Recommendations
Books Like New Grub Street
Best books to read after New Grub Street by George Gissing
George Gissing's New Grub Street is the most accurate portrait of the literary marketplace ever written — the collision between artistic integrity and commercial necessity in 1880s London, seen through two writers whose different responses to that collision define the novel's moral argument. These recommendations extend the experience through other portraits of the literary world and through fiction about artistic idealism and its cost.
- 1Buy
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft
by George Gissing
Gissing's 1903 quasi-autobiographical reflection on a writer's life — what Reardon might have written if he had lived. A more serene companion to New Grub Street's bitterness, organized as seasonal reflections from a writer who has finally escaped poverty.
- 2Buy
Lost Illusions
by Honoré de Balzac
The greatest predecessor to New Grub Street in literary fiction — Lucien de Rubempré's Parisian disillusionment as poet-turned-journalist is the French equivalent of Reardon's English story. Balzac's portrait of the literary marketplace is equally comprehensive and equally disgusted.
- 3Buy
Pendennis
by William Makepeace Thackeray
Thackeray's semi-autobiographical novel about a young man's London literary apprenticeship is the genial, comic predecessor to New Grub Street's darker vision. Thackeray had been a journalist and knew the literary world from inside; his portrait is less bitter than Gissing's because he succeeded where Reardon fails.
- 4Buy
The Aspern Papers
by Henry James
James's novella about an editor who tries to extract unpublished papers from an old woman and her niece is the Jamesian version of New Grub Street's theme — the literary marketplace's appetite for artistic material and the ethical compromises it induces.
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Hunger
by Knut Hamsun
Hamsun's 1890 novel about a writer starving in Oslo is the contemporary Scandinavian equivalent of New Grub Street's English literary poverty — written in the same years, equally committed to the interior experience of artistic deprivation, and equally foundational to the modernist tradition.
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Martin Eden
by Jack London
London's 1909 autobiographical novel about a working-class sailor who educates himself and tries to become a writer in California — the American version of Reardon's story, equally organized around the gap between artistic aspiration and commercial reality, equally unsparing in its ending.
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Stoner
by John Williams
Williams's novel about an English professor who lives and dies in the academic equivalent of Gissing's literary marketplace — doing work he believes in, receiving little recognition, finding meaning in the work itself rather than in its social or commercial reward. The clearest contemporary successor to New Grub Street's moral vision.
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The Information
by Martin Amis
Amis's 1995 novel about two novelists — one successful, one failing — whose friendship is destroyed by envy is the contemporary update of New Grub Street's two-writers structure, with the same bitter honesty about the literary world's economy and its human cost.
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