Naked Lunch
1959 · 304 pages
Addiction as the model for every kind of control: Burroughs turns junk sickness into a shrieking comic nightmare of mad doctors, police, and addicts. Massachusetts put it on trial for obscenity and lost.
★ 6.6
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
The Street of Crocodiles
1934 · 368 pages
Shot by a Gestapo officer in 1942, Schulz left stories that turn a Galician backwater into a world where his father breeds birds in the attic and the calendar grows a thirteenth month.
★ 6.5
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
1985 · 400 pages
Two stories alternate: a man who encrypts data inside his mind, and a newcomer to a walled town reading dreams from unicorn skulls. Murakami has been returning to that architecture for forty years.
★ 6.4
Nadja
1928 · 160 pages
Walking Paris in 1926, Breton meets a woman who calls herself Nadja and lives entirely by chance. Photographs of the real streets interrupt the account, and surrealism never came closer to a novel.
★ 6.3