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What Makes Sammy Run?

Budd Schulberg · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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Rags to RichesAnti-HeroLiterary FictionClassics
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Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Patrick Süskind · 263 pages

Rags to RichesAnti-HeroLiterary FictionClassics
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The Red and the Black

Stendhal · 472 pages

Rags to RichesAnti-HeroLiterary FictionClassics
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Ask the Dust

John Fante · 165 pages

HollywoodAnti-HeroLiterary FictionClassics
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Barry Lyndon

William Makepeace Thackeray · 312 pages

Set in late 18th century Europe the adventures and misadventures of a minor member of the Irish gentry trying to better himself. Redmond Barry of Bally Barry is a clever young man, who learns the manners of a gentleman. This serves him well, for the next few decades he meanders through Europe, as a soldier, mercenary, gambler, and vagabond. He reaches the pinnacle of worldly success by marriage to

Rags to RichesAnti-HeroClassicsFirst Person Narrator
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David Copperfield

Charles Dickens · 742 pages

Rags to RichesLiterary FictionClassicsFirst Person Narrator
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Tono-Bungay

H.G. Wells · 395 pages

George Ponderovo's quiet young life is changed forever when he is forced to leave home and is apprenticed to his dynamic Uncle Edward in his chemist's shop. Edward, determined to "strike out", invents a bogus medicine called Tono-Bungay which earns him a vast fortune. George's share of the wealth enables him to live out his fantasies by building an aeroplane. As he witnesses the spectacular rise o

Rags to RichesLiterary FictionClassicsFirst Person Narrator
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Anti-HeroLiterary FictionClassicsFirst Person Narrator
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Tropic of Cancer

Henry Miller · 321 pages

A stream-of-consciousness story of a poverty-stricken young American, living in Paris.

Anti-HeroLiterary FictionClassicsFirst Person Narrator
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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.

Rags to RichesAnti-HeroLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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Notes from Underground

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Christian Redl, Norman Dietz · 155 pages

Its nameless hero is a profoundly alienated individual in whose brooding self-analysis there is a search for the true and the good in a world of relative values and few absolutes. Moreover, the novel introduces themes — moral, religious, political and social — that dominated Dostoyevsky's later works.

Anti-HeroLiterary FictionClassicsSatirical
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The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald · 182 pages

Here is a novel, glamorous, ironical, compassionate – a marvelous fusion into unity of the curious incongruities of the life of the period – which reveals a hero like no other – one who could live at no other time and in no other place. But he will live as a character, we surmise, as long as the memory of any reader lasts. "There was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to

Rags to RichesLiterary FictionClassicsFirst Person Narrator
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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

Anti-HeroClassicsLiterary FictionSatirical
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My Face for the World to See

Alfred Hayes · 131 pages

My face for the world to see is set in Hollywood, where the tonic for anonymity is fame and you're only as real as your image. At a party, the narrator, a screenwriter, rescues a young woman who staggers with drunken determination into the Pacific. He is living far from his wife in New York and long ago shed any illusions about the value of his work. He just wants to be left alone. And yet without

HollywoodLiterary FictionClassicsFirst Person Narrator
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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

HollywoodClassicsLiterary FictionMale Lead
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The Count of Monte Cristo

Alexandre Dumas · 592 pages

Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and becomes determined not only to escape but to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. A huge popular success when it was first serialized in the

Rags to RichesAnti-HeroClassicsMale Lead
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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

Anti-HeroLiterary FictionClassicsFirst Person Narrator
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The Deer Park

Norman Mailer · 348 pages

Amid the cactus wilds some two hudred miles from Hollywood lies a privileged oasis called Desert D'Or. It is a place for starlets and would-be starlets, directors, studio execs, and the well-groomed lowlifes who cater to them. And, as imagined by Norman Mailer in this blistering classic of 1950s Hollywood, Desert D'Or is a moral proving ground, where men and women discover what they really want—an

HollywoodLiterary FictionClassicsFirst Person Narrator
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All the King's Men

Robert Penn Warren · 490 pages

The story is about Willie Stark, a slick politician of humble birth, who was based on real-life Huey Long, a Louisiana governor, but the real main character is Jack Burden, a reporter who serves to narrate the story and Stark's rise to power.

Rags to RichesLiterary FictionClassicsFirst Person Narrator
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The Financier

Theodore Dreiser · 508 pages

Rags to RichesClassicsLiterary FictionMale Lead
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The Talented Mr. Ripley

Patricia Highsmith · 256 pages

The first of the acclaimed Ripley novels, this clever psychological thriller introduces the reader to Tom Ripley and his extraordinary modus operandi. Accepting a commission from a wealthy businessman to travel to Italy in an attempt to convince his wayward son to return to the United States, Ripley gradually develops a plan to assume the young man’s identity along with his bank account.

Anti-HeroRags to RichesClassicsLiterary Fiction
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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.

Anti-HeroLiterary FictionClassicsFirst Person Narrator
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Karoo

Steve Tesich · 488 pages

HollywoodAnti-HeroLiterary FictionMale Lead
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Room at the Top

John Braine · 262 pages

Rags to RichesClassicsLiterary FictionMale Lead

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