🧲 Books like this
Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness
Charles Bukowski · 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 authorDirty Havana Trilogy
Pedro Juan Gutierrez · 400 pages
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
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Raymond Carver · 159 pages
In his second collection of stories, as in his first, Carver's characters are peripheral people--people without education, insight or prospects, people too unimaginative to even give up. Carver celebrates these men and women.
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
Sherman Alexie · 223 pages
Praise
Andrew McGahan · 279 pages
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
Making Nice
Matt Sumell · 223 pages
"In Matt Sumell's blazing, heartbreaking first book, our rage-filled hero Alby is flailing wildly against the world around him--he punches his sister (she deserved it), "unprotectos" broads (they deserved it and liked it), gets drunk and picks fights (all deserved), defends defenseless creatures both large and small and spews insults at children, slow drivers, lunch ladies, and every single surviv
The Pugilist at Rest
Thom Jones · 240 pages
14 stories grouped into four parts: the horrors of Vietnam; men at war with women; the difficulties of divorce, mental defects, and the ravages of cancer; and battling epilepsy and alcoholism.
Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance
Irvine Welsh · 276 pages
With three delightful tales of love and its up and downs, the ever-surprising Irvine Welsh virtually invents a new genre of fiction: the chemical romance. In "Lorraine Goes to Livingston," a best-selling author of Regency romances, paralyzed and bedridden, plans her revenge on a gambling, whoring husband with the aid of her nurse, Lorraine. In "Fortune's Always Hiding," flawed beauty Samantha Wort
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.
It's Fine by Me
Per Petterson · 199 pages
On his first day of school, a teacher welcomes Audun to the class by asking him to describe his former life in the country. But there are stories about his family he would prefer to keep to himself, such as the weeks he spent living in a couple of cardboard boxes, and the day of his little brother's birth, when his drunken father fired three shots into the ceiling. So he refuses to talk and refuse
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 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
86'd
Dan Fante · 272 pages
In Los Angeles, struggling telemarketer-writer and part-time drunk Bruno Dante is jobless again. The publication of his book of short stories has been put off indefinitely. Searching the want ads for a gig, he finds a chauffeur job. When Bruno calls the number in the ad, he discovers the boss is his former Manhattan employer David Koffman, who is opening a West Coast branch of his thriving limo se
The Voice Imitator
Thomas Bernhard · 114 pages
Homesick for Another World
Ottessa Moshfegh · 304 pages
Features stories, in which the flesh is weak; the timber is crooked; people are cruel to each other, and stupid, and hurtful, but beauty comes from strange sources. In this book, the author shows us uncomfortable things, and makes us look at them forensically - until we find, suddenly, that we are really looking at ourselves.
The Green Man
Kingsley Amis · 240 pages
The alcoholic owner of an English countryside inn divides his time between trying to seduce the female guests and telling tales of ghosts rumored to haunt the inn. After an encounter with a spirit, the man and his cohorts realize that the ghosts are not only real, but after them as well.
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
George Saunders · 179 pages
George Saunders has seen the future of America and it is funny. Bleak, yes, and sad and toxic and greedy - and very, very weird - but funny, too. With today's malls and theme parks and ecological disasters as their foundation, these stories build a tomorrow inhabited by fat executives in despair, genetic mutants in servitude, virtual-reality merchants in Chapter 11, and American Dreamers everywher
Black Tickets: Stories
Jayne Anne Phillips · 265 pages
Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew
Shehan Karunatilaka · 416 pages
Retired sportswriter W.G. Karunasena is dying. He will spend his final months drinking arrack, making his wife unhappy, ignoring his son, and tracking down Pradeep S. Mathew, a spin bowler who has mysteriously disappeared.
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
David Foster Wallace · 273 pages
David Foster Wallace made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. In his exuberantly acclaimed collection, BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN, he combined hilarity and an escalating disquiet in stories that astonish, entertain, and expand our ideas of the pleasures that fiction can afford.

