Books like Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
A pop-culture essayist drives across America visiting sites where rock stars died, using their deaths to examine what music means to the living.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
The Philosophy of Modern Song
Sixty-six short essays on songs by other people, from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, each with a riff on what the song is really about.
Life
Keith Richards tells the story of the Rolling Stones with the same raw energy he brought to the guitar.
Chronicles: Volume One
Dylan's memoir, which skips from his arrival in Greenwich Village in 1961 to the making of New Morning and Oh Mercy, and back to his Minnesota boyhood.
A Visit from the Goon Squad
A novel in linked chapters that leaps through decades and forms, one of them a PowerPoint presentation, following a record executive, his kleptomaniac assistant and the people around them as time changes everything.
Travels with Charley
At fifty-eight Steinbeck sets out in a camper truck with his French poodle, Charley, to rediscover the America he had been writing about, coast to coast and back.
When You Are Engulfed in Flames
Sedaris on quitting cigarettes by moving to Tokyo for three months, on domestic life with Hugh in Paris and Normandy, and on the neighbours, strangers and medical complaints that keep finding him.
Naked
Sedaris on his obsessive-compulsive childhood in Raleigh, hitchhiking, apple picking with strangers, a summer at a nudist colony and his mother's last years, the book that made his name.
Just Kids
Patti Smith remembers her years with Robert Mapplethorpe in New York, from the Chelsea Hotel to their first successes, two young artists holding each other up through hunger and ambition.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
Essays on state fairs, cruise ships, tennis, and television that reveal the absurdity and melancholy hiding in American entertainment culture.
The Year of Magical Thinking
After her husband's sudden death and her daughter's hospitalisation, Didion keeps a forensic record of what magical thinking her grief conjures and what it refuses to.
Stay True
Hua Hsu remembers his friendship with Ken at Berkeley in the 1990s, zines, mixtapes and arguments about what was cool, and the random act of violence that ended it.
Absolutely on Music
Murakami and the conductor Seiji Ozawa listen to recordings together and talk about Mahler, Beethoven and Ozawa's apprenticeships with Bernstein and Karajan.