Recommendations
Books Like The Plot Against America
Best books to read after The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
Philip Roth's The Plot Against America imagines Charles Lindbergh winning the 1940 election and pursing quiet anti-Semitism — a Newark Jewish family's American life growing precarious. These recommendations extend the experience through Roth's other novels and through alternative history fiction about American democracy and fascism.
- 1Buy
American Pastoral
by Philip Roth
Roth's Pulitzer-winning novel — the same preoccupation (what America promises and how violently it can fail), in a different mode: the 1960s rather than the 1940s, radicalism rather than fascism.
- 2Buy
Portnoy's Complaint
by Philip Roth
Roth's comic breakthrough — the personal and familial version of the same anxieties that The Plot Against America examines historically; Alexander Portnoy's mother and Gene Henderson's Africa are the same Newark in different registers.
- 3Buy
It Can't Happen Here
by Sinclair Lewis
Lewis's 1935 novel about an American fascist president — the direct predecessor to The Plot Against America, published when fascism was a live political threat in the US rather than a retrospective fear.
- 4Buy
The Man in the High Castle
by Philip K. Dick
Dick's classic alternative history novel in which the Axis powers won WWII — a different kind of alternative history (more formally experimental, more concerned with the nature of reality) but the founding text of the American fascism counter-factual.
- 5Buy
Kindred
by Octavia E. Butler
Butler's time-travel novel about a Black woman sent back to the antebellum South — alternative history as a direct encounter with the specific terror of living in a society organized to destroy you.
- 6Buy
The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
Atwood's Gilead — a theocratic dictatorship arising from the United States — is the speculative fiction that The Plot Against America most closely resembles in its interest in the specific mechanisms by which liberal democracy is dismantled from within.
- 7Buy
Maus
by Art Spiegelman
Spiegelman's graphic novel about his father's survival of the Holocaust — the most important document of American Jewish reckoning with the European catastrophe that The Plot Against America imagines arriving in America.
- 8Buy
The Human Stain
by Philip Roth
The third of Roth's American Trilogy — set in the Clinton impeachment era, concerned with the political consequences of moral certainty applied to a complex human reality; the most direct companion to The Plot Against America in Roth's oeuvre.
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