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🧲 Books like this

Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness

Charles Bukowski · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
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Dirty Havana Trilogy

Pedro Juan Gutierrez · 400 pages

Sparse ProseSubstance AbuseShort StoriesLiterary Fiction
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Venus Drive: Stories

Sam Lipsyte · 192 pages

Short StoriesSparse ProseSubstance AbuseDark Comedy
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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 ProseSubstance AbuseDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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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.

Short StoriesSubstance AbuseSparse ProseLiterary Fiction
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Short StoriesSubstance AbuseDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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Praise

Andrew McGahan · 279 pages

Sparse ProseSubstance AbuseLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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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

Substance AbuseSparse ProseLiterary FictionDark Comedy
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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

Short StoriesSubstance AbuseDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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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.

Short StoriesSparse ProseDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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Big Bad Love

Larry Brown

Short StoriesSubstance AbuseDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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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

Short StoriesDark ComedySubstance AbuseLiterary Fiction
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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.

Sparse ProseSubstance AbuseDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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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

Sparse ProseSubstance AbuseLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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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

Sparse ProseSubstance AbuseLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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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

Sparse ProseSubstance AbuseLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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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

Substance AbuseDark ComedyLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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The Voice Imitator

Thomas Bernhard · 114 pages

Short StoriesSparse ProseDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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The Guards

Ken Bruen · 304 pages

Sparse ProseDark ComedySubstance AbuseFirst Person Narrator
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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.

Short StoriesSparse ProseDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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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.

Substance AbuseDark ComedyLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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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

Short StoriesDark ComedyLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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Black Tickets: Stories

Jayne Anne Phillips · 265 pages

Short StoriesSparse ProseSubstance AbuseLiterary Fiction
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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.

Substance AbuseDark ComedyLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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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.

Short StoriesDark ComedyLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator

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