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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
❤️

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.

Substance AbuseDark ComedyAnti-HeroWorking-Class Protagonist
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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

Sparse ProseDark ComedySubstance AbuseAnti-Hero
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Joe

Larry Brown · 348 pages

Substance AbuseSparse ProseWorking-Class ProtagonistAnti-Hero
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Dirty Havana Trilogy

Pedro Juan Gutierrez · 400 pages

Sparse ProseWorking-Class ProtagonistSubstance AbuseShort Stories
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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.

Sparse ProseShort StoriesSubstance AbuseWorking-Class Protagonist
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Naked Lunch

William S. Burroughs · 304 pages

Substance AbuseAnti-HeroDark ComedyLiterary Fiction
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To Have and Have Not

Ernest Hemingway · 262 pages

This 1936 novel tells the story of an American fishing boat skipper who dabbles in a little smuggling to make ends meet. In need of money for his family the captain reluctantly becomes agrees to smuggle a group of Chinese immigrants from Cuba to Florida. This is Hemingway’s only novel to be set in the United States.

Sparse ProseAnti-HeroWorking-Class ProtagonistDark
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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

Sparse ProseAnti-HeroWorking-Class ProtagonistSubstance Abuse
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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Hunter S. Thompson · 204 pages

Maverick author Hunter S. Thompson introduced the world to "gonzo journalism" with this cult classic that shot back up the best seller lists after Thompson's suicide in 2005. No book ever written has more perfectly captured the spirit of the 1960s counterculture. In Las Vegas to cover a motorcycle race, Raoul Duke (Thompson) and his attorney Dr. Gonzo (inspired by a friend of Thompson) are quickly

Substance AbuseDark ComedyAnti-HeroLiterary Fiction
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Kiss Me, Judas

Will Christopher Baer · 316 pages

Substance AbuseAnti-HeroSparse ProseDark Comedy
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I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell

Tucker Max · 288 pages

The Book That Inspired The MovieMy name is Tucker Max, and I am an asshole. I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead. But, I do contribute to humanity in one very important way: I share my a

Substance AbuseDark ComedyAnti-HeroSpicy
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The Rules of Attraction

Bret Easton Ellis · 283 pages

First Sentence: “And it’s a story that might bore you, but you don’t have to listen, she told me, because she always knew it was going to be like that, and it was, she thinks, her first year, or actually weekend, really a Friday, in September, and Camden, and this was three or four years ago, and she got so drunk that she ended up in bed, lost her virginity (late, she was eighteen) in Lorna Slavin

Substance AbuseAnti-HeroDark ComedyDark
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The Family of Pascual Duarte

Camilo Jose Cela, Anthony Kerrigan · 198 pages

Sparse ProseAnti-HeroWorking-Class ProtagonistDark
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Complete Novels: Red Harvest / The Dain Curse / The Maltese Falcon / The Glass Key / The Thin Man

Dashiell Hammett · 967 pages

"In a few years of extraordinary creative energy, Dashiell Hammett invented the modern American crime novel."--BOOK JACKET. "The five novels that Hammett published between 1929 and 1934, collected here in one volume, have become part of modern American culture, creating archetypal characters and establishing the ground rules for a whole tradition of hardboiled writing."--BOOK JACKET. "Each novel

Sparse ProseAnti-HeroSubstance AbuseDark
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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.

Sparse ProseShort StoriesDark ComedyDark
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The White Tiger

Aravind Adiga · 304 pages

Balram Halwai is a complicated man. Servant. Philosopher. Entrepreneur. Murderer. Over the course of seven nights, by the scattered light of a preposterous chandelier, Balram tells the terrible and transfixing story of how he came to be a success in life -- having nothing but his own wits to help him along.

Dark ComedyAnti-HeroWorking-Class ProtagonistDark
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Angels

Denis Johnson · 217 pages

Angels puts Jamie Mays--a runaway wife toting along two kids--and Bill Houston--ex-Navy man, ex-husband, ex-con--on a Greyhound bus for a dark, wild ride cross country. Driven by restless souls, bad booze, and desperate needs, Jamie and Bill bounce from bus stations to cheap hotels as they ply the strange, fascinating, and dangerous fringe of American life. Their tickets may say Phoenix, but their

Sparse ProseSubstance AbuseWorking-Class ProtagonistDark
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Venus Drive: Stories

Sam Lipsyte · 192 pages

Short StoriesDark ComedySparse ProseSubstance Abuse
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A Walk on the Wild Side

Nelson Algren · 346 pages

With its depictions of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, A Walk in the Wild Side has found a place in the imaginations of all generations since it first appeared. As Algren admitted, the book "wasn't written until long after it had been walked . . . I found my way to the streets on the other side of the Southern

Working-Class ProtagonistDark ComedySubstance AbuseDark
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The Outlaw Album: Stories

Daniel Woodrell · 176 pages

Twelve short stories depict people on the fringes of society, including an injured rapist who is cared for by a young girl and a husband who cruelly avenges the murder of his wife's pet.

Short StoriesSparse ProseWorking-Class ProtagonistDark
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Praise

Andrew McGahan · 279 pages

Substance AbuseSparse ProseWorking-Class ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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The Sisters Brothers

Patrick deWitt · 379 pages

Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm's gold-mining claim outside Sacramento, El

Dark ComedyAnti-HeroSubstance AbuseDark
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The Killing Of The Tinkers

Ken Bruen · 254 pages

Back in Galway and back to his old drinking habits, Jack Taylor agrees to assist a gypsy in an investigation into the deaths of a number of members of the gypsy clan, deaths that the Guards, the Irish police, are reluctant to investigate.

Substance AbuseSparse ProseAnti-HeroDark
🙂

Happy!

Grant Morrison

Nick Sax is a corrupt, intoxicated ex-cop turned hitman, adrift in a stinking twilight world of casual murder, soulless sex, eczema and betrayal. With a hit gone wrong, a bullet in his side, the cops and the mob on his tail, and a monstrous child-killer in a Santa suit on the loose, Nick and his world will be changed forever this Christmas. By a tiny blue horse called Happy..."--Back cover.

Anti-HeroDark ComedySubstance AbuseDark

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