Best Descent Into Madness Books
Top 10 Best Descent Into Madness Books
: The Blind Owl, The Piano Teacher, The Awakening, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Hunger, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values, The Mosquito Coast, Time Out of Joint, When Rabbit Howls, Moravagine
| Author | Sadegh Hedayat |
| ISBN | 0802131808 |
Considered the most important work of modern Iranian literature, The Blind Owl is a haunting tale of loss and spiritual degradation. Replete with potent symbolism and terrifying surrealistic imagery, Sadegh Hedayat's masterpice details a young man's despair after losing a mysterious lover. And...
| Author | Elfriede Jelinek |
| ISBN | 0802118062 |
The Piano Teacher, the most famous novel of Elfriede Jelinek, who was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, is a shocking, searing, aching portrait of a woman bound between a repressive society and her darkest desires.
Erika Kohut is a piano teacher at the prestigious and formal Vienna Conservatory,...
| Author | Kate Chopin |
| ISBN | 0543898083 |
When first published in 1899, The Awakening shocked readers with its honest treatment of female marital infidelity. Audiences accustomed to the pieties of late Victorian romantic fiction were taken aback by Chopin's daring portrayal of a woman trapped in a stifling marriage, who seeks and finds...
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
| Author | James Hogg |
| ISBN | 0192835904 |
Set in early eighteenth-century Scotland, the novel recounts the corruption of a boy of strict Calvinist parentage by a mysterious stranger under whose influence he commits a series of murders. The stranger assures the boy that no sin can affect the salvation of an elect person. The reader, while recognizing...
| Author | Knut Hamsun |
| ISBN | 0486431681 |
One of the most important and controversial writers of the 20th century, Knut Hamsun made literary history with the publication in 1890 of this powerful, autobiographical novel recounting the abject poverty, hunger and despair of a young writer struggling to achieve self-discovery and its ultimate...
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
| Author | Robert M. Pirsig |
| ISBN | 0060589469 |
Maybe it's unfair to give a poor rating to a book I read in high school. However, I like to think that I was wise beyond my years and knew a phony, self-congratulatory, pretentious buffoon when I saw one. On the other hand, I did wear baggy overalls with Birkenstocks every day back then and wondered why I didn’t...
| Author | Paul Theroux |
| ISBN | 0618658963 |
In a breathtaking adventure story, the paranoid and brilliant inventor Allie Fox takes his family to live in the Honduran jungle, determined to build a civilization better than the one they've left. Fleeing from an America he sees as mired in materialism and conformity, he hopes to rediscover a purer...
Time Out of Joint is Philip K. Dick’s classic depiction of the disorienting disparity between the world as we think it is and the world as it actually is. The year is 1998, although Ragle Gumm doesn’t know that. He thinks it’s 1959. He also thinks that he served in World War II, that he lives in a quiet...
| Author | Truddi Chase |
| ISBN | 0515103292 |
Truddi Chase began therapy to discover why she suffered from blackouts. What surfaced was terrifying: she was inhabited by 'the Troops'-92 individual personalities. This groundbreaking true story is made all the more extraordinary in that it was written by the Troops themselves. What they reveal...
| Author | Blaise Cendrars |
| ISBN | 1590170636 |
At once truly appalling and appallingly funny, Blaise Cendrars's Moravagine bears comparison with Naked Lunch—except that it's a lot more entertaining to read. Heir to an immense aristocratic fortune, mental and physical mutant Moravagine is a monster, a man in pursuit of a theorem that will justify...
| Author | Kichiku Neko |
| ISBN | 1569702756 |
Asano Katsuya is a US trained psychiatrist who has been recruited by the Tokyo Police Department to provide a profile through the victims' data. Based on Asano's profile and recommendation, an elaborate plan is put into place to lure the serial killer out - a plan that bore successful results Now, after...
| Author | Susanna Kaysen |
| ISBN | 0679746048 |
In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele--Sylvia Plath, Robert...
| Author | José Saramago |
| ISBN | 0151010404 |
Tertuliano Maximo Afonso is a history teacher in a secondary school. He is divorced, involved in a rather one-sided relationship with a bank clerk, and he is depressed. To lift his depression, a colleague suggests he rent a certain video. Tertuliano watches the film and is unimpressed. During the night,...
