Recommendations
Books Like Libra
Best books to read after Libra by Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo's Libra is the great American conspiracy novel — Lee Harvey Oswald, the JFK assassination, the CIA operatives whose plot becomes uncontrollable. These recommendations continue the DeLillo canon, explore the American political novel tradition, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the postmodern novel of American paranoia.
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Buy on AmazonWhite Noise
by Don DeLillo
The essential DeLillo companion — Jack Gladney, the airborne toxic event, the most accessible DeLillo and the most widely taught, showing the other side of his obsessions from Libra's political darkness.
- 2
Buy on AmazonUnderworld
by Don DeLillo
The DeLillo masterwork — the most ambitious American novel of the 1990s, beginning at the 1951 Giants-Dodgers game and moving through the Cold War, the largest expression of the concerns about American history that Libra focuses on the Kennedy assassination.
- 3
Buy on AmazonFalling Man
by Don DeLillo
The 9/11 DeLillo — the novel DeLillo wrote about September 11, returning to the territory of American catastrophe and its aftermath, for readers who want more DeLillo after Libra.
- 4
Buy on AmazonAmerican Tabloid
by James Ellroy
The companion JFK conspiracy novel — Ellroy's hard-boiled treatment of the same material, CIA operatives and organized crime and the run-up to Dallas, in a completely different style from DeLillo's.
- 5
Buy on AmazonThe Manchurian Candidate
by Richard Condon
The political thriller predecessor — the Cold War assassination plot, brainwashing, the original American political conspiracy novel that Libra both inherits and moves beyond.
- 6
Buy on AmazonInfinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace
The maximalist American novel companion — Wallace's engagement with American culture and entertainment as the twin to DeLillo's engagement with American political violence, both novels using fictional characters to anatomize what America is doing to its people.
- 7
Buy on AmazonGravity's Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon
The postmodern paranoid predecessor — Tyrone Slothrop in WWII Europe, Pynchon's novel of conspiracy and institutional power as the primary literary predecessor to DeLillo's treatment of the Kennedy assassination.
- 8
Buy on AmazonThe Spy Who Came in from the Cold
by John le Carré
The espionage fiction companion — Alec Leamas and the moral corruption of the Cold War intelligence world, le Carré's moral seriousness about what intelligence agencies actually do sharing Libra's concern with the institutional machinery of American violence.
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