Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
10 best books like Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (John N. Gray): Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, On The Black Hill, On the Genealogy of Morals, A Short History of Decay, Kolyma Tales, The Loser, The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays, The Science of Storytelling, Utz
Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence
| Author | David Benatar |
| ISBN | 0199296421 |
Better Never to Have Been argues for a number of related, highly provocative, views: (1) Coming into existence is always a serious harm. (2) It is always wrong to have children. (3) It is wrong not to abort fetuses at the earlier stages of gestation. (4) It would be better if, as a result of there being no...
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
His fiction is known to be some of the most terrifying in the genre of supernatural horror, but Thomas Ligotti's first nonfiction book may be even scarier. Drawing on philosophy, literature, neuroscience, and other fields of study, Ligotti takes the penetrating lens of his imagination and turns it...
On the Black Hill is an elegantly written tale of identical twin brothers who grow up on a farm in rural Wales and never leave home. They till the rough soil and sleep in the same bed, touched only occasionally by the advances of the twentieth century.
In depicting the lives of Benjamin and Lewis...
On the Genealogy of Morals
| Author | Friedrich Nietzsche |
On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) is a book about the history of ethics and about interpretation. Nietzsche rewrites the former as a history of cruelty, exposing the central values of the Judaeo-Christian and liberal traditions - compassion, equality, justice - as the product of a brutal process of...
| Author | Emil M. Cioran |
| ISBN | 1559704640 |
The Poetry of Death
A Short History of Decay is a compendium of pessimistic aphorism, a sort of cosmopolitan collection of Gnostic scripture through the ages. It is entertaining, observationally acute, and compelling - all descriptions that the author would object to strenuously. I think...
| Author | Varlam Shalamov |
| ISBN | 0140186956 |
It is estimated that some three million people died in the Soviet forced-labour camps of Kolyma, in the northeastern area of Siberia. Shalamov himself spent seventeen years there, and in these stories he vividly captures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, whose hopes...
| Author | Thomas Bernhard |
| ISBN | 1400077540 |
Thomas Bernhard was one of the most original writers of the twentieth century. His formal innovation ranks with Beckett and Kafka, his outrageously cantankerous voice recalls Dostoevsky, but his gift for lacerating, lyrical, provocative prose is incomparably his own.
One of Bernhard's most...
| Author | Guy Davenport |
| ISBN | 1567920802 |
I've lost count of the times I read his essay on Whitman.
Within a few miles of each other in the 1880s, Whitman was putting the last touches to his great book, Eadweard Muybridge was photographing movements milliseconds apart of animals, naked athletes, and women, and Thomas Eakins was painting...
The Science of Storytelling
‘One of my absolute favourite writers’ Decca Aitkenhead
Who would we be without stories?
Stories mould who we are, from our character to our cultural identity. They drive us to act out our dreams and ambitions, and shape our politics and beliefs. We use them to construct our relationships,...
| Author | Bruce Chatwin |
| ISBN | 0140115765 |
Utz collects Meissen porcelain with a passion. His collection, which he has protected and enlarged through both World War II and Czechoslovakia's years of Stalinism, numbers more than 1,000 pieces, all crammed into his two-room Prague flat. Utz is allowed to leave the country each year, and although...
