Sick City


Tony O'Neill - 2010
    people the way Dutch Leonard had his hand down the pants of every degenerate in his great Detroit novels.”— Barry Gifford, author of Wild at Heart From Tony O’Neill, the author of Down and Out on Murder Mile and coauthor of the Neon Angel and the New York Times bestselling Hero of the Underground, comes Sick City—a wild adventure of two junkies, Hollywood, and the Sharon Tate sex tape. Readers of Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty) and Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting) will take great delight in Sick City, “a disturbingly twisted ride through Hollywood’s underbelly with a degenerate cast of colorfully interwoven characters” (Slash).

The Rapist


Les Edgerton - 2013
    Master storyteller Les Edgerton guides us on a haunting journey inside the criminal mind to show that no matter how depraved a person appears to be, there might still exist a spark of humanity.

Apathy and Other Small Victories


Paul Neilan - 2006
    Usually on a Greyhound bus, right before his life falls apart again. Just like he planned. But this time it's complicated: there's a sadistic corporate climber who thinks she's his girlfriend, a rent-subsidized affair with his landlord's wife, and the bizarrely appealing deaf assistant to Shane's cosmically unstable dentist. When one of the women is murdered, and Shane is the only suspect who doesn't care enough to act like he didn't do it, the question becomes just how he'll clear the good name he never had and doesn't particularly want: his own.

The Nick Tosches Reader


Nick Tosches - 2000
    He can be elegant as a slow blues." The Nick Tosches Reader is the author's own selection of his best work over the past thirty years, including fiction, poetry, interviews, rock writing, investigative journalism, and criticism. First published in major magazines, obscure underground periodicals, and his own best-selling books, many of these selections deal with rock 'n' roll and cultural icons—but there are also pieces on everything from William Faulkner to organized crime to heavyweight boxing, including the Vanity Fair feature that gave rise to Tosches's major new book on Sonny Liston, published by Little, Brown. Here is "a unique and darkly impressionistic cultural history" of the last three decades as only Nick Tosches could write it.

Suicide Casanova


Arthur Nersesian - 2002
    Suicide Casanova is erotic noir and Nersesian’s hard-boiled prose comes at you like a jailhouse confession.”—Jonathan Ames, author of The Extra Man Arthur Nersesian is the bestselling cult author of The Fuck-Up, Chinese Takeout, Manhattan Is a Loverboy and dogrun. The former managing editor of the Portable Lower East Side, he currently lives in New York City.

The Painted Gun


Bradley Spinelli - 2017
    Whiplash twists, razor-sharp prose, an addictive narrative--I couldn't read it fast enough."--Rob Hart, author of South Village"With a plot that winds up like a Swiss watch and then explodes like an RPG, Bradley Spinelli's The Painted Gun pays off in every way a reader of noir fiction wants it to, and provides a lovely bonus--some of the most sure-footed tough guy prose I've seen since Hammett and Chandler walked those mean streets. Spinelli's novel pays homage to the conventions of detective fiction while also spinning an original and terrifying web of violence, menace, and intrigue. A bravura performance by a writer of marvelous gifts."--Sterling Watson, author of Suitcase City"The Painted Gun is a fun and wonderfully reckless remix. Bradley Spinelli spins the conventions of noir and whips up a tasty postmodern dish. It's an homage to yesterday, and also an examination of what's thrumming outside our walls right now."--Joshua Mohr, author of All This LifePraise for Killing Williamsburg by Bradley Spinelli:"Spinelli offers sharp and stylish prose...Benson's nihilistic views may resonate with readers in their twenties facing an uncertain economic future."-- Publishers Weekly "Spinelli has written the first visionary neo-Romantic novel of the twenty-first century."-- The Awl It's 1997 at the dawn of the digital age in San Francisco. Ex-journalist and struggling alcoholic David "Itchy" Crane's fledgling "information consultancy" business is getting slowly buried by bad luck, bad decisions, and the growing presence of the Internet. Before Itchy can completely self-destruct, a crooked private investigator offers him fifty grand to find a missing girl named Ashley. Crane takes the job because the money's right and because the only clue to her disappearance is a dead-on oil portrait of Crane himself painted by the mysterious missing girl--whom he has never met.As Crane's search for Ashley rapidly becomes an obsession, he stumbles upon a series of murders, gets slapped around by thugs and intimidated by cops, and begins to suspect he's being framed for the murders by a psychotic Guatemalan hit man. Left with no avenue but survival, Crane goes on the offensive, fighting to clear his name, solve the murders, and find the beguiling portrait artist Ashley, who may have a few surprises of her own.

Bandits


Elmore Leonard - 1987
    Leonard has produced another winner.”—PeopleA wild ride with “the coolest, hottest writer in America” (Chicago Tribune), Bandits has everything Elmore Leonard fans love: non-stop thrills, unexpected twists and turns, unforgettable characters, and the most razor-sharp dialogue being rapidly exchanged anywhere in the crime fiction genre. Leonard stands tall among the all-time greats (John D. MacDonald, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain) and towers far above most of the writers currently plying the noir fiction trade. The master who created U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, currently of the hit TV series Justified, is at the top of his game, ensnaring readers in an ingenious plot hatched by a former jewel thief and a radical ex-nun to scam millions from a sadistic Nicaraguan colonel. In fact, the Philadelphia Inquirer says Bandits “may well be his best.” Read it and decide for yourself.

