Recommendations
Books Like The Bonfire of the Vanities
Best books to read after The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities is the definitive satirical novel of 1980s New York — a bond trader's fall from grace after a Bronx accident involving a Black teenager. These recommendations extend the experience through Wolfe's other fiction and through other panoramic satirical novels about American wealth, race, and justice.
- 1Buy
A Man in Full
by Tom Wolfe
Wolfe's second novel — a real estate developer in Atlanta and a young man in prison; similarly massive and satirical, equally organized around the question of what a man has really built when his empire collapses.
- 2Buy
American Psycho
by Bret Easton Ellis
Ellis's satire of the same milieu — Patrick Bateman inhabits the same Wall Street world as Sherman McCoy, but seen from inside the obsession with surfaces and the violence it conceals.
- 3Buy
Cosmopolis
by Don DeLillo
DeLillo's single-day novel about a billionaire crossing Manhattan — the minimalist high-modernist version of the same subject Wolfe covers with satirical maximalism.
- 4Buy
The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
Franzen's National Book Award–winning family novel — another big American novel about the collision between individual aspiration and institutional reality, less satirical than The Bonfire of the Vanities but equally ambitious in scope.
- 5Buy
Bright Lights, Big City
by Jay McInerney
McInerney's 1984 cocaine-and-nightclub novel of 1980s Manhattan — the most immediate fictional companion to The Bonfire of the Vanities, covering the same downtown milieu in the second person.
- 6Buy
Less Than Zero
by Bret Easton Ellis
Ellis's debut novel about wealthy young Angelenos — the West Coast version of the same 1980s consumer emptiness that The Bonfire of the Vanities examines from Wall Street.
- 7Buy
Money: A Suicide Note
by Martin Amis
Amis's 1984 novel narrated by John Self, a successful television commercial director who is also destroying himself — the British companion to The Bonfire of the Vanities, similarly organized around excess, self-delusion, and the money that enables both.
- 8Buy
Liar's Poker
by Michael Lewis
Lewis's memoir of his years as a bond trader at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s — the non-fiction account of the world Sherman McCoy inhabits; reading it alongside or after The Bonfire of the Vanities illuminates both.
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