Please recommend me an American or non-American novel!

Mein Kampf

Youth in Revolt

*Ada* by Nabokov is far superior to any of your projected reads (My Antonia and Travels with Charley, The Stranger)

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates sounds up your alley, OP.

R4 I have already watched the movie. I also enjoyed Little Children with Kate Winslet.

OP, I find it tough to recommend books to strangers but I’ll suggest four very different titles. Happy reading!

Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward

Pickard County Atlas - Chris Harding Thornton

There There - Tommy Orange

The Art of Fielding - Chad Harbach

In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes. Lots of post WW2 male angst in that for you, OP.

The Humphrey Bogart movie made it almost an entirely different story and does the book zero justice.

Give Wallace Stegner a try, especially ‘Angle of Repose’ and ‘Crossing to Safety’. Just about any Edith Wharton is great, too.

R7 I watched that already! Love Gloria Graham!

I assume you’ve already read A Catcher in the Rye.

You might try some of the old "big-yarn" ones, some classic, some just simple stories The Best of Everything The World According to Gap The Group The Fountainhead The Great Gatsby Gone With the Wind

Yes, but I want to reread it.

[quote] [R7] I watched that already! Love Gloria Graham!

You're missing out on a great book just because you've watched the movie. Like I said, this movie has almost nothing in common with the book.

"The Black Obelisk" by Erich Maria Remarque

Reuben, Reuben

Of Mice and Men

R16 Just read it.

三國演義

"Secrets Of A Sparrow," by Diana Ross.

I never get tired of reading Diary of a Mad Housewife

Also the three Johns: O’Hara, Updike, Cheever

"The Grapes Of Wrath", by John Steinbeck

"The Pillars Of The Earth" by Ken Follett.

Both are brilliantly constructed, and absolutely wonderful books.

R21 I keep meaning to read "The Witches Of Eastwick" but haven't gotten to it yet.

Schachnovelle by Stefan Zweig

It’s considered one of the best American novels ever written.

Read "Housekeeping" by Marilynne Robinson.

Another vote for Nabokov: "Laughter in the Dark" one of those novels that's hard to put down once you start reading it.

A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Why read English lit when the Germans do your genre so well, OP? Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß

Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon

Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow

The Cider House Rules by John Irving

Memoirs of a Geisha is set in Japan but it's by Arthur Golden, an American novelist

Eleni, by Nicholas Gage. Good book. Decent film, with DL fave John Malkovich.

White Noise is still relevant. I'm rereading it now.

‘Veronica’ and ‘Two Girls, Fat and Thin’ by Mary Gaitskill.

Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran and Faggots by Larry Kramer present two diametrically-opposed perspectives of 1970s gay America.

GGG, your faux pas earlier today was duly noted but your love of The Bell Jar turns me on....

How old are [italic]you[/italic]?

Also, check out Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres and David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives.

Hop on Pop

Big Little Lies

About 4 suburban housewives and a murder. After the PTA meeting, one of them will be dead and the community will be reeling.

The Art of Crash Landing by Melissa DeCarlo. It was published five years ago.

G3 you would like this book, i think...its one of my favorites:

The Secret History, by Donna Tartt

Also, I've always liked American Psycho, by Brent Easton Ellis (but the movie was shit)

Donna Tartt... whatta name!

R38 Already read The Secret History and I liked it.

R34 I was born in the Early 1990s and you?

"Recommend" is a transitive verb but not a ditransitive verb. One can "recommend me for a position in your company", where I am the object, or one can "recommend a novel to me", where the novel is the direct object but I am the indirect object. "Recommend me a novel" (empfehlen mir einen Roman) is slightly off grammar. Not completely wrong, but indicates a second-language speaker.

R41 Such a detective!

White Belt Man! You're still alive.

Where's covid when you need it?

Just kidding! Love ya, girl!

Mean it this time.

Not like all those other times.

When we were all laughing at you.

Behind your back.

And to your face.

Having just finished reading it, I can recommend The Heart in a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. It does feature an angsty teen as a central character. It is set in the late 1930s but the issues addressed in the book are timeless.

R44 I started reading it in early autumn, but never finished it. I probably should start it again.

Two angsty teenagers:

Eleana Ferrante: "The Lying Life of Adults"

Courtney Maum: "Costalegre: A Novel Inspired By Peggy Guggenheim and Her Daughter, Pegeen"

G3, R42...LOLOL...you got him. I would have thought you name might have given him a clue.

"The Dharma Bums" and "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" by Ken Kesey

"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe is not a novel, it's more like an essay, but worth reading.

R42 You tease. HOW OLD ARE YOU?

R41 I want your transitive cock inside of me.

The Beautiful Room is Empty by Edmund White

Alan Hollinghurst: The Swimming Pool Library

Anything by Richard Yates is exactly what you’re looking for. I’d suggest The Easter Parade first.

Mrs. Bridge by Evan Connell is affluent suburban housewife angst at its best.

R53 I read Easter Parade already 😀

So read the rest of Richard Yates. They’re all great

For novels of the 1950s and 1960s, of course To Kill a Mockingbird, anything by James Baldwin (Giovanni's Room, The Fire Next Time, Another Country, etc), In Cold Blood, along with many suggestions above. I think some of the novels by Marilyn French are very good. I can remember reading Her Mother's Daughter and having my mind expanded into the psychological conflict of women whose personal ambitions and dreams are often severely diminished by motherhood - something that men never give a second thought to normally. Anything by Andrew Holleran for the sheer poetry of the way he writes about the inner lives of gay men. You'd better read some Jacqueline Susanne just to see what trashy melodramatic novels of the 1960s were all about.

Some best-selling books of the past 15 or so years that I've genuinely loved:

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

News of the World by Paulette Jiles (currently a Tom Hanks film)

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

Christodora by Tim Murphy

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amore Towles

Station Eleven & The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

My True Hidden Hollywood Story by Brenda Dickson.

[quote]Here is a list of novels I like: The Bell Jar, Hundred Years of Solitude, East of Eden, Jane Eyre, The Secret History, Tess, some Russian stuff, Madame Bovary etc. I would like to read more books about America in the 1950's to 1970's, but I do not mind to read books from other periods.

Not American, but OP, try the English Patrick Hamilton. He is a sorely neglected mid-century English writer. Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, Hangover Square, The Slaves Of Solitude and the plays Rope and Gaslight (the psychological term was coined due to this work) which were made into films by Alfred Hitchcock and George Cukor.

I absolutely second those novels of Patrick Hamilton's particularly THE SLAVES OF SOLITUDE and TWENTY THOUSAND STREETS UNDER THE SKY. Honestly, two of my favorite novels of all time. I've recommended them on DL book threads several times. I think both of them have been reissued as paperbacks recently by NYRB.