgia, Lula Dean spearheads a campaign to purge local library shelves of titles she deems inappropriate.
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11
Switch Bitch
by Roald Dahl
entertainment, narrative
Published in 1974, Switch Bitch is a collection of four long-form short stories centered on sexual deception and the pursuit of hedonism.
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12
The Signature of All Things
narrative, literary
Alma Whittaker, the daughter of a wealthy botanical importer, spends the nineteenth century studying the intricate world of mosses on her family’s Philadelphia estate.
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