If you loved how The Recognitions spans continents and generations—from Wyatt Gwyon’s forgeries to the New York art scene—Underworld delivers a similarly sweeping tapestry. DeLillo’s novel threads together stories from the Cold War, New York’s underbelly, and everyday lives, building a mosaic that’s both intimate and monumental.

If you were fascinated by the broad cast from Otto to Esme and their intersecting quests in The Recognitions, you’ll find Infinite Jest just as intoxicating. Wallace introduces you to everyone from the Incandenza family to recovering addicts at Ennet House, their lives overlapping in darkly comic, surprising ways.

Captivated by Gaddis’s sly asides and the novel’s awareness of its own artifice? Pale Fire is a metafictional masterpiece: Nabokov’s unreliable narrator, Charles Kinbote, bends and refracts a poem’s meaning, making you question what’s real, what’s invented, and the very act of storytelling itself.

If you admired the intricate, puzzle-like structure of The Recognitions—where stories nest within stories and no thread is ever quite resolved—The Book of Numbers will enthrall you. Cohen’s narrative leaps between a failing writer and a tech mogul, weaving together identity, technology, and meaning in a dense, rewarding web.

Were you drawn to Gaddis’s probing of forgery, faith, and the nature of art? The Magic Mountain immerses you in Hans Castorp’s intellectual and spiritual odyssey at a Swiss sanatorium, where conversations about time, death, and meaning echo the existential concerns and meditations of The Recognitions.