Books like To Jerusalem and back by Saul Bellow

John Steinbeck journeys across the United States with his French poodle Charley, exploring the country’s sights, sounds, and people in a candid travelogue that reflects on American life and identity.

Saul Bellow’s novel follows a middle‑aged Jewish man navigating the challenges of contemporary life, examining themes of failure, redemption, and the search for meaning in an urban American setting.

In the Hotel Gloriana on the Upper West Side, mid‑forties Tommy Wilhelm spends one pivotal day, isolated among elderly residents and his father, confronting the quiet stakes of middle‑age life.

In 1990s America, novelist Nathan Zuckerman narrates a quiet life until the aging classicist Coleman Silk moves in next door.

In Search of Our Mother's Garden: A Collection of Nonfiction Essays by Alice Walker

A man confronting his past traces guilt to a chance encounter in a park, spiraling into paranoia as he questions reality.

Albert Corde, a former newspaperman turned university dean, travels with his wife to Bucharest to visit her dying mother, while back in Chicago his journalistic work and a student‑murder scandal drag him into a fractious public debate.

The Israeli novelist David Grossman's impassioned account of what he observed on the West Bank in early 1987 - not only the misery of the Palestinian refugees and their deep-seated hatred of the Israelis but also the cost of occupation for both occupier and occupied - is an intimate and urgent moral report on one of the great tragedies of our time. The Yellow Wind caused a sensation upon its original publication. Now with a new introduction by the author, it is essential reading for anyone who seeks a deeper understanding of Israel today.

For the sixth edition, James D. Hart and Phillip Leininger have updated the Companion in light of what has happened in American literature since 1982. To this end, they have revised the entries on such established authors as Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and Joyce Carol Oates, and they have added more than 180 new entries on novelists (T. Coraghessan Boyle, Tim O'Brien, Louise Erdrich, Don De Lillo), poets (Rita Dove, Weldon Kees), playwrights (Wendy Wasserstein, August Wilson), popular writers (Stephen King, Louis L'Amour), historians (James M. McPherson, David Herbert Donald, William Manchester), naturalists (Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey), and literary critics (Camille Paglia, Richard Ellmann). In addition, the Companion boasts more women's, African-American, and ethnic voices, with new entries on such luminaries as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, M. F. K. Fisher, William Least Heat-Moon, Ursula Le Guin, and Oscar Hijuelos, among many others. With over 5,000 total entries, The Oxford Companion to American Literature reflects a dynamic balance between past and contemporary literature, surveying virtually every aspect of our national literature, from the Pulitzer Prize to pulp fiction, and from Walt Whitman to William F. Buckley, Jr. There are over 2,000 biographical profiles of important American authors (with information regarding their styles, subjects, and major works) and influential foreign writers as well as other figures who have been important in the nation's social and cultural history. There are more than 1,100 full summaries of important American novels, stories, essays, poems (with verse form noted), plays, biographies and autobiographies, tracts, narratives, and histories. The new edition provides historical background and astute commentary on literary schools and movements, literary awards, magazines, newspapers, and a wide variety of other matters directly related to writing in America. Finally, the book is thoroughly cross-referenced and features an extensive and fully updated index of literary and social history.

Henry James’s essays on Italy blend vivid travel descriptions of Venice, Rome, and Florence with a thoughtful meditation on the country’s beauty and its social hardships.