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Ask the Dust

John Fante · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

Midnight Cowboy

James Leo Herlihy · 253 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistBig CityCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
❤️

Dance Dance Dance

Haruki Murakami · 393 pages

Big CityWriter ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenHollywood
❤️

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

Working-Class ProtagonistBig CityCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
❤️

Women

Charles Bukowski · 297 pages

Low-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at fifty, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life, running three hundred hangovers a year, and maintaining a sex life that woul

Writer ProtagonistWorking-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
❤️

Studs Lonigan

James T. Farrell · 819 pages

[William V. Lipton][1] from Ann Arbor, MI says: "This is both a coming-of-age novel and a social history. Set during the 1920s and 1930s, it follows Studs as he grows through his teen years in Chicago. It shows the influences on urban children, the stresses on families and the American society during that time. The characters and dialogue are captivating." ([on Flashlight Worthy][2]) [1]:

Working-Class ProtagonistBig CityCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
❤️

Martin Eden

Jack London · 411 pages

Jack London's Martin Eden was first published in 1909 and is the story of a young writer's quest for celebrity and love. Much loved by writers who identify with Martin's belief that when he posted a manuscript, 'there was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps,' that automatically ret

Writer ProtagonistWorking-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
❤️

Stoner

John Williams · 278 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionClassics
❤️

No One Writes to the Colonel

Gabriel Garcia Marquez · 170 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionClassics
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Little Man, What Now?

Hans Fallada · 383 pages

First published in Germany in 1932, Fallada's documentary novel is a portrait of Germany during its period of economic and political breakdown prior to the advent of Hitler.

Working-Class ProtagonistBig CityCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
❤️

The Tin Flute

Gabrielle Roy · 393 pages

A family in the Saint-Henri slums of Montreal struggles to overcome poverty and ignorance while searching for love.

Big CityWorking-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
❤️

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 ProtagonistBig CityCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
❤️

Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned

Walter Mosley · 208 pages

Socrates Fortlow is Walter Mosley's most compelling character since Easy Rawlins, a tough, brooding ex-convict and is set to be a bold and original new hero.

Working-Class ProtagonistBig CityCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
❤️

The Outsiders

S.E. Hinton · 192 pages

According to Ponyboy, there are two kinds of people in the world: greasers and socs. A soc (short for "social") has money, can get away with just about anything, and has an attitude longer than a limousine. A greaser, on the other hand, always lives on the outside and needs to watch his back. Ponyboy is a greaser, and he's always been proud of it, even willing to rumble against a gang of socs f

Working-Class ProtagonistWriter ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
❤️

Ways of Going Home

Alejandro Zambra · 139 pages

Writer ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenBig CityLiterary Fiction
❤️

To Have and Have Not

Ernest Hemingway · 262 pages

This 1936 novel tells the story of an American fishing boat skipper who dabbles in a little smuggling to make ends meet. In need of money for his family the captain reluctantly becomes agrees to smuggle a group of Chinese immigrants from Cuba to Florida. This is Hemingway’s only novel to be set in the United States.

Working-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionClassics
❤️

This Is How You Lose Her

Junot Diaz · 240 pages

This is a collection of stories that explores the power of love in all its forms, obsessive love, illicit love, fading love, maternal love, as it is shaped by passion, betrayal, and the echoes of intimacy.

Character-DrivenWriter ProtagonistBig CityLiterary Fiction
❤️

Tropic of Cancer

Henry Miller · 321 pages

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

Writer ProtagonistWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary FictionClassics
❤️

The Assistant

Bernard Malamud · 246 pages

Frank, a troubled, somewhat desperate, Italo-American works long hours in the grocery store of a struggling Jewish family in a Brooklyn neighborhood. He develops a secret passion for his employer's attractive daughter.

Working-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionClassics
❤️

My Name Is Lucy Barton

Elizabeth Strout · 200 pages

"Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn't spoken for many years, comes to see her and a simple hospital visit becomes a portal to the most tender relationship of all--the one between mother and daughter"--

Writer ProtagonistWorking-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
🙂

Interior Chinatown

Charles Yu · 288 pages

HollywoodBig CityCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
🙂

The Dharma Bums

Jack Kerouac · 204 pages

The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The basis for the novel's semi-fictional accounts are events occurring years after the events of On the Road. The main characters are the narrator Ray Smith, based on Kerouac, and Japhy Ryder, based on the poet and essayist Gary Snyder, who was instrumental in Kerouac's introduction to Buddhism in the mid-1950s. The book co

Writer ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionClassics
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The Citadel

A.J. Cronin · 374 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionClassics
🙂

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.

Big CityWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary FictionClassics
🙂

My Brother Jack

George Johnston

Working-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenWriter ProtagonistLiterary Fiction

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