What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorOnce Were Warriors
Alan Duff · 220 pages
A frank portrayal of Maori life in New Zealand. A powerful story in which everyone is a victim and through the strength and vision of one woman transcends brutality and leads the way to a new alternative.
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.
Save Yourself
Kelly Braffet · 317 pages
While a convenience-store clerk navigates the pitfalls of his father's imprisonment and the baffling attentions of two young women, a high school freshman endures her parents' fundamentalism and cruel classmates by joining a circle of dark misfits.
Back Roads
Tawni O'Dell · 352 pages
"Harley Altmyer, the heartbreaking and lovable hero of Tawni O'Dell's debut novel, should be in college drinking Rolling Rock and chasing girls. He should be freed from his stifling coal town, with its lack of jobs and no sense of humor. Instead, he's marooned in the Pennsylvania backwoods caring for his three beloved but unruly younger sisters. He has, at best, a shaky hold on the vicissitudes o
Dirty Havana Trilogy
Pedro Juan Gutierrez · 400 pages
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
Ham on Rye
Charles Bukowski · 288 pages
In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, women, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D. H. Lawrence, Ham on Rye of
Love Me Back
Merritt Tierce · 220 pages
"Marie, a young single mother, lands a job at an upscale Dallas steakhouse. She is preternaturally attuned to the appetites of her patrons, but quickly learns to hide her private struggle behind an easy smile and a crisp white apron. In a world of long hours and late nights, where everything runs on a currency of favors, cash, and cachet, Marie gives in to brutally self-destructive impulses. She l
The Death of Sweet Mister
Daniel Woodrell · 208 pages
"Shuggie Akins is a lonely fat boy of thirteen. His mother, Glenda, teases him with her sexual provocations. His father, Red, is a brutal man with a short fuse who mocks and despises his son. Into this mix comes Jimmy Vin Pearce with his shiny green T-bird and his smart city clothes. It isn't long before he and Glenda begin a torrid affair. What follows is violent, shocking, and totally unpredicta
The Jungle
Upton Sinclair · 342 pages
Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the appalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, the book was c
On the Savage Side
Tiffany McDaniel · 464 pages
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
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
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
The Informers
Bret Easton Ellis · 225 pages
Los Angeles, 1980s. Centers on an array of characters who represent both the top of the heap - a Hollywood dream merchant, a dissolute rock star, an aging newscaster - and the very bottom (a voyeuristic doorman, an amoral ex-con). Connecting the intertwining strands are a group of beautiful, blonde young men and women who sleep all day and party all night, doing drugs and one another with total ab
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess · 188 pages
A Clockwork Orange is a dystopian satirical black comedy novel by English writer Anthony Burgess, published in 1962. It is set in a near-future society that has a youth subculture of extreme violence. The teenage protagonist, Alex, narrates his violent exploits and his experiences with state authorities intent on reforming him. The book is partially written in a Russian-influenced argot called "Na
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
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
The Family of Pascual Duarte
Camilo Jose Cela, Anthony Kerrigan · 198 pages
Bastard Out of Carolina
Dorothy Allison · 309 pages
Bone, an illegitimate child in a family of social outcasts, sees her mother's happiness with her new husband and will not tell when the stepfather begins abusing her in the 1950s.