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Billy Liar

10 best books like Billy Liar (Keith Waterhouse): Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir, Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s, Inside the Whale and Other Essays, The Life And Times Of Little Richard, Selected Poems, In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture, The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll, Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture

Room at the Top
AuthorJohn Braine
ISBN0416006116
This novel has astoundingly bad dialogue in it, all the way through to the bitter end, but it’s still a tough piece of British truth-telling. It’s about two things – class, and the possibilities of moving from the working class to the middle-class ( there’s a careful, excruciating listing of...
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
AuthorAlan Sillitoe
ISBN0452269091
To Arthur Seaton, Key worker on a lathe in a Nottingham cycle factory, life is one long battle with authority. You don't need to give Arthur more than one chance to do the Government or trick the foreman.

And when the day's work is over, Arthur is off to the pubs, raring for adventure. He is a warrior...
Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir
AuthorAnatole Broyard
ISBN0679781269
What Hemingway's A Moveable Feast did for Paris in the 1920s, this charming yet undeceivable memoir does for Greenwich Village in the late 1940s. In 1946, Anatole Broyard was a dapper, earnest, fledgling avant-gardist, intoxicated by books, sex, and the neighborhood that offered both in such abundance....
Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s
AuthorOtto Friedrich
ISBN0060926791
A superb "survey" of Berlin in the 20s by a writer who
appreciates the fantasticalities of the era. It encompasses
everyone fr Fritz Lang to Marlene to Grosz and Hitler's niece
Geli Raubal, the murdered Walther Rathenau and aesthete Harry Kessler. The torchlight parades begin, the candles...
Inside the Whale and Other Essays
AuthorGeorge Orwell
George Orwell is best remembered for ANIMAL FARM and 1984, but it is his essays that launched him. In them he not only demonstrated how he thought, but proposed a rule as to how thinking ought to proceed. Tracing his arguments and their development in these essays is a rich and rewarding exercise. The range...
The Life And Times Of Little Richard
AuthorCharles White
ISBN0711997616
This is Nik Cohn on the subject of Little Richard:

"He looked beautiful. He wore a baggy suit with elephant trousers, 26 inches at the bottoms, and he had his hair back-combed in a monstrous plume like a fountain. Then he had a little toothbrush moustache and a round, totally ecstatic face.
...
Selected Poems
AuthorFrank O'Hara
ISBN0394719735
Frank O'Hara's poems are made for weather like this: bright high summer with air so warm and thick it feels like you could swim in it, when it's easy to forget you or the world has ever been cold. Summery, happy and joyful aren't ideas commonly associated with poetry for grownups but here they're intrinsic…...
In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture
AuthorGeorge Steiner
ISBN0300017103
“Four impressive lectures about the culture of recent times (from the French Revolution) and the conceivable culture of times to come.  Mr. Steiner’s discussion of the break with the traditional literary past (Jewish, Christian, Greek, and Latin) is illuminating and attractively undogmatic. ...
The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll
AuthorCharlie Gillett
ISBN0306806835
When I was 10 years old in 1958 my parents bought me my own radio for my birthday. It was red and about the size of my Roy Rogers tin lunch box. It had a single speaker in the middle and a big round dial on either side of the speaker, one for volume and one to tune in stations. Our family had a big Philco radio in the...
Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture
AuthorJon Savage
ISBN0670038377
From the author of the critically acclaimed England’s Dreaming, a landmark cultural history of youth Teenagers —as we have come to define them —were not, award-winning author Jon Savage tells us, born in the 1950s of rockers and Beatniks, when most histories would begin. Rather, the teenager...
Strange People
AuthorFrank Edwards
ISBN0451058992
Giants, midgets, fat men, a strongwoman, a "monkey girl," psychics, "idiot savants"--this is a classic of stories about strange people. I have the original paperback published in 1961 (price-all of 50 cents!). I remembered some of the stories, but not all. When I ran across this book while going through...
Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock
AuthorNik Cohn
ISBN0802138306
Written in 1968 and revised in 1972, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom was the first book to celebrate the language and the primal essence of rock 'n' roll. But it was much more than that. It was a cogent history of an unruly era, from the rise of Bill Haley to the death of Jimi Hendrix.

