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Midnight Cowboy

James Leo Herlihy · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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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]:

Big CityWorking-Class ProtagonistBleakCharacter-Driven
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Ask the Dust

John Fante · 165 pages

Big CityBleakWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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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.

BleakNew York CityWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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Go

John Clellon Holmes · 311 pages

New York CityBig CityBleakCharacter-Driven
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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

Working-Class ProtagonistBleakBig CityLiterary Fiction
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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

BleakBig CityWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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The Chosen

Chaim Potok · 284 pages

It's about two jewish boys from different jewish sects with very differing doctrine. The kids meet in the unlikely circumstance of a baseball game, and a terrible accident, that leads them to be lifelong friends

Big CityNew York CityLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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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.

BleakBig CityWorking-Class ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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Desperate Characters

Paula Fox · 166 pages

First published in 1970 to great acclaim, this novel stands as one of the most dazzling and rigorous examples of the storyteller's craft in postwar American literature--a novel that, according to Irving Howe, ranks with "Billy Budd" and "The Great Gatsby".

BleakNew York CityBig CityLiterary Fiction
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Sister Carrie

Theodore Dreiser · 450 pages

Young Caroline Meeber leaves home for the first time and experiences work, love, and the pleasures and responsibilities of independence in late-nineteenth-century Chicago and New York.

Big CityNew York CityWorking-Class ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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The Man With the Golden Arm

Nelson Algren · 364 pages

"A novel of rare genius, The Man with the Golden Arm has been called "Algren's most satisfying work." It describes the dissolution of a card-dealing WWII veteran named Frankie Machine, caught in the act of slowly cutting his own heart into water-thin slices. For Frankie, a murder committed may be the least of his problems.". "In this first critical edition of an Algren work, Algren's novel is joi

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'Tis A Memoir

Frank McCourt · 512 pages

Big CityNew York CityWorking-Class ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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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 CityBleakWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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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.

Working-Class ProtagonistBleakCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Stoner

John Williams · 278 pages

BleakWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary FictionClassics
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Beautyland

Marie-Helene Bertino · 327 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistBig CityNew York CityLiterary Fiction
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The Lost Weekend

Charles Jackson · 244 pages

A would-be writer's dissatisfaction with his life leads him on a three-day binge. This film gives an uncompromising look at the devastating effects of alcoholism. Made into a motion picture.

BleakNew York CityLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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The Street

Ann Petry · 435 pages

The Street is a novel published in 1946 by African-American writer Ann Petry . Set in World War II era Harlem, it centers on the life of Lutie Johnson. Petry's novel is a commentary on the social injustices that confronted her character, Lutie Johnson, as a single black mother in this time period. Lutie is confronted by racism, sexism, and classism on a daily basis in her pursuit of the American d

BleakNew York CityWorking-Class ProtagonistCharacter-Driven
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No One Writes to the Colonel

Gabriel Garcia Marquez · 170 pages

BleakWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Rickshaw Boy

Lao She

First published in China in 1937, *Rickshaw Boy* is the story of Xiangzi, an honest and serious country boy who works as a rickshaw puller in Beijing. A man of simple needs whose greatest ambition is to one day own his own rickshaw, Xiangzi is nonetheless thwarted, time and again, in his attempts to improve his lot in life. One of the most important and popular works of twentieth-century Chinese

BleakBig CityWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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Girl in Translation

Jean Kwok · 293 pages

Big CityWorking-Class ProtagonistNew York CityCharacter-Driven
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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.

Big CityWorking-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Street Kids

Pier Paolo Pasolini · 240 pages

The Street Kids is the most important novel by Italy's preeminent late-20th Century author and intellectual, Pier Paolo Pasolini. It tells the story of Riccetto, a poor urchin who lives on the outskirts of Rome. Readers meet him at his first communion in 1944 during the German occupation of Italy. In the years that follow, drifting ever further from family and friends, Riccetto moves from petty th

Big CityBleakWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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The Dollmaker

Harriette Simpson Arnow · 624 pages

BleakBig CityWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary Fiction

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