Recommendations
Books Like Accordion Crimes by Annie Proulx
For readers of the great American immigrant novel
If you loved Accordion Crimes — the green accordion's journey through a century of American immigrant communities, each section a separate portrait of cultural loss and assimilation — these novels share the same ambition: the broad portrait of American life through multiple communities, the immigrant experience's cost, and the novel as a comprehensive map of American social worlds.
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Buy on AmazonThe Shipping News
by Annie Proulx
Proulx's Pulitzer-winning novel — the companion in her major fiction; where Accordion Crimes is episodic and broad, The Shipping News is concentrated on one place and one character's transformation; the best entry point for new readers to Proulx.
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Buy on AmazonPostcards
by Annie Proulx
Proulx's debut novel — the companion in her American landscape fiction; where Accordion Crimes follows an object through multiple communities, Postcards follows a man across the same American geography.
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Buy on AmazonMy Antonia
by Willa Cather
Cather's great novel about Bohemian immigrants on the Nebraska plains — the companion in the tradition of American fiction about the immigrant experience and the specific landscape that shaped it; Antonia's Nebraska is the earlier, more lyrical version of what Proulx is doing with the immigrant communities of Accordion Crimes.
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Buy on AmazonUSA Trilogy
by John Dos Passos
Dos Passos's experimental three-part novel — the most important predecessor in American fiction that attempts to portray the full breadth of American life through multiple overlapping narratives and formal experimentation; Accordion Crimes is the most Dos Passosian of Proulx's works.
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Buy on AmazonThe Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Diaz
Diaz's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — the companion in American fiction about immigrant communities and the specific weight of their history; the Dominican experience in New Jersey is the contemporary, Caribbean version of what Proulx is doing with the European immigrant communities.
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Buy on AmazonInfinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace
Wallace's masterwork — the companion in American fiction that attempts the comprehensive portrait of a culture through formal ambition and multiple overlapping narratives; where Accordion Crimes is the immigrant experience, Infinite Jest is the entertainment-addicted society; both are attempting to map a broad American world.
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Buy on AmazonThe Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
Franzen's National Book Award-winning novel — the companion in American fiction that attempts to map a broad American social world; where Accordion Crimes maps the immigrant experience through a single object, The Corrections maps the professional middle class through a family.
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Buy on AmazonBeloved
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — the companion in American fiction about a specific community's trauma and what it does to memory and inheritance; Sethe's Cincinnati is the African American version of what Proulx is exploring in the immigrant communities — the cost of the American assimilation machine.
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