Recommendations
Books Like Underworld
Best books to read after Underworld by Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo's Underworld is a postmodern masterwork of Cold War anxiety, systems thinking, and American memory. These recommendations share its formal ambition, its paranoid intelligence, or its sprawling engagement with American history.
- 1
Buy on AmazonWhite Noise
by Don DeLillo
The ideal entry into DeLillo — the airborne toxic event, death anxiety, suburban consumerism, darkly comic and more accessible than Underworld.
- 2
Buy on AmazonGravity's Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon
The other great paranoid American novel of systems and conspiracy — the V-2 rocket, World War II, as formally ambitious as Underworld and comparably rewarding.
- 3
Buy on AmazonThe Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
The other great social novel of the 1990s American experience — family dysfunction and free-market America, more realist but sharing Underworld's scale of ambition.
- 4
Buy on AmazonAmerican Pastoral
by Philip Roth
Roth's Pulitzer-winning counterpart — the American Dream's disintegration across the 1960s, a shared obsession with history's violence on private life.
- 5
Buy on AmazonBlood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy at his most Melvillean — pure violence and American expansion as mythic condition, the formal ambition that equals DeLillo's.
- 6
Buy on AmazonThe Recognitions
by William Gaddis
The foundational postmodern American novel — forgery, authenticity, systems of meaning, 956 pages that anticipated everything DeLillo does.
- 7
Buy on AmazonA Visit from the Goon Squad
by Jennifer Egan
DeLillo's structural ambitions refracted through music industry and time — interconnected chapters spanning decades, memory and American popular culture.
- 8
Buy on AmazonThe Fortress of Solitude
by Jonathan Lethem
Brooklyn from the 1970s through the 1990s, race and gentrification, superhero mythology as American cultural memory — shares DeLillo's range of cultural reference.
More Underworld Resources
More Reading Recommendations
View all →Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.