On The Road
1957 · 416 pages
Sal Paradise crosses and recrosses America with Dean Moriarty, a car thief who talks nonstop and cannot sit still. Kerouac made restlessness the American subject, and the prose runs on the same fuel.
★ 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.
The Savage Detectives
1998 · 592 pages
Two young poets calling themselves visceral realists vanish into the Sonoran desert hunting a woman who published a single poem decades earlier. Forty voices over twenty years piece together where they went.
★ 7.7
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
1968 · 256 pages
Didion went into Haight-Ashbury in 1967 and came back with a five-year-old on acid and children improvising a society in a vacuum. She rebuilt American nonfiction prose around the sound of her sentences.
★ 7.0
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
1971 · 204 pages
Raoul Duke and his attorney drive to Las Vegas with a trunk of narcotics to cover a desert motorcycle race and a drug enforcement conference. The bender becomes Thompson's autopsy of the sixties.
★ 6.4
Dog Soldiers
1974 · 352 pages
Vietnam comes home in a suitcase. A correspondent buys heroin in Saigon and ships it to his wife in California, where the deal collapses into a chase through a country the war broke.
★ 6.3
The Dharma Bums
1958 · 244 pages
Ray Smith takes up Zen and mountaineering under Japhy Ryder, drawn from the poet Gary Snyder, who foresees a rucksack revolution. Young Americans read it and went to the mountains by the thousand.
★ 6.0