And while telling...
Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, First Series
AuthorMalcolm Cowley
ISBN0140045406
Paris Review First Series is the first of collection literary interviews published by The Paris Review (1959), edited by Malcolm Cowley (and includes his introduction, "How Writers Write").

Interviews: Francois Mauriac, E.M. Forster, Joyce Cary, Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, Thorton...
On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious
AuthorDouglas E. Harding
ISBN1878019198
Headlessness, the experience of "no-self" that mystics of all times have aspired to, is an instantaneous way of "waking up" and becoming fully aware of one's real and abiding nature. Douglas Harding, the highly respected mystic-philosopher, describes his first experience of headlessness in "On...
Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective
AuthorArthur C. Danto
ISBN0520216741
In this collection of interconnected essays, Arthur C. Danto argues that Andy Warhol's Brillo Box of 1964 brought the established trajectory of Westen art to an end and gave rise to a pluralism which has changed the way art is made, perceived, and exhibited. Wonderfully illuminating and highly provocative,...
Tales of Beatnik Glory
AuthorEd Sanders
ISBN1560256524
Ed Sanders's mock-heroic (and heroic) odyssey follows poet, filmmaker, and activist Sam Thomas, editor of Dope, Fucking, and Social Change, and a variegated cast of castoffs, dropouts, peaceniks, freakniks, and mendicant filthniks, from Kansas through the beatnik and hippie countercultures...
A Grave for a Dolphin
AuthorAlberto Denti di Pirajno
"Africa taught me the shallowness of the saying that mankind is everywhere the same"
By sally tarbox on November 14, 2017
Format: Hardcover
Magical account by Italian doctor and administrator who served in Eritrea. Takes you back to a different world; the wildlife, the scenery, the superstitious...
David Bomberg
AuthorRichard Cork
ISBN0300038275
Bomberg's career is a case study in neglect. The early popular canvases of this English painter buzzed with mechanistic imagery inspired by futurism. But after fighting on the front in World War I, he lost faith in the machine age. Living in Palestine in the 1920s, he forged a personal figurative style...
Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music
AuthorGerri Hirshey
ISBN1904915108
Nowhere to Run: The Story of Soul Music is a unique oral history. Here are the recollections of many of the giants of soul—Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown, Mary Wilson, Marvin Gaye, Screaming Jay Hawkins, and Wilson Pickett. These and other interviews, many...
Interviews with Francis Bacon
AuthorDavid Sylvester
ISBN0500274754
"Controversial in both life and art, Francis Bacon was one of the most important painters of the twentieth century. His monumental, unsettling images have an extraordinary power to disturb, shock, and haunt the spectator, "to unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life...
Blast #1
AuthorWyndham Lewis
ISBN0876855214
An incredible piece of hybrid art and literature. Way ahead of its time, but equally, capturing a paradoxically overlooked zeitgeist. Lewis (and others) ride the crest of early 20th-century revolution, in the ways that words can become art. Some of it is painfully boring. Some makes no sense. Some...
All The Emperor's Horses
AuthorDavid Kidd
ISBN1174887648
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important,...
A Kind of Loving
AuthorStan Barstow
ISBN0140016694
All about love, lust, and loneliness, the book introduces Vic Brown, a young working-class Yorkshireman. Vic is attracted to the beautiful but demanding Ingrid, and as their relationship grows and changes, he comes to terms the hard way with adult life and what it really means to love. The influence...
This Sporting Life
AuthorDavid Storey
The north of England in the 1950s, Arthur (not that other great Northern bellower given to us by Alan Sillitoe) wants out of the flat on your back, working yourself to death, working class lifestyle that he was born in to and the only way he can see to escape is through excelling at sport. He's got some physicality...
Octobriana and the Russian Underground
AuthorPeter Sadecky
ISBN0060137371
Honestly I didn't make it through the entire book, but the meme is pretty cool to be aware of , and the artwork and developing mythology of Octobriana is if not revolutionary, pretty fascinating. I should have been online while reading and did more of a where-are-they-now parallel search.

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