Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson (Vintage, $12). The prose equivalent of Sympathy for the Devil. Or is it The Great Gatsby on acid? At last, I thought when I read this in college, a literary equivalent to the manic, visceral energy of rock ’n’ roll and an epitaph for the hedonistic idealism of the ’60s. As well as one of the great first lines in literature.
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please by Raymond Carver (Vintage, $13). I imagine that this book was for my generation of creative writing school geeks what reading Hemingway’s In Our Time was for readers in the ’20s. Carver stripped it all down to the essentials, and taught us to hear speech in a new way.
A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley (Vintage, $14). A howling heart’s cry of a memoir. In telling the story of his wasted life and his failed literary ambition, Exley redeems both. This novel has an extraordinary immediacy of tone that’s like a suicide note from your best friend.
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The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy (Grove, $13). Sebastian Dangerfield is the reincarnation of James Joyce’s Buck Mulligan, a Dublin antihero and all-around bad boy for the ages. Donleavy’s prose is a pan pipe of an instrument that shuttles between the lyrical and the obscene.
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh (Back Bay Books, $15). A hilarious, bitchy satire of the Bright Young Things of the ’20s, who reminded me quite a bit of the BYTs of the ’80s. “Oh, Nina, what a lot of parties.” Waugh’s ear for dialogue and his merciless wit were never on better display.
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