Recommendations
Books Like White Noise
Best books to read after White Noise by Don DeLillo
White Noise is the defining American postmodern novel about consumer culture, media, and the fear of death. These books extend the conversation into DeLillo's own vast canon, the postmodern American novel tradition, and the literature of technological anxiety and the media-saturated world.
- 1Buy
Underworld
by Don DeLillo
DeLillo's masterpiece — an 800-page novel spanning the Cold War era through the '90s, beginning with the 1951 Giants-Dodgers game. The most ambitious American novel of its decade and the full expression of the powers White Noise showed.
- 2Buy
Libra
by Don DeLillo
DeLillo's novelization of the Kennedy assassination from Lee Harvey Oswald's perspective — paranoid, brilliant, and the book that shows what White Noise's treatment of conspiracy and death-anxiety leads to.
- 3Buy
Infinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace
Wallace's encyclopedic postmodern novel set in a near-future America where entertainment has become literally addictive — the most direct descendant of White Noise's argument about consumer culture and death-avoidance.
- 4Buy
The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
Franzen's family novel is also a diagnosis of American consumer culture — the Lambert family's dysfunction mapped onto the failures of capitalism, pharmaceutical culture, and the cult of the new.
- 5Buy
American Psycho
by Bret Easton Ellis
Ellis's satirical novel about a Wall Street banker who may or may not be a serial killer — the most extreme expression of the consumer-culture critique that White Noise inaugurates, stripped of DeLillo's philosophical ambivalence.
- 6Buy
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son — the other side of White Noise's death anxiety: what happens after the Airborne Toxic Event destroys everything the white noise was designed to protect.
- 7Buy
Remainder
by Tom McCarthy
McCarthy's novel of a man who uses a settlement from an accident to compulsively recreate the same scene over and over — the most formally interesting European fiction about repetition, simulation, and authenticity that answers White Noise's American concerns.
- 8Buy
Super Sad True Love Story
by Gary Shteyngart
Shteyngart's satirical near-future novel of a financially and culturally declining America, where everyone's vital statistics and credit scores are visible on public screens — White Noise's world taken to its logical social media conclusion.
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