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Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf

Alfred Doblin · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 498 pages

A masterpiece of guilt and redemption that transforms the sordid story of an old woman’s murder into the nineteenth century’s profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel. Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the tsars, is determined to overreach his humanity and assert his untrammeled individual will. When he commits an act of murder and theft, he sets in

Big CityWorking-Class ProtagonistDense ProseClassics
❤️

Trainspotting

Irvine Welsh · 352 pages

Scottish writer Irvine Welsh's first novel, Trainspotting, is a collection of short-stories revolving around a group of friends, their drug use, and struggles in the city of Edinburgh.

Stream of ConsciousnessWorking-Class ProtagonistDense ProseBig City
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As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner · 250 pages

Written in stream-of-consciousness style with multiple narrators, the story follows a journey wherein the family of a dead woman try to transport her body to her birthplace in Mississippi in accordance with her wishes. When a ford across a river is flooded they are forced to take a roundabout route and it becomes a desperate race to complete their mission before the body begins to decompose.

Stream of ConsciousnessWorking-Class ProtagonistDense ProseClassics
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Native Son

Richard Wright · 398 pages

Native Son (1940) is a novel written by the American author Richard Wright. It tells the story of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, a black youth living in utter poverty in a poor area on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s. ---------- Also contained in: [Early Works](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL506449W)

Big CityWorking-Class ProtagonistClassicsCrime
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McTeague

Frank Norris · 332 pages

It was Sunday, and, according to his custom on that day, McTeague took his dinner at two in the afternoon at the car conductors' coffee-joint on Polk Street. He had a thick gray soup; heavy, underdone meat, very hot, on a cold plate; two kinds of vegetables; and a sort of suet pudding, full of strong butter and sugar. On his way back to his office, one block above, he stopped at Joe Frenna's saloo

Working-Class ProtagonistBig CityClassicsCrime
❤️

Ulysses

James Joyce · 736 pages

Written over a seven-year period, from 1914 to 1921, this book has survived bowdlerization, legal action and controversy. The novel deals with the events of one day in Dublin, 16th June 1904, now known as "Bloomsday". The principal characters are Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly. Ulysses has been labelled dirty, blasphemous and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge Jo

Stream of ConsciousnessDense ProseBig CityClassics
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Tropic of Cancer

Henry Miller · 321 pages

A stream-of-consciousness story of a poverty-stricken young American, living in Paris.

Stream of ConsciousnessWorking-Class ProtagonistClassicsDense Prose
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Howl and Other Poems

Allen Ginsberg · 44 pages

"The prophetic poem that launched a generation when it was first published in 1956 is here presented in a commemorative 40th Anniversary Edition." "When the book arrived from its British printers, it was seized almost immediately by U.S. Customs, and shortly thereafter the San Francisco police arrested its publisher and editor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, together with the City Lights Bookstore manager

Stream of ConsciousnessDense ProseBig CityClassics
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Molloy

Samuel Beckett · 241 pages

Stream of ConsciousnessDense ProseClassicsLiterary Fiction
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Naked Lunch

William S. Burroughs · 304 pages

Stream of ConsciousnessDense ProseClassicsLiterary Fiction
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The Spire

William Golding · 224 pages

Told in a stream-of-consciousness narrative, this is a story of obsession. Against the advice of his builder, the Dean of Salisbury Cathedral, slowly dying from tuberculosis, plans the construction of a towering spire atop the cathedral as the culmination of his life’s work but becomes increasingly deranged as the construction faces constant problems due to the sheer grandiosity of the work.

Stream of ConsciousnessDense ProseLiterary FictionClassics
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Clockers

Richard Price · 624 pages

Big CityWorking-Class ProtagonistOrganized CrimeCrime
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Les Misérables

Victor Hugo · 747 pages

In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean--a man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert--Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre.

