Recommendations
Books Like Cosmopolis
Best books to read after Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis is a hallucinatory single-day novel about a billionaire crossing Manhattan while his fortune collapses — adapted by David Cronenberg. These recommendations extend the experience through DeLillo's other novels and through literary fiction about finance, capitalism, and the alienation of extreme wealth.
- 1Buy
White Noise
by Don DeLillo
DeLillo's most accessible novel — the natural starting point for DeLillo readers, warmer and funnier than Cosmopolis but exploring the same themes of American anxiety and the alienation of consumer culture.
- 2Buy
Mao II
by Don DeLillo
DeLillo's PEN/Faulkner winner — shares Cosmopolis's compressed, stylistically intense mode and its preoccupation with crowds, violence, and the world that lies beneath financial abstraction.
- 3Buy
American Psycho
by Bret Easton Ellis
Ellis's novel about a Wall Street serial killer — the most extreme statement of the theme Cosmopolis explores: the point at which financial abstraction detaches itself from human reality entirely, with grotesque consequences.
- 4Buy
The Big Short
by Michael Lewis
Lewis's non-fiction account of the 2008 financial crisis — the real-world equivalent of Eric Packer's catastrophic currency bet; context for Cosmopolis's portrait of how financial speculation can appear completely abstract and have completely concrete consequences.
- 5Buy
Glamorama
by Bret Easton Ellis
Ellis's satirical novel about a model in 1990s New York — another portrait of a young man embedded in a world of extreme surfaces, similarly organized around the alienation of the very beautiful and the very rich.
- 6Buy
The Bonfire of the Vanities
by Tom Wolfe
Wolfe's satirical panorama of 1980s New York — a bond trader, a fall from grace, the collision of wealth and race in the city; the more populous, exuberant predecessor to Cosmopolis's concentrated portrait of a man at the top of the financial world.
- 7Buy
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
by Ottessa Moshfegh
A wealthy, beautiful young woman in New York who spends a year sedating herself into oblivion — shares Cosmopolis's portrait of a person who has everything and is destroyed by the fact that nothing means anything.
- 8Buy
Falling Man
by Don DeLillo
DeLillo's 9/11 novel — Cosmopolis is set in April 2000, eighteen months before the attacks; Falling Man picks up the thread of what happens to a similar milieu of New York financial culture after the attacks unmake the world Eric Packer inhabits.
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