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Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

Raymond Carver · 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
❤️

Post Office

Charles Bukowski · 160 pages

"It began as a mistake." By middle age, Henry Chinaski has lost more than twelve years of his life to the U.S. Postal Service. In a world where his three true, bitter pleasures are women, booze, and racetrack betting, he somehow drags his hangover out of bed every dawn to lug waterlogged mailbags up mud-soaked mountains, outsmart vicious guard dogs, and pray to survive the day-to-day trials of sad

Sparse ProseWorking-Class ProtagonistAddictionBleak
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Stoner

John Williams · 278 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistMarriage in TroubleSparse ProseBittersweet
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Rock Springs

Richard Ford · 252 pages

Sparse ProseWorking-Class ProtagonistShort StoriesBittersweet
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The Easter Parade

Richard Yates · 225 pages

Even as little girls, Sarah and Emily are very different from each other. Emily looks up to her wiser and more stable older sister and is jealous of her relationship with their absent father, and later her seemingly golden marriage. The path she chooses for herself is less safe and conventional and her love affairs never really satisfy her. Although the bond between them endures, gradually the dis

Sparse ProseAddictionMarriage in TroubleBleak
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Sabrina & Corina

Kali Fajardo-Anstine · 212 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistShort StoriesAddictionCharacter-Driven
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Ironweed

William Kennedy · 240 pages

AddictionBleakWorking-Class ProtagonistBittersweet
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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

Working-Class ProtagonistAddictionShort StoriesBleak
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Sleepwalk

Adrian Tomine · 103 pages

Sparse ProseShort StoriesBittersweetBleak
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The Motel Life

Willy Vlautin · 224 pages

The night it happened I was drunk, almost passed out, and I swear to God a bird came flying through my motel room window . . .Narrated by Frank Flannigan, The Motel Life tells the story of how he and his brother Jerry Lee take to the road in a bid to escape the hit-and-run accident which kick-starts the narrative. Written with huge compassion, and an eye for the small details of life, it has becom

Working-Class ProtagonistSparse ProseBittersweetSubstance Abuse
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Unaccustomed Earth

Jhumpa Lahiri · 352 pages

These eight stories by beloved and bestselling author Jhumpa Lahiri take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand, as they explore the secrets at the heart of family life. Here they enter the worlds of sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers. Rich with the signature gifts that have established Jhumpa Lahiri as one of our most essential writers,

Short StoriesSparse ProseBittersweetMarriage in Trouble
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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.

AddictionBleakSparse ProseSubstance Abuse
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The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

Breece D'J Pancake · 192 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistSparse ProseBleakShort Stories
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Dirty Havana Trilogy

Pedro Juan Gutierrez · 400 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistSparse ProseBleakSubstance Abuse
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Gather

Kenneth M. Cadow · 325 pages

Publisher Annotation: A resourceful teenager in rural Vermont struggles to hold on to the family home while his mom recovers from addiction in this striking debut novel.

AddictionWorking-Class ProtagonistBittersweetSubstance Abuse
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Delicious Foods

James Hannaham · 371 pages

"Darlene, once an exemplary wife and a loving mother to her young son, Eddie, finds herself devastated by the unforeseen death of her husband. Unable to cope with her grief, she turns to drugs, and quickly forms an addiction. One day she disappears without a trace. Unbeknownst to eleven-year-old Eddie, now left behind in a panic-stricken search for her, Darlene has been lured away with false promi

AddictionWorking-Class ProtagonistBleakSubstance Abuse
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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.

Sparse ProseSubstance AbuseCharacter-DrivenBittersweet
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Joe

Larry Brown · 348 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistBleakSubstance AbuseSparse Prose
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The Short Novels of John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck · 550 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistSparse ProseBittersweetBleak
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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 174 pages

First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Iv

Sparse ProseWorking-Class ProtagonistBleakCharacter-Driven
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Voyage In The Dark

Jean Rhys · 188 pages

"Often considered Jean Rhys's most autobiographical novel, this masterful and moving work follows a chorus girl, Anna, who struggles to adjust to cold and inhospitable England after a childhood in the West Indies. When an affair that at first feels like salvation comes to a disastrous end, Anna begins to unravel"--

BleakSparse ProseWorking-Class ProtagonistBittersweet
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Tender Is the Night

F. Scott Fitzgerald · 349 pages

A psychiatrist, Dick Diver, treats and eventually marries a wealthy patient, Nicole. Eventually, this marriage destroys him.

Marriage in TroubleAddictionSubstance AbuseBittersweet
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Working-Class ProtagonistShort StoriesSparse ProseBleak
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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 ProtagonistBleakSubstance Abuse
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Runaway

Alice Munro · 335 pages

In Alice Munro’s superb new collection, we find stories about women of all ages and circumstances, their lives made palpable by the subtlety and empathy of this incomparable writer. The runaway of the title story is a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband. In "Passion," a country girl emerging into the larger world via a job in a resort hotel disco

Short StoriesSparse ProseBittersweetMarriage in Trouble

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