Many of you have asked me for book recommendations. Rather than a recommendation list, I will show you a few novels that have coaxed my own medulla oblongata into a deeply hardened state. I tend to like visceral and graceful novels with troubled but promising protagonists. I gravitate toward stories that are unabashedly fucking real. Stories where the words on the page dance together like beautifully synchronized ballerinas but are still raw enough to reach out and forcibly smack you in the face.
I will, of course, miss some great ones, but here is my current short list:
1. Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami
2. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
3. Ask the Dust - John Fante
4. Ham on Rye - Charles Bukowski
5. Mao II - Don DeLillo
6. The Pillowman (A Play) - Martin McDonagh
7. Sputnik Sweetheart - Haruki Murakami
8. The Garden of Eden - Ernest Hemingway
9. American Pastoral - Philip Roth
10. Sons and Lovers - D. H. Lawrence
11. Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
12. Naked Lunch - William S. Burroughs
What are the novels that get you off?
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