Books like Play It as It Lays
Maria Wyeth, a fading actress in late-1960s Los Angeles, drives the freeways all day to keep from thinking about her marriage, her institutionalised daughter and what she cannot make herself feel.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Play It as It Lays
Less Than Zero
A college student returns to 1980s Los Angeles and drifts through a world of cocaine, parties, and moral emptiness.
The Informers
Linked stories of rich, numbed Los Angeles in the early 1980s, in which students, parents, studio executives, a rock star and a pair of vampires drift through cocaine, sunshine and emotional vacancy.
Nobody Is Ever Missing
Elyria walks out of her marriage in New York without a word and flies to New Zealand on a one-way ticket, hitchhiking across the country and narrating her unraveling in long, breathless sentences.
Hollywood
Bukowski's semi-autobiographical account of surviving Hollywood while his novel Barfly becomes a movie.
Girl, Interrupted
Kaysen's memoir of the two years she spent at eighteen in McLean Hospital for a borderline diagnosis, told in chips of narrative cut in and out of the case file.
The Day of the Locust
Tod Hackett, a young set designer at a Hollywood studio in the 1930s, falls for a would-be starlet and watches the bored, disappointed people who came to California to die turn ugly.
Colored Television
Jane, a mixed-race novelist in Los Angeles, has spent ten years on a serious book about mixed-race America, and broke and house-sitting for a famous friend, she decides to try selling a television show instead.
The Bell Jar
A young woman's descent into depression in 1950s New York, told with razor wit and suffocating clarity.
Eve's Hollywood
Babitz's first book, a collection of short pieces on growing up in Hollywood, from Hollywood High to the rock clubs of the Sunset Strip, by someone who thinks Los Angeles is the best place on earth.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Chief Bromden, a huge Native American patient who pretends to be deaf and mute, watches Randle McMurphy, a charismatic new arrival, take on the ward's tyrannical Nurse Ratched.
Owls Do Cry
The four Withers children grow up poor in a small New Zealand town, playing on the rubbish dump, and are scattered by death and by the asylum.
Mercury Pictures Presents
Maria Lagana, who fled Mussolini's Italy as a girl, works her way up at a low-budget Hollywood studio during the Second World War, where everyone is hiding something and the government wants propaganda.