Chart Throb


Ben Elton - 2006
    Three judges. Just one winner. And that’s Colin Simms, the genius behind the show. Colin always wins, because Colin writes the rules. But this year, as he sits smugly in judgment on the mingers, clingers and blingers whom he has pre-selected in his carefully scripted “search” for a star, he has no idea that the rules are changing. The “real” is about to be put back into “reality” television, and Colin and his fellow judges (the nation’s favourite mum and the other bloke) are about to become ex-factors themselves.From the best-selling author of The First Casualty, Popcorn, and Dead Famous comes Chart Throb. One winner. A whole bunch of losers.From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Contortionist's Handbook


Craig Clevenger - 2002
    In the face of his impending institutionalization, he continually reinvents himself to escape the legal and mental health authorities and to save himself from a life of incarceration. But running turns out to be costly. Vincent's clients in the L.A. underworld lose patience, the hospital evaluator may not be fooled by his story, and the only person in as much danger as himself is the woman who knows his real name.

Super-Cannes


J.G. Ballard - 2000
    Isolated and secure, the residents lack nothing, yet one day, a doctor at the clinic goes on a suicidal shooting spree. Dr. Jane Sinclair is hired as his replacement, and her husband Paul uncovers the dangerous psychological vents that maintain Eden-Olympia's smoothly-running surface.

Great Jones Street


Don DeLillo - 1973
    Dissatisfied with a life that has brought fame and fortune, he suddenly decides he no longer wants to be a commodity. He leaves his band mid-tour and holes up in a dingy, unfurnished apartment in Great Jones Street. Unfortunately, his disappearing act only succeeds in inflaming interest. As faithful fans await messages, Bucky encounters every sort of roiling force he is trying to escape.DeLillo’s third novel is more than a musical satire: it probes the rights of the individual, foreshadows the struggle of the artist within a capitalist world and delivers a scathing portrait of our culture’s obsession with the lives of the few.

The World Made Straight


Ron Rash - 2006
    After hours of passing in and out of consciousness, Travis is discovered by Carlton Toomey, the wise and vicious farmer who set the trap to protect his plants, and Travis's confrontation with the subtle evils within his rural world has begun. Before long, Travis has moved out of his parents' home to live with Leonard Shuler, a one-time schoolteacher who lost his job and custody of his daughter years ago, when he was framed by a vindictive student. Now Leonard lives with his dogs and his sometime girlfriend in a run-down trailer outside town, deals a few drugs, and studies journals from the Civil War. Travis becomes his student, of sorts, and the fate of these two outsiders becomes increasingly entwined as the community's terrible past and corrupt present bear down on each of them from every direction, leading to a violent reckoning—not only with Toomey, but with the legacy of the Civil War massacre that, even after a century, continues to divide an Appalachian community. Vivid, harrowing yet ultimately hopeful, The World Made Straight is Ron Rash's subtlest exploration yet of the painful conflict between the bonds of home and the desire for independence.

A Swollen Red Sun


Matthew McBride - 2014
    And he takes it. Banks knows what he did was wrong, but he did it for all the right reasons. At least, he thinks so. But for every wrong, there is a consequence.Jerry Dean can’t afford to lose that $52,000—he owes it to his partners, a crooked cop, and the fearsome Reverend Butch Pogue, who controls the town’s meth production with an iron fist. With the looming threat of prison or death—depending on who catches him first—Jerry Dean makes a final attempt to save himself, setting into a motion a series events that shake even Gasconade Country’s most degenerate citizens.

Already Dead


Denis Johnson - 1997
    A relentless failure, Nelson has botched nearly every scheme he's attempted to pull off. Now his future lies in a potentially profitable marijuana patch hidden in the lush old-growth redwoods on the family land.Nelson has some serious problems. His marriage has fallen apart, and he may lose his land, cash and crop in the divorce. What's more, in need of some quick cash, he had foolishly agreed to smuggle $90,000 worth of cocaine through customs for Harry Lally, a major player in a drug syndicate. Chickening out just before bringing the drugs through, he flushed the powder. Now Lally wants him dead, and two goons are hot on his trail. Desperate, terrified and alone, for Nelson, there may be only one way out.This is Denis Johnson's biggest and most complex book to date, and it perfectly showcases his signature themes of fate, redemption and the unraveling of the fabric of today's society. Already Dead, with its masterful narrative of overlapping and entwined stories, will further fuel the acclaim that surrounds one of today's most fascinating writers.

Clockers


Richard Price - 1992
    His beat is a rough New Jersey neighborhood where the drug murders blur together, until the day Victor Dunham — a twenty-year-old with a steady job and a clean record — confesses to a shooting outside a fast-food joint. It doesn't take long for Rocco's attention to turn to Victor's brother, a street-corner crack dealer named Strike who seems a more likely suspect for the crime. At once an intense mystery, and a revealing study of two men on opposite sides of an unwinnable war, Clockers is a stunningly well-rendered chronicle of modern life on the streets.