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The Day of the Locust

Nathanael West · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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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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Mother Night

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. · 202 pages

Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense. American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of gray with a verdict that will haunt us all.

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Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace · 1,088 pages

A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connec

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The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka · 95 pages

Metamorphosis (German: Die Verwandlung) is a novella written by Franz Kafka which was first published in 1915. One of Kafka's best-known works, Metamorphosis tells the story of salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself inexplicably transformed into a huge insect (German: ungeheueres Ungeziefer, lit. "monstrous vermin") and subsequently struggles to adjust to this new condition.

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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

Sparse ProseHollywoodBleakLiterary Fiction
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Popcorn

Ben Elton · 301 pages

Popcorn is a 1996 novel by the British writer Ben Elton. It shares themes with a number of movies from the mid-1990s, most notably Natural Born Killers by Oliver Stone and Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs by Quentin Tarantino.

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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Ken Kesey · 311 pages

An international bestseller and the basis for a hugely successful film, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was one of the defining works of the 1960s. A mordant, wickedly subversive parable set in a mental ward, the novel chronicles the head-on collision between its hell-raising, life-affirming hero Randle Patrick McMurphy and the totalitarian rule of Big Nurse. McMurphy swaggers into

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The Orphan Master's Son

Adam Johnson · 456 pages

An epic novel and a thrilling literary discovery, The Orphan Master’s Son follows a young man’s journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea. Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother—a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang—and an influential father who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. There the boy is giv

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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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The Loved One

Evelyn Waugh · 160 pages

Following the death of a friend, the poet and pets' mortician Dennis Barlow finds himself entering the artificial Hollywood paradise of the Whispering Glades Memorial Park. Within its golden gates, death, American-style, is wrapped up and sold like a package holiday--and Dennis gets drawn into a bizarre love triangle with Aimée Thanatogenos, a naïve Californian corpse beautician, and Mr. Joyboy, a

HollywoodSatireDark ComedySatirical Humor
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Animal Farm

George Orwell · 122 pages

Animal Farm is a brilliant political satire and a powerful and affecting story of revolutions and idealism, power and corruption. 'All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.' Mr Jones of Manor Farm is so lazy and drunken that one day he forgets to feed his livestock. The ensuing rebellion under the leadership of the pigs Napoleon and Snowball leads to the animals taking ov

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Moving Pictures

Terry Pratchett · 339 pages

Discworld's pesky alchemists are up to their old tricks again. This time, they've discovered how to get gold from silver -- the silver screen that is. Hearing the siren call of Holy Wood is one Victor Tugelbend, a would-be wizard turned extra. He can't sing, he can't dance, but he can handle a sword (sort of), and now he wants to be a star. So does Theda Withel, an ambitious ingenue from a little

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Waiting for Godot

Samuel Beckett · 87 pages

This volume is an absurdist play in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly and in vain for the arrival of someone named Godot. They claim he's an acquaintance but in fact hardly know him, admitting that they would not recognize him when they do see him.

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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

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Catch-22

Joseph Heller · 463 pages

*Catch-22* is like no other novel. It has its own rationale, its own extraordinary character. It moves back and forth from hilarity to horror. It is outrageously funny and strangely affecting. It is totally original. Set in the closing months of World War II in an American bomber squadron off Italy, *Catch-22* is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian, who is frantic and furious because thousan

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Money

Martin Amis · 368 pages

An anti-hero to beat them all, John Self is a dissipated connoisseur of self-gratification. Addicted to porn, fast-food and money, he lives a culture-less high-life in New York and London, groping his way through a world of all-day hangovers, barely remembered debaucheries and desires that are both pointless and insatiable. In this hilariously grotesque black comedy Amis explores the back streets

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Naked Lunch

William S. Burroughs · 304 pages

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Hollywood

Charles Bukowski · 239 pages

Bukowski's alter ego, Henry Chinaski, returns, revelling in his eternal penchant for booze, women and horse-racing as he makes the precarious journey from poet to screenwriter. Based on Bukowski's experiences when working on the film Barfly, the absurdity and egotism of the film industry are laid bare in this deadpan, touching and funny glimpse into the endless negotiations and back-stabbings of L

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Play It as It Lays

Joan Didion · 214 pages

Set in a place beyond good and evil---literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul---it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.

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Interior Chinatown

Charles Yu · 288 pages

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High-Rise

J.G. Ballard · 207 pages

*High-Rise* is a 1975 novel by British writer J. G. Ballard. The story describes the disintegration of a luxury high-rise building as its affluent residents gradually descend into violent chaos. As with Ballard's previous novels *Crash* (1973) and *Concrete Island* (1974), High-Rise inquires into the ways in which modern social and technological landscapes could alter the human psyche in provocati

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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.

BleakDark ComedySatireLiterary Fiction
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White Noise

Don DeLillo · 326 pages

The trials and tribulations of a profesor of Hitler studies.

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Laughter in the Dark

Vladimir Nabokov · 197 pages

Film MakingArtist ProtagonistDark ComedyLiterary Fiction

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