Books like 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.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Requiem for a Dream
Last Exit to Brooklyn
Linked stories of longshoremen, hustlers, transvestites, and strikers in 1950s Red Hook Brooklyn, told in unpunctuated bursts that broke American obscenity law and then the English sentence.
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.
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.
The Man with the Golden Arm
Frankie Machine, a card dealer in Chicago's Polish neighbourhood, back from the war with a morphine habit, wants to be a jazz drummer and to get clear of the life.
Junky
Burroughs's first book, a flat, exact account of a heroin user's life in 1940s New York, New Orleans and Mexico City, told by a man who has learned everything about the drug except how to stop.
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.
Narcopolis
In an opium den on Shuklaji Street in Bombay in the 1970s, the narrator meets Dimple, a eunuch who prepares the pipes, and the den's world changes as heroin arrives.
Monkey Grip
Nora, a single mother living in shared houses in inner Melbourne in the 1970s, falls in love with Javo, a junkie actor who keeps disappearing.
Blue Sisters
A year after their sister Nicky's death, the three remaining Blue sisters, a lawyer in London, a boxer in Los Angeles and a model in Paris, come back to New York to stop their parents selling the family apartment.
No Longer Human
Three notebooks left by Oba Yozo tell how, since childhood, he has felt unable to understand other people, playing the clown to hide it, and how he has drifted from school to drink, women and worse.
The Emperor of Gladness
On a rainy evening in East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai is about to jump from a bridge when Grazina, an elderly Lithuanian widow with dementia, calls him down, and he becomes her live-in carer while working at a fast-food restaurant.
She's Come Undone
Dolores Price narrates forty years of her own life, from a television-fed New England childhood through rape and obesity and a bad marriage into something that finally looks like a self.