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Big Bad Love

Larry Brown · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
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Barn Burning

William Faulkner · 47 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistShort StoriesAmerican SouthLiterary Fiction
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The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

Breece D'J Pancake · 192 pages

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Hill William

Scott McClanahan · 222 pages

Hill William is a novel-in-stories chronicling the life of a young boy growing up in the mountains of today's West Virginia. Going no further than a mile from his home, the reader accompanies the narrator as he discovers the universe, as well as himself.

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Burning Bright

Ron Rash · 205 pages

Jacob and Edna have fallen on hard times. They haven't lost everything the way others have, but they have lost enough. When one of their hens stops laying eggs, it seems like the final straw. Jacob is determined to solve the mystery. What he discovers is as heartbreaking as it is revelatory.

Short StoriesWorking-Class ProtagonistAmerican SouthLiterary Fiction
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Dubliners

James Joyce · 226 pages

James Joyce's disillusion with the publication of Dubliners in 1914 was the result of ten years battling with publishers, resisting their demands to remove swear words, real place names and much else, including two entire stories. Although only 24 when he signed his first publishing contract for the book, Joyce already knew its worth: to alter it in any way would 'retard the course of civilisation

Short StoriesWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary FictionBleak
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"Sweat"

Zora Neale Hurston · 216 pages

Now frequently anthologized, Zora Neale Hurston's short story "Sweat" was first published in Fire!!, a legendary literary magazine of the Harlem Renaissance, whose sole issue appeared in November 1926. In "Sweat" Hurston claimed the voice that animates her mature fiction, notably the 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God; the themes of marital conflict and the development of spiritual conscio

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Collected Stories

Raymond Carver · 1,019 pages

Collects legendary and controversial works by the mid-twentieth-century writer including posthumous, unedited, and previously unseen versions, in a comparative anthology that offers insight into the influence of editor Gordon Lish.

Short StoriesWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary FictionBleak
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Refresh, Refresh

Benjamin Percy · 252 pages

'The stories in Refresh, Refresh are big-hearted and drunk and dangerous, and there's a heightened, unnerving vibe as you travel through Percy's world. You never know where you will end up... but you can be sure that he'll actually take you somewhere.'Dan Chaon.Here is the United States of today. The young men and boys in this bold, fiery collection do the unthinkable to prove to themselves – to e

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Dirty Havana Trilogy

Pedro Juan Gutierrez · 400 pages

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Suttree

Cormac McCarthy · 471 pages

By the author of *Blood Meridian* and *All the Pretty Horses, Suttree* is the story of Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege with his prominent family to live in a dilapidated houseboat on the Tennessee River near Knoxville. Remaining on the margins of the outcast community there--a brilliantly imagined collection of eccentrics, criminals, and squatters--he rises above the physic

Working-Class ProtagonistAmerican SouthLiterary FictionSubstance Abuse
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Ford County

John Grisham · 320 pages

Ford County is a collection of novellas by John Grisham. His first collection of stories, it was published by Doubleday in the United States on November 3, 2009. The book contains 7 short stories: Blood Drive; Fetching Raymond; Fish Files; Casino; Michael's Room; Quiet Haven; Funny Boy.

Short StoriesWorking-Class ProtagonistAmerican SouthLiterary Fiction
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Young Skins

Colin Barrett · 192 pages

"Enter the small, rural town of Glanbeigh, a place whose fate took a downturn with the Celtic Tiger, a desolate spot where buffoonery and tension simmer and erupt, and booze-sodden boredom fills the corners of every pub and nightclub. Here and in the towns beyond, the young live hard and wear the scars. Amongst them, there's jilted Jimmy, whose best friend, Tug, is the terror of the town and Jimmy

Short StoriesWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary FictionSubstance Abuse
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A Walk on the Wild Side

Nelson Algren · 346 pages

With its depictions of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, A Walk in the Wild Side has found a place in the imaginations of all generations since it first appeared. As Algren admitted, the book "wasn't written until long after it had been walked . . . I found my way to the streets on the other side of the Southern

Working-Class ProtagonistAmerican SouthLiterary FictionSubstance Abuse
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Where All Light Tends to Go

David Joy · 289 pages

"Set in North Carolina's Appalachian Mountains, eighteen-year-old Jacob McNeely is torn between appeasing his meth-dealing kingpin father and leaving the mountains forever with the girl he loves"--

Working-Class ProtagonistAmerican SouthLiterary FictionBleak
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American Salvage

Bonnie Jo Campbell · 170 pages

Presents a collection of stories that feature rural and working-class characters trying to cope with life in post-industrial America.

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The Push Man and Other Stories

Yoshihiro Tatsumi · 224 pages

"Over four decades ago, Yoshihiro Tatsumi expanded the horizons of comics story-telling by using the visual language of manga to tell gritty, literary short stories about the private lives of everyday people. He has been called "the grandfather of Japanese alternative comics" and has influenced generations of cartoonists, but, until now, the majority of his work has remained unavailable outside of

Short StoriesWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary FictionMale Lead
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Cannery Row

John Steinbeck · 183 pages

Cannery Row is a novel by American author John Steinbeck, published in 1945. It is set during the Great Depression in Monterey, California, on a street lined with sardine canneries that is known as Cannery Row. The story revolves around the people living there. Steinbeck revisited these characters and this milieu nine years later in his novel Sweet Thursday.

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Southern Cross the Dog: A Novel

Bill Cheng · 324 pages

Convinced that he is cursed after the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, 20-year-old Robert Chatham, who, constantly followed by trouble, has lost his will to live, finally shakes his demons until he is forced to make an impossible choice.

Working-Class ProtagonistAmerican SouthLiterary FictionBleak
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Trash: Stories

Dorothy Allison · 237 pages

First published in 1988, the award-winning Trash showcases Allison at her most fearlessly honest and startlingly vivid. The limitless scope of human emotion and experience are depicted in stories that give aching and eloquent voice to the terrible wounds we inflict on those closest to us. These are tales of loss and redemption; of shame and forgiveness; of love and abuse and the healing power of s

Short StoriesAmerican SouthWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

George Saunders · 179 pages

George Saunders has seen the future of America and it is funny. Bleak, yes, and sad and toxic and greedy - and very, very weird - but funny, too. With today's malls and theme parks and ecological disasters as their foundation, these stories build a tomorrow inhabited by fat executives in despair, genetic mutants in servitude, virtual-reality merchants in Chapter 11, and American Dreamers everywher

Short StoriesWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary FictionMale Lead
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We Live in Water

Jess Walter · 177 pages

"We Live in Water, the first collection of short fiction from New York Times bestselling author Jess Walter, is a suite of diverse, often comic stories about personal struggle and diminished dreams, all of them marked by the wry wit and generosity of spirit that has made him one of our most talked-about writers. In "Thief," a blue-collar worker turns unlikely detective to find out which of his kid

Short StoriesWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary FictionMale Lead

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