Books like The Art of Fielding
What should you read after Chad Harbach’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Chad Harbach
- 2011
- 512 pages
- Literary fiction
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after The Art of Fielding
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchTomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Gabrielle Zevin
Swap the diamond for a games studio and you get the same book: gifted people, one shared obsession, and the friendships that keep bending around it for decades.
- Obsessive craft
- Ensemble told from many angles
- Warm, wry voice
- Thirty years, not four
Best for failure and the yipsOpen
Andre Agassi
The best book anyone has written about hating the thing you are great at — Agassi on the drills, the choking, and a father who built him for one purpose.
- Obsessive craft
- Failure and the yips
- Mentorship and devotion
- Memoir, not fiction
Best for a small campusThe Marriage Plot
Jeffrey Eugenides
Another campus novel that follows three graduating students out into the world, with the same affection for people who take their own seriousness extremely seriously.
- A small campus
- Ensemble told from many angles
- Unlikely love stories
- A love triangle drives it
Great matchBeartown
Fredrik Backman
A dying Swedish town stakes everything on a junior hockey team, and Backman is just as interested in what a sport does to the people standing around it.
- Ensemble told from many angles
- Obsessive craft
- A small campus
- A sexual assault at its centre
Great matchThe Secret History
Donna Tartt
The other great small-college novel, and its opposite in temperature: the same intoxicating campus, the same mentor worship, considerably more murder.
- A small campus
- Mentorship and devotion
- Warm, wry voice
- Cold where Harbach is warm
Worth a look — with a warningA Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara
If four friends tracked across time was the part that held you, Yanagihara takes it much further and much darker. Read it when you have the stomach.
- Ensemble told from many angles
- Mentorship and devotion
- Unlikely love stories
- Sustained trauma and self-harm
What should you read after The Art of Fielding?
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin — swap the diamond for a games studio and you get the same book: gifted people, one shared obsession, and the friendships that keep bending around it for decades.
If what stayed with you was obsessive craft, read Open by Andre Agassi instead: the best book anyone has written about hating the thing you are great at — Agassi on the drills, the choking, and a father who built him for one purpose. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides is the other strong option — another campus novel that follows three graduating students out into the world, with the same affection for people who take their own seriousness extremely seriously.
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