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What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

Charles Bukowski · 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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The Dramatist

Ken Bruen

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Crank

Ellen Hopkins · 537 pages

Kristina is the perfect daughter: gifted high school junior, quiet, never any trouble. Then she meets the monster: crank. And what begins as a wild ride turns into a struggle for her mind, her soul---her life.

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Fight Club

Chuck Palahniuk · 208 pages

A man who struggles with insomnia meets a colorful extremist, and they create a secret organization together. Chuck Palahniuk showed himself to be his generation’s most visionary satirist in this, his first book. Fight Club’s estranged narrator leaves his lackluster job when he comes under the thrall of Tyler Durden, an enigmatic young man who holds secret after-hours boxing matches in the base

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Less Than Zero

Bret Easton Ellis · 208 pages

Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980's, this coolly mesmerizing novel is a raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation who have experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age, in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money a place devoid of feeling or hope. Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college and re-enters a landscape of limitless

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Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems

Billy Collins · 171 pages

Offers a collection of witty, emotional, and direct poems by the popular and critically acclaimed poet, including selections from his four previous collections and new works such as "Man Listening to a Disc," about headphones.

Poetry CollectionSparse ProseDry HumorLiterary Fiction
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Dirty Havana Trilogy

Pedro Juan Gutierrez · 400 pages

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Almost Transparent Blue

Ryu Murakami · 128 pages

Almost Transparent Blue (限りなく透明に近いブルー Kagirinaku Tōmei ni Chikai Burū, "Almost Infinitely Transparent Blue") is a 1976 novel, written by Japanese author Ryū Murakami, that features a portrait of narrator Ryū and his friends trapped in a cycle of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll during the 1970s.

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Angels

Denis Johnson · 217 pages

Angels puts Jamie Mays--a runaway wife toting along two kids--and Bill Houston--ex-Navy man, ex-husband, ex-con--on a Greyhound bus for a dark, wild ride cross country. Driven by restless souls, bad booze, and desperate needs, Jamie and Bill bounce from bus stations to cheap hotels as they ply the strange, fascinating, and dangerous fringe of American life. Their tickets may say Phoenix, but their

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Joe

Larry Brown · 348 pages

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Falling Up

Shel Silverstein · 176 pages

A collection of humorous poems and drawings.

Poetry CollectionSparse ProseDry Humor
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Ablutions

Patrick deWitt · 164 pages

Working at a decaying Hollywood bar while making notes for the novel he hopes to write, a bartender is drawn into the alcoholic oblivion that affects his customers, losing his wife, his goals, and himself in the process.

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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

Poetry CollectionSubstance AbuseDarkLiterary Fiction
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Roadside Picnic

Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky · 160 pages

[Comment by Hari Kunru in The Guardian][1]: > Soviet-era Russian science fiction deserves a wider audience in English. The Strugatsky brothers collaborated on numerous novels and stories, the best known of which is this, partly because it was filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky as Stalker, in 1977. The novel takes place 10 years after a mysterious alien visitation, which seems to have no rational explan

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Junky

William S. Burroughs · 158 pages

A semi-autobiographical account, narrated in a matter-of-fact manner, of the author’s life as a drug addict. The story ranges from the backstreets of New York to a drug rehabilitation hospital in Kentucky, the bars of New Orleans and on to Mexico, recounting the difficulties of obtaining drugs, financial problems and homosexual encounters. Burroughs significantly stretched the boundaries of publis

Substance AbuseSparse ProseBleakMale Lead
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A Million Little Pieces

James Frey · 430 pages

"The most lacerating tale of drug addiction since William S. Burroughs' Junky." --The Boston Globe"Again and again, the book delivers recollections that leave the reader winded and unsteady. James Frey's staggering recovery memoir could well be seen as the final word on the topic."--San Francisco Chronicle"A brutal, beautifully written memoir."--The Denver Post"Gripping . . . A great story . . . Y

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Complete Poems

Marianne Moore · 320 pages

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One of the Boys

Daniel Magariel · 172 pages

"A riveting and emotionally harrowing debut about two young brothers and their physically and psychologically abusive father--One of the Boys is 160 perfect, stunning pages by a major new talent. The three of them--a twelve-year-old boy, his older brother, their father--have won the war: the father's term for his bitter divorce and custody battle. They leave their Kansas home and drive through the

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Young God

Katherine Faw Morris

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Venus Drive: Stories

Sam Lipsyte · 192 pages

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Praise

Andrew McGahan · 279 pages

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The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway · 251 pages

Hemingway's profile of the Lost Generation captures life among the expatriates on Paris' Left Bank during the 1920s, the brutality of bullfighting in Spain, and the moral and spiritual dissolution of a generation.

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Robert B. Parker's The Devil Wins

Reed Farrel Coleman · 342 pages

In the wake of a huge storm, three bodies are discovered in the rubble of an abandoned factory building in an industrial part of Paradise known as The Swap. One body, a man's, wrapped in a blue tarp, is only hours old. But found within feet of that body are the skeletal remains of two teenage girls who had gone missing during a Fourth of July celebration twenty-five years earlier. Not only does th

Sparse ProseSubstance AbuseDarkMale Lead

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