Books like 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.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Day of the Locust
Miss Lonelyhearts
A male newspaper columnist who answers desperate letters as Miss Lonelyhearts in Depression-era New York takes his readers' suffering to heart, while his cynical editor mocks his growing religious crisis.
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.
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.
Hollywood
Bukowski's semi-autobiographical account of surviving Hollywood while his novel Barfly becomes a movie.
Interior Chinatown
A background actor in a Chinatown cop show realises his entire life has been scripted by stereotypes, and breaks the fourth wall to rewrite his story.
Reflections in a Golden Eye
On an army post in the South in peacetime, a repressed officer, his careless wife, her lover and a silent young private circle one another in a short novel of watching and obsession.
Wise Blood
A young man in the rural American South is consumed by a grotesque religious vision, and the novel's dark comedy conceals a genuine theological horror.
Imperial Bedrooms
Twenty-five years after Less Than Zero, Clay, now a screenwriter, returns to Los Angeles to cast a film and finds the same people, older, richer and emptier, still circling the same moral void.
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.
The Invention of Sound
A Hollywood Foley artist who records real screams for horror films crosses paths with a grieving father hunting the snuff-film ring he believes took his daughter.
Heart of a Dog
A stray dog in 1920s Moscow is surgically transformed into a human, and the resulting creature becomes a savage satire of the New Soviet Man.
In Dubious Battle
Jim Nolan, a young Communist recruit, goes with the seasoned organiser Mac to a California valley to lead the apple pickers in a strike against the growers.