Books like The Information
A man cries in his sleep, calls it nothing, and wakes to the unbearable news that another writer’s life is going better than his own. These novels share that blend of wounded vanity, moral danger, verbal brilliance and savage comedy.
If you liked The Information, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with The Information, and we tell you exactly what.
Milo Burke is a failed painter reduced to soliciting donations for a third-rate university, where every conversation becomes an exchange of humiliations disguised as professional courtesy. Like Richard Tull, he possesses enough intelligence to diagnose his failure perfectly—and nowhere near enough wisdom to escape it.
Lipsyte’s sentences have Amis’s appetite for the lethal aside: jokes arrive as compressed social judgments, exposing vanity, money and self-deception at once. Yet The Ask is distinctly American in its anxieties about employment, debt and the monetization of everything. It is one of the sharpest comic novels of its generation, and anyone who relished The Information’s combination of linguistic dazzle and spiritual squalor should not miss it.
Exley’s cult classic inhabits the grandiose, self-lacerating consciousness of a man convinced he was meant for greatness and forced to watch greatness happen to other people. His devotion to football star Frank Gifford becomes a way of measuring the distance between public triumph and his own alcoholism, breakdowns and botched literary ambitions.
What links it most deeply to The Information is its understanding that envy is not a passing emotion but an entire imaginative system: funny, fertile and ruinous. Exley turns abjection into magnificent rhetoric without asking us to mistake eloquence for innocence. Few novels make failure so appalling, so comic or so strangely majestic; its fiercely devoted readership is entirely deserved.
Thelonious “Monk” Ellison writes formally adventurous novels that scarcely sell, while the publishing world rewards a caricature of Black life he finds artistically fraudulent. His furious response begins as an act of contempt—but contempt, recognition and ambition prove impossible to keep neatly separate.
A lover of The Information will recognize the cruel precision with which Everett examines literary status: the reviews, categories and market judgments that writers claim to despise while allowing them to determine their worth. But Erasure expands the wound beyond professional jealousy, asking who gets to define authenticity and what happens when satire becomes commercially useful. Long regarded as one of Everett’s defining novels, it is both devastatingly funny and formally audacious—the rare literary satire with something larger than the literary world at stake.