Recommendations
Books Like Kudos
Best books to read after Kudos by Rachel Cusk
Rachel Cusk's Kudos is the concluding volume of the Outline trilogy — the narrator at literary festivals, the formal project of self-constitution through the stories of others reaching its conclusion. These recommendations continue the Cusk canon, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the autofiction novel that has relinquished conventional narrative in favor of pure attention.
- 1Buy
Outline
by Rachel Cusk
The first Outline trilogy novel — the narrator teaching in Athens; the recommended starting point for the trilogy, where the formal innovation is freshest and most surprising.
- 2Buy
Transit
by Rachel Cusk
The second Outline trilogy novel — the narrator back in London renovating a flat; the middle volume whose domestic setting is the most conventionally engaging of the three.
- 3Buy
Aftermath
by Rachel Cusk
The Cusk memoir that preceded the trilogy — her account of her own divorce; the non-fiction companion that illuminates the biographical and formal crisis from which the trilogy emerged.
- 4Buy
Second Place
by Rachel Cusk
Cusk's novel published after the Outline trilogy — a woman invites a famous painter to stay in her remote coastal home; written in a looser, more narrative form than the trilogy, it marks a return to something closer to conventional storytelling while retaining the trilogy's interest in what we want from art and from other people.
- 5Buy
Speedboat
by Renata Adler
The American predecessor in the tradition of the fragmented female literary novel — Adler's 1976 novel of a journalist's disconnected observations; the formal ancestor of Cusk's project, and the book most often cited by critics comparing Kudos to the broader tradition of the fragmented novel of female consciousness.
- 6Buy
The Waves
by Virginia Woolf
The modernist predecessor in the tradition of the literary novel that represents consciousness directly — six voices across a lifetime; the most significant formal predecessor to the Outline trilogy's commitment to following attention rather than constructing a conventional story.
- 7Buy
Dept. of Speculation
by Jenny Offill
The companion American fragmented literary novel — Offill's account of a marriage and an affair; shares Kudos's interest in a woman writer who constitutes herself through observation and quotation rather than through conventional confession or narrative.
- 8Buy
My Brilliant Friend
by Elena Ferrante
The Italian companion in the tradition of the literary novel about a woman who sees herself through her relationship to others — Elena through Lila; shares Kudos's interest in the impossibility of describing the self directly and the way a woman's identity is always constituted through comparison and contrast.
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