Dense ProseWorking-Class ProtagonistClassicsBig City
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Mystic River

Dennis Lehane · 487 pages

When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car pulled up to their street. One boy got into the car, two did not, and something terrible happened -- something that ended their friendship and changed all three boys forever. Twenty-five years later, Sean is a homicide detective. Jimmy is an ex-con who owns a corner store. And Dave is trying to

Working-Class ProtagonistOrganized CrimeBig CityLiterary Fiction
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Under the Volcano

Malcolm Lowry · 375 pages

It is the Day of the Dead. The fiesta in full swing. In the shadow of Popocatepeti ragged children beg coins to buy skulls made of chocolate...and the ugly pariah dogs roam the streets. Geoffrey Firmin, HM ex-consul, is drowning himself in liquor and Mescal, while his ex-wife and half brother look on powerless to help him. As the day wears on, it becomes apparent that Geoffrey must die. It is his

Stream of ConsciousnessDense ProseClassicsLiterary Fiction
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Our Lady of the Flowers

Jean Genet · 318 pages

"Novel by Jean Genet, written while he was in prison for burglary and published in 1944 in French as Notre-Dame des fleurs. The novel and the author were championed by many contemporary writers, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Cocteau, who helped engineer a pardon for Genet. A wildly imaginative fantasy of the Parisian underworld, the novel tells the story of Divine, a male prostitute who cons

Stream of ConsciousnessDense ProseClassicsLiterary Fiction
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Hell to Pay

George P. Pelecanos · 368 pages

Derek Strange and Terry Quinn, the team of private investigators who made their stunning debut in Right As Rain, are hired to find a 14-year-old white girl from the suburbs who's run away from home and is now working as a prostitute. The two ex-cops think they know D.C.'s dangers, but nothing in their experience has prepared them for Worldwide Wilson, the pimp whose territory they're intruding upo

Big CityWorking-Class ProtagonistOrganized CrimeCrime
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The Jungle

Upton Sinclair · 342 pages

Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the appalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, the book was c

Big CityWorking-Class ProtagonistClassicsDark
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Last Exit to Brooklyn

Hubert Selby Jr. · 303 pages

Last Exit to Brooklyn is a raw depiction of life amongst New York's junkies, hustlers, drag queens and prostitutes. An unforgettable cast of characters inhabits the housing projects, bars and streets of Brooklyn: Georgette, a hopelessly romantic and tormented transvestite; Vinnie, a disaffected and volatile youth who has never been on the right side of the law; Tralala, who can find no escape from

Stream of ConsciousnessWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary FictionClassics
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Animal

K'wan · 416 pages

Tayshawn is one of the children the world throws away. The neighborhood kids give him the nickname "Animal." When his older brother, the only person in his life who shows him kindness, is taken away, Tayshawn will have to adapt to survive in the jungle.

Working-Class ProtagonistBig CityOrganized CrimeCrime
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Stream of ConsciousnessDense ProseClassicsLiterary Fiction
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Prince of Thieves

Chuck Hogan · 400 pages

Claire Keesey finds herself attracted to two men--Doug MacRay, the leader of a crew of criminals and bank robbers, and FBI agent Adam Frawley--but her relationships are complicated by Frawley's plans to eliminate Boston's criminal element.

Working-Class ProtagonistOrganized CrimeBig CityCrime
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Visions of Cody

Jack Kerouac · 414 pages

« Visions de Cody est sans doute l’œuvre la plus ambitieuse de Jack Kerouac. Composée d’esquisses du New York des années 1950, du portrait intime des proches de l’écrivain, de la retranscription de leurs conversations sous drogues et alcool, elle constitue le complément indispensable au célèbre Sur la route. «Visions de Cody est une étude de caractère de six cents pages du héros de Sur la route, "

Stream of ConsciousnessDense ProseBig CityLiterary Fiction
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Complete Novels: Red Harvest / The Dain Curse / The Maltese Falcon / The Glass Key / The Thin Man

Dashiell Hammett · 967 pages

"In a few years of extraordinary creative energy, Dashiell Hammett invented the modern American crime novel."--BOOK JACKET. "The five novels that Hammett published between 1929 and 1934, collected here in one volume, have become part of modern American culture, creating archetypal characters and establishing the ground rules for a whole tradition of hardboiled writing."--BOOK JACKET. "Each novel

Organized CrimeBig CityClassicsCrime

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