Books like Television by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

A seminal 16th‑century Italian treatise, The Prince offers practical guidance for rulers, arguing that ends can justify morally dubious means to secure power and glory.

Candide: A Tale of Conviviality and Optimism in a Wretched World

The Brothers Karamazov follows a Russian family torn by betrayal, faith, and violence, exploring deep moral questions within 19th‑century Russian society.

Oedipa Maas, executor of Pierce Inverarity’s will, uncovers a hidden network of conspiracies, jazz clubs, and beatnik culture while navigating her own psyche.

Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy weaves three interlinked detective‑style narratives that explore identity and the city’s uncanny parallels, turning ordinary clues into profound questions of human existence.

A tense Dutch family drama in which two brothers and their wives confront the moral dilemma of protecting their children after the kids are implicated in a crime.

The Pale King follows IRS employees at the Peoria, Illinois, Regional Examination Center as they navigate the absurdities of bureaucracy in a sharp, observational narrative.

Sixty‐seven‑year‑old Trond, after meeting his lone neighbor, is compelled to revisit a youthful incident that set off a chain of losses for him and his childhood friend Jon.

Divorced and suddenly unemployed, Sylvia Landsman escapes to Italy, where she meets Henry, a wistful, married expatriate. Their circuitous tour of Europe becomes a journey of stories, longing, and the painful possibility of small acts of courage.

The cake in kitchen, the house in the suburbs, Mamie in her mink stole, Elvis in his pink Cadillac. It was America in the 1950s, and the world was not so much a stage as a setpiece for TV, the new national phenomenon. It was a time when how things looked - and how we looked - mattered, a decade of design that comes to vibrant life in As Seen on TV. This book captures a visual culture reflecting and reflected in the powerful new medium of television. Looking closely at a number of celebrated instances in which the principles of design dominated the public arena and captivated the popular imagination, Karal Ann Marling gives us a vivid picture of the taste and sensibility of the postwar era. From Walt Disney's Wednesday night TV show, the leap was easy to his theme park, where the wildly popular TV characters could be seen firsthand, and Marling conducts us through this heady concoction of real life and fantasy. Next she takes us into the picture-perfect world of Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book of 1950, the runaway bestseller of the decade, and shows us how the look of food, culminating in the TV Dinner, attained paramount importance. From the painting-by-numbers fad to the public fascination with the First Lady's apparel to the television sensation of Elvis Presley to the sculptural refinement of the automobile, Marling explores what Americans saw and what they looked for with a gaze newly trained by TV. A study in style, in material culture, in art history at eye level, her book shows us as never before those artful everyday objects that stood for American life in the 1950s, as seen on TV.

A darkly comic novel exploring the corrupting influence of politics and media in modern Britain.

A novel exploring life, love, and the aftermath of 9/11.

A French secret‑service officer, Henri Robin, travels to Berlin in 1949 on an undisclosed task, only to confront a doppelganger and a labyrinth of memory, crime, and identity that blurs past and present.