Books like Sex and Rage
Jacaranda Leven, a surfer and party girl who drifts through Los Angeles at the end of the 1970s, starts writing seriously and moves to New York, and has to decide what she will give up to keep going.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Sex and Rage
Slow Days, Fast Company
Sketches of Los Angeles in the 1970s, from Hollywood parties to the beach towns down the coast, written by a woman who knows the city's pleasures and its boredom equally well and would not live anywhere else.
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.
Women
A down-and-out poet in Los Angeles navigates a series of women, bars, and hangovers in Bukowski's autobiographical novel about surviving desire.
Hot Water Music
Short stories of drunks, failed writers, gamblers and the women who put up with them, set in the bars, racetracks and cheap apartments of Bukowski's Los Angeles.
Breakfast at Tiffany's
A young writer looks back on the wartime year he lived downstairs from Holly Golightly, a Manhattan café-society girl with a past she keeps rewriting and a cat she refuses to name.
The Rum Diary
In 1958, Paul Kemp, a young freelance journalist, takes a job at a failing English-language newspaper in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and drinks, brawls and drifts towards trouble, in Thompson's early autobiographical novel.
Rules of Civility
A young woman in Depression-era New York navigates the city's elite hotels and speakeasies, building a life through wit, nerve, and a single evening's lucky encounter.
Perfume & Pain
Astrid Dahl, a lesbian novelist cancelled after a West Hollywood bookstore event, retreats to her Sapphic Scribes writing group, tries to give up pills and drink, and falls for nearly every woman in her orbit while her agent waits for the next book.
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.
City of Girls
In 1940, nineteen-year-old Vivian Morris, sent down from Vassar, goes to live with her aunt Peg, who runs a crumbling midtown theatre called the Lily Playhouse, and plunges into a world of showgirls, playboys and nights that last until morning.
A Manual for Cleaning Women
Forty-three stories drawn from Lucia Berlin's own life: cleaning houses in Berkeley, working in emergency rooms and a prison, growing up in mining towns and in Chile, raising four sons.
Table for Two
Six short stories set mostly in New York and a novella that follows Eve Ross from Rules of Civility to 1938 Hollywood, each turning on a chance meeting or a decision made over a meal.