Books like Naked Lunch
A drug addict's hallucinatory narrative dissolves plot, character, and language itself into a stream of images that broke every rule of what a novel could be.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Naked Lunch
Jesus' Son
Short, hallucinatory stories narrated by a nameless young addict drifting through the American margins of the 1970s, spare and strange and full of grace.
Beautiful Losers
A Montreal folklorist mourning his wife writes about the seventeenth-century Mohawk saint Kateri Tekakwitha and about F., his friend, mentor and his wife's lover, in Cohen's wild, explicit second novel.
Choke
Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout and sex addict, pays for his mother's care home by choking on purpose in restaurants and letting his rescuers send him money, until he learns something about his mother and himself.
Haunted
Seventeen people answer an ad for a writers' retreat and lock themselves into an old theatre for three months, where they tell their worst stories and, to make better ones, set about sabotaging themselves.
The Box Man
A nameless man cuts a window in a cardboard box, puts it over his head and begins to live inside it, writing the notebook the reader holds.
Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes
Cigano, an American drifter living rough in Rio de Janeiro after leaving prison clean of heroin, meets Narcisa, a poet and street addict, and falls for her.
Earthlings
As a girl, Natsuki believed a plush hedgehog from the planet Popinpobopia had given her magic powers, and her cousin Yuu believed he was an alien; as adults, unable to fit into the society she calls the Factory, they set out to escape it.
Trainspotting
Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie, and Spud run together through heroin-era 1980s Leith in a novel written out in the Edinburgh that English-reading publishing had previously been allowed to leave out.
Crash
A London advertising man and a scarred crash researcher share an erotics of car accidents, and Ballard works out, with clinical patience, where that desire goes.
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
A young man is sent across a country where a mad scientist's machines make desires manifest and dismantle reality.
The Dice Man
Luke Rhinehart, a bored Manhattan psychiatrist, begins letting the roll of a die make his decisions, from the trivial to the criminal, and turns the idea into a therapy for his patients.
Requiem for a Dream
Four New Yorkers, a widow taking diet pills so she can appear on a TV game show, her son, his girlfriend and his best friend, who start dealing heroin, slide into addiction in Selby's airless prose.