Books like

Books like Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

12 books with a reading profile close to Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino. Deep and inward-looking; a moderate read.

1

Wellness

by Nathan Hill

Also deep and inward-looking · analytical, narrative

Jack and Elizabeth meet as art students in 1990s Chicago, bonding over an underground lifestyle and the belief that they are escaping their stifling Midwestern upbringings.
2

ONE DAY, EVERYONE WILL HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AGAINST THIS

by Omar El Akkad

Also deep · analytical, narrative

Omar El Akkad’s collection of essays examines the cognitive dissonance inherent in Western humanitarian responses to global atrocities.
3

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

by David Foster Wallace

Also deep · analytical, narrative

This collection of seven essays blends technical reporting with personal anxiety to examine how American mass culture consumes its participants.
4

Swing Time

by Zadie Smith

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, literary

Two brown girls in a London council estate meet at a dance class in the 1980s.
5

BRAWLER

by Lauren Groff

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, literary

This short story collection tracks people navigating the friction between their internal desires and the physical environments of modern Florida and historical Europe.
6

Hell of a Book

by Jason Mott

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, literary

A Black writer, whose name we never learn, is on a book tour for his novel, and the story follows him as he travels and tries to carry on while his mind seems to drift.
7

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

by Joan Didion

Also deep · analytical, narrative

Joan Didion captures the disintegration of American institutional life during the late 1960s with a focus on California.
8

The Sentence

by Louise Erdrich

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, literary

Tookie, an Ojibwe woman who survived an unusual incarceration, works at a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis.
9

Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall

by Kazuo Ishiguro

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, literary

Ishiguro's collection of five linked stories is set around musicians, with nightfall as a recurring backdrop.
10

The Gathering

by Anne Enright

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, literary

Veronica Hegarty is a middle-aged Dublin mother of two who attends the wake of her brother Liam, who drowned himself in the sea at Brighton.
11

The Office of Historical Corrections

by Danielle Evans

Also deep · narrative, literary

Danielle Evans’ collection centers on Black women navigating public and private crises in modern America.
12

The Goldfinch

by Donna Tartt, Katia Benovich

Also inward-looking · narrative, literary

Thirteen-year-old Theo Decker survives a terrorist bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an event that kills his mother and leaves him in possession of Carel Fabritius’s 1654 painting, The Goldfinch.

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