Infinite Jest
1996 · 970 pages
Somewhere there is a film so entertaining that anyone who watches it stops eating. Wallace chases it through a tennis academy and a halfway house full of addicts he writes with real love.
★ 7.7
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.
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
Down These Mean Streets
1967 · 340 pages
Dark-skinned and Puerto Rican in 1940s Spanish Harlem, Thomas was Black to white America and not Black to his own family. Gangs, heroin, and seven years in prison follow, told in barrio speech.
★ 5.1
Junky
1953 · 197 pages
Burroughs reports his heroin years like a chemist writing up an experiment, from New York hustles to Mexico City rooms and cures that never take. There is no remorse and no lyricism.
★ 4.9
Cash
The Autobiography
1997 · 320 pages
Cash tells it in his own voice: picking cotton in Dyess, Arkansas, the brother a saw killed at fifteen, the amphetamine decades, and the night he crawled into Nickajack Cave to die.
★ 4.6