At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom: Stories
10 best books like At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom: Stories (Amy Hempel): Night Boat to Tangier, A Home at the End of the World, The City and the Pillar, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories, Jesus' Son, Train Dreams, Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, Poems 1962-2012
| Author | Kevin Barry |
| ISBN | 0385540310 |
In the dark waiting room of the ferry terminal in the sketchy Spanish port of Algeciras, two aging Irishmen — Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, longtime partners in the lucrative and dangerous enterprise of smuggling drugs — sit at night, none too patiently. It is October 23, 2018, and they are...
| Author | Michael Cunningham |
| ISBN | 0312424086 |
From Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours, comes this widely praised novel of two boyhood friends: Jonathan, lonely, introspective, and unsure of himself; and Bobby, hip, dark, and inarticulate. In New York after college, Bobby moves in with Jonathan and his roommate,...
| Author | Gore Vidal |
| ISBN | 1400030374 |
A literary cause célèbre when first published more than fifty years ago, Gore Vidal's now-classic The City and the Pillar stands as a landmark novel of the gay experience.
Jim, a handsome, all-American athlete, has always been shy around girls. But when he and his best friend, Bob, partake...
Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
| Author | Raymond Carver |
| ISBN | 0679722319 |
By the time of his early death in 1988, Raymond Carver had established himself as one of the greatest practitioners of the American short story, a writer who had not only found his own voice but imprinted it in the imaginations of thousands of readers.
'Where I'm Calling From', his last collection,...
| Author | Denis Johnson |
| ISBN | 0060975776 |
Jesus' Son, the first collection of stories by Denis Johnson, presents a unique, hallucinatory vision of contemporary American life unmatched in power and immediacy and marks a new level of achievement for this acclaimed writer. In their intensity of perception, their neon-lit evocation of a strange...
| Author | Denis Johnson |
| ISBN | 1250007658 |
Denis Johnson's Train Dreams is an epic in miniature, one of his most evocative and poignant fictions. It is the story of Robert Grainier, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century---an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles...
Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth
| Author | Chris Ware |
| ISBN | 0224063979 |
Jimmy Corrigan has rightly been hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever to be published. It won the Guardian First Book Award 2001, the first graphic novel to win a major British literary prize.
It is the tragic autobiography of an office dogsbody in Chicago who one day meets the father who...
England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond
| Author | Jon Savage |
| ISBN | 0312288220 |
England's Dreaming is the ultimate book on punk, its progenitors, the Sex Pistols, and the moment they defined for music fans in England and the United States. Savage brings to life the sensational story of the meteoric rise and rapid implosion of the Pistols through layers of rich detail, exclusive...
"I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die..." --John Lydon
Punk has been romanticized and embalmed in various media. An English class revolt that became a worldwide fashion statement, punk's idols were the Sex Pistols, and its sneering hero was Johnny Rotten.
Seventeen...
| Author | Louise Glück |
| ISBN | 0374126089 |
Even when collected, Louise Glück’s poetry resists collection. With each successive book her drive to leave behind what came before has grown more fierce, the force of her gaze fixed on what has yet to be imagined. She invented a form to accommodate this need, the book-length sequence of poems, like...
| Author | Jane Bowles |
| ISBN | 0720611792 |
Eccentric, adventurous Christina Goering Meets the anxious but equally enterprising Mrs. Copperfield at a party.
Two serious ladies who want to live outside of themselves, they go in search of salvation: Mrs. Copperfield visits Panama with her husband, where she finds solace among the...
| Author | Dennis Cooper |
| ISBN | 2867449235 |
Cooper says, "I present the actual act of evil so it's visible and give it a bunch of facets so that you can actually look at it and experience it. You're seduced into dealing with it. ... So with Frisk, whatever pleasure you got out of making a picture in your mind based on ... those people being murdered,...
| Author | Francesca Lia Block |
| ISBN | 0064470652 |
In Witch Baby Francesca Lia Block really spreads her wings and finds her pace. Witch Baby is the second book in her Dangerous Angels series and is her sophomore novel. You really need to have read Weetzie Bat for Witch Baby to make any sense.
Witch Baby is my favorite character in the whole crazy...
| Author | A.M. Homes |
| ISBN | 1862076898 |
This is one of those books to which, if it were possible to give more than 5 stars on GR, I'd definitely give more than 5 stars. There wasn't a single thing about this book that I didn't like. From the narrator, to the writing style, to the exceptional humor and family drama, it was spectacularly executed...
| Author | Ray Charles |
| ISBN | 0306814315 |
Ray Charles (1930-2004) led one of the most extraordinary lives of any popular musician. In Brother Ray, he tells his story in an inimitable and unsparing voice, from the chronicle of his musical development to his heroin addiction to his tangled romantic life. Overcoming poverty, blindness, the...
| Author | Sammy Davis Jr. |
| ISBN | 0374293538 |
I read this in 7th grade. Imagine that, a little white suburban girl in 1973 COMPLETELY INFATUATED with the 40- or 50-something black member of the rat pack. I still remember huge parts of Yes I Can, especially the part where Sammy gets into a car accident and helps the lady out of the other car, all the while...
| Author | Richard Brautigan |
| ISBN | 0224619330 |
Brautigan's poetic style is often surreal, often tender, with touches of humor. The poems are written in clear, straightforward free verse. Here is an example of his style from "The Chinese Checker Players": "When I was six years old/I played Chinese checkers/with a woman/who was ninety-three years...
| Author | Ada Limon |
| ISBN | 1571315128 |
From National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Ada Limón comes The Carrying—her most powerful collection yet.
Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the...
