Book picks similar to
Newspaper Diapers by M.T. Johnson


fiction
short-stories
horror
disturbing

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid


Michael Ondaatje - 1970
    The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a virtuoso synthesis of storytelling, history, and myth by a writer who brings us back to our familiar legends with a renewed sense of wonder.

Pity the Animal


Chelsea Hodson - 2014
    “How much can a body endure? Almost everything.” Chelsea Hodson is a 2012 PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow. She is also the author of the chapbook Beach Camp, published by Swill Children in 2010. Her essays have been published in Black Warrior Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Sex Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Watch the trailer here: http://vimeo.com/88997155

Glimpse


Carol Lynch Williams - 2010
    In one moment,it is over.In one momentit is gone.The morning growsthin, greyand our lives—how they were—have vanished.Our lives havechangedwhen I walk inon Lizziemy sisterholding a shotgun.Twelve year old girl Hope's life is turned upside down when her older sister Lizzie becomes an elective mute and is institutionalized after trying to kill herself.With raw and haunting writing reminiscent of Ellen Hopkins and Elizabeth Scott, Carol Lynch Williams is a promising new YA voice.

Until I Say Goodbye: A Book about Living


Susan Spencer-Wendel - 2012
    She was forty-four years old, with a devoted husband and three young children, and she had only one year of health remaining.Susan decided to live that year with joy.She quit her job as a journalist and spent time with her family. She built an outdoor meeting space for friends in her backyard. And she took seven trips with the seven most important people in her life. As her health declined, Susan journeyed to the Yukon, Hungary, the Bahamas, and Cyprus. She took her sons to swim with dolphins, and her teenage daughter, Marina, to Kleinfeld's bridal shop in New York City to see her for the first and last time in a wedding dress.She also wrote this book. No longer able to walk or even to lift her arms, she tapped it out letter by letter on her iPhone using only her right thumb, the last finger still working.However, Until I Say Good-Bye is not angry or bitter. It is sad in parts--how could it not be?--but it is filled with Susan's optimism, joie de vivre, and sense of humor. It is a book about life, not death. One that, like Susan, will make everyone smile.From the Burger King parking lot where she cried after her diagnosis to a snowy hot spring near the Arctic Circle, from a hilarious family Christmas disaster to the decrepit monastery in eastern Cyprus where she rediscovered her heritage, Until I Say Good-Bye is not only Susan Spencer-Wendel's unforgettable gift to her loved ones--a heartfelt record of their final experiences together--but an offering to all of us: a reminder that "every day is better when it is lived with joy."

Groomed


Laurie Matthew - 2012
    Uncle Andrew would shower Laurie with attention and love, capture the hearts of everyone around him - and carefully groom her for years of abuse by not only himself, but also by a network of paedophiles. Laurie tells a harrowing story of isolation, as her abusers went to extraordinary lengths to carry out their sick acts, wearing masks to confuse and torment her and keeping her away from other children. But these evil men had no idea that the girl they systematically violated would turn into one of the country's leading child protection experts, and that their legacy would give her the impetus to change the lives of so many innocent victims.

Axiomatic


Maria Tumarkin - 2018
    In writing that is inventive, bold, and generous, Axiomatic introduces an unforgettable voice.

The Things They Carried


Tim O'Brien - 1990
    In this, his second work of fiction about Vietnam, O'Brien's unique artistic vision is again clearly demonstrated. Neither a novel nor a short story collection, it is an arc of fictional episodes, taking place in the childhoods of its characters, in the jungles of Vietnam and back home in America two decades later.

Between the Bridge and the River


Craig Ferguson - 2006
    Two childhood friends from Scotland and two illegitimate half-brothers from the American South suffer and enjoy all manner of bizarre experiences which, as it turns out, are somehow interconnected and, surprisingly enough, meaningful. An eclectic cast of characters includes Carl Jung, Fatty Arbuckle, Virgil, Marat, Socrates, and Tony Randall. Love, greed, hope, revenge, organized religion, and Hollywood are alternately tickled and throttled. Impossible to summarize and impossible to stop reading, this is a romantic comic odyssey that actually delivers and rewards.

The Mysterious Stranger


Mark Twain - 1916
    Twain wrote this version between November 1897 and September 1900. "Eseldorf" is German for "Assville" or "Donkeytown".

The Bell Jar


Sylvia Plath - 1963
    Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.

Necrophilia Variations


Supervert - 2005
    It consists of a series of texts that, like musical phrases, take up the theme and advance it by means of repetition, contrast, and variation. To love someone dead is merely nostalgia, but to make love with someone dead is necrophilia, and this book is about that.Although a work of fiction, Necrophilia Variations uses literary means to probe the psychopathology of sexual perversion. Eros, the book asks, is naturally drawn to beauty, and yet nothing would seem to be less inherently beautiful than a cadaver. How is it that a necrophile ends up confusing the two, or making the leap, such that he finds beauty in what most people would find repugnant? How does he come to desire that which would seem to be intrinsically undesirable?Written in a style that ranges from the lugubrious to the ludicrous — from purple prose to black humor — Necrophilia Variations exhibits a world of depravity from the inside out. Each of its texts utilizes the first person — not because it is autobiographical but rather because it is personal, even intimate. Why intimate? Because that's how death is — near you, beside you, eventually inside you as well. It would be nice to say that that's how sex is too — intimate — but then it's no secret just how impersonal sex can be, especially when your lover is unconscious or worse.If you have ever contemplated the curious points of contact between eros and thanatos — if you have ever wondered why femmes fatales are alluring, or why sex can be made more exciting by games that simulate danger and pain, or why that bit of French slang that deems orgasm a "little death" seems so appropriate — then you may well enjoy this book. And if you do, then your joy in reading may even unlock the necrophiliac mind for you — since a text is, like a corpse, the remains of a living being, and as a reader you will no doubt be determined to extract pleasure from it.

Collected Stories and Later Writings


Paul Bowles - 1979
    From his base in Tangier he produced globally ranging novels, stories, and travel writings that set exquisite surfaces over violent undercurrents. His elegantly spare novels chart the unpredictable collisions between "civilized" exiles and a Morocco they never grasp, achieving effