Book picks similar to
Happiness by Todd Solondz


twentieth-century
american
crime
cinema

Collected Poems


Donald Justice - 2004
    Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Justice has been hailed by his contemporary Anthony Hecht as “the supreme heir of Wallace Stevens.” In poems that embrace the past, its terrors and reconciliations, Justice has become our poet of living memory. The classic American melancholy in his titles calls forth the tenor of our collective passages: “Bus Stop,” “Men at Forty,” “Dance Lessons of the Thirties,” “The Small White Churches of the Small White Towns.” This master of classical form has found in the American scene, and in the American tongue, all those virtues of our literature and landscape sought by Emerson and Henry James. For half a century he has endeavored, with painterly vividness and plainspoken elegance, to make those local views part of the literary heritage from which he has so often taken solace, and inspiration.School Letting Out(Fourth or Fifth Grade)The afternoons of going home from schoolPast the young fruit trees and the winter flowers.The schoolyard cries fading behind you then,And small boys running to catch up, as thoughIt were an honor somehow to be near—All is forgiven now, even the dogs,Who, straining at their tethers, used to bark,Not from anger but some secret joy.From the Hardcover edition.

Elmore Leonard: La Brava; Cat Chaser; Split Images


Elmore Leonard - 1992
     La Brava, Cat Chaser, and Split Images received rave reviews and make it clear why this New York Times bestselling author has been hailed coast to coast as the hottest thriller writer of our time.

Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll


Eric Bogosian - 1991
    Bogosian is a hilarious wit: there is one line after another that you will quote to friends. He is a born storyteller with perfect pitch for the voices of various ethnic, racial and economic backgrounds. Using every powerful means available to a theatre artist, he shakes the cages of a complacent country engulfed by homelessness to ask just exactly who, if anyone, is home." -Frank Rich, New York Times"Greatly and bilaterally talented... spiky, stinging, caustic without cauterizing. And funny." -John Simon, New York Magazine"Scabrously funny... a dervish of a performer, ricocheting off the walls of the male psyche." -Boston PhoenixEric Bogosian is one of our most innovative and provocative artists, with a unique gift for portraying the currents and idioms of contemporary society. The monologues in Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll form a composite picture of the complex, sometimes alarming state of American culture in the 1990s.One of America’s premier performers and most innovative and provocative artists, Bogosian’s plays and solo work include suburbia (Lincoln Center Theater, 1994; adapted to film by director Richard Linklater, 1996); Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead; Griller; Humpty Dumpty; 1+1; Skunkweed; Wake Up and Smell the Coffee; Drinking in America; Notes from Underground and Talk Radio (Pulitzer Prize finalist; New York Shakespeare Festival, 1987; Broadway, 2007; adapted to film by director Oliver Stone, 1988). He has starred in a wide variety of film, TV and stage roles. Most recently, he created the character of Captain Danny Ross on the long-running series Law & Order: Criminal Intent. In 2014, TCG published 100 (monologues), a collection that commemorates thirty years of Bogosian’s solo-performance career.

Usual Suspects


Christopher McQuarrie - 1999
    One of a hand-picked selection of some of the most popular and cult-worthy titles on Faber and Faber's extensive list of film scripts.

Stories of Erskine Caldwell


Erskine Caldwell - 1953
    Included here is Crown-Fire, Country Full of Swedes, The Windfall, Horse Thief, Yellow Girl and Kneel to the Rising Sun.

Ghost World: The Screenplay


Daniel Clowes - 2001
    Included is the original shooting script. With over thirty pages of material not used in the final film, along with a sixteen-page color section featuring rare artwork, production drawings, photographs of the cast and crew, and detailed annotations by the screenwriters.

The Big Book of Scandal: Trashy but True Tales from the Tawdry Worlds of Celebrity, High Society, Politics, and Big Business!


Jonathan Vankin - 1998
    Witness the exploits of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Elvis, Liz, Di, Tricky Dicky and Bill Clinton!

The Apartment


Billy Wilder - 1998
    Jack Lemmon played the 'schnook' who lends out his apartment for his boss's sexual trysts, only to fall in love with the boss's girl - played by Shirey MacLaine. The Apartment is a beautifully judged piece of writing saved from cynicism by Wilder and Diamond's tenderness towards their central characters. This edition of the screenplay includes a specially commissioned introduction by Mark Cousins.

How It Ended: New and Collected Stories


Jay McInerney - 2009
    In fact, the short story, as A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times Book Review, shows “McInerney in full command of his gifts . . . These stories, with their bold, clean characterizations, their emphatic ironies and their disciplined adherence to sound storytelling principles, reminded me of, well, Fitzgerald and also of Hemingway—of classic stories like ‘Babylon Revisited’ and ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.’ They are models of the form.”Only seven of these stories have ever been collected in a book, but all twenty-six unveil and re-create the manic flux of our society. Whether set in New England, Los Angeles, New York or the South, they capture various stages of adulthood, from early to budding to entrenched to resentful: a young man confronting the class system at a summer resort; a young woman holed up in a remote cabin while her (married) boyfriend campaigns for the highest office of all; a couple whose experiments in sexuality cross every line imaginable; an actor visiting his wife in rehab; a doctor contending with both convicts and his own criminal past; a youthful socialite returning home to nurse her mother; an older one scheming for her next husband; a family celebrating the holidays while mired in loss year after year; even Russell and Corrine Calloway, whom we first met in McInerney's novel Brightness Falls.A manifold exploration of delusion, experience and transformation, these stories display a preeminent writer of our time at the very top of his form.

Barton Fink & Miller's Crossing


Joel Coen - 1991
    The former is a psychological thriller set in the Hollywood of the 1940s, while the latter reinvents the 1930s gangster film.

The Maximortal


Rick Veitch - 1992
    Seven years before The Amazing Adventures of Kavelier and Clay, Rick Veitch married the larcenous history of the comics business to the outrageous themes and characters of his infamous Brat Pack universe, creating one of the most startling and uncompromising visions of the super-hero archetype ever put to paper.

Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947-1997


Salman Rushdie - 1997
    Selected by Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West, these novel excerpts, stories, and memoirs illuminate wonderful writing by authors often overlooked in the West. Chronologically arranged to reveal the development of Indian literature in English, this volume includes works by Jawaharlal Nehru, Nayantara Sahgal, Saadat Hasan Manto, G.V. Desani, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Kamala Markandaya, Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, Ved Mehta, Anita Desai, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Satyajit Ray, Salman Rushdie, Padma Perera, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Rohinton Mistry, Bapsi Sidhwa, I. Allan Sealy, Shashi Tharoor, Sara Suleri, Firdaus Kanga, Anjana Appachana, Amit Chaudhuri, Amitav Ghosh, Githa Hariharan, Gita Mehta, Vikram Seth, Vikram Chandra, Ardashir Vakil, Mukul Kesavan, Arundhati Roy, and Kiran Desai.

New and Collected Poems


Richard Wilbur - 1988
    Winner of the 1989 Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry.

Plays 1: Mistero Buffo / Accidental Death of an Anarchist / Trumpets and Raspberries / The Virtuous Burglar / One Was Nude and One Wore Tails


Dario Fo - 1992
    Mistero Buffo, or The Comic Mysteries, is based on research into mediaeval mystery plays; The Accidental Death of an Anarchist concerns the "accidental" (or not) death of an anarchist railwork who "fell" (or was pushed) to his death from a police headquarters window in 1969; Trumpets and Raspberries is "A deeply subversive farce" (The Guardian) in which the boss of Italy's biggest car manufacturer FIAT, is mistaken for a left wing terrorist.

Dead Lines


John Skipp - 1988
    Skipp and Spector'slatest chiller, their most intimate, potent and gripping work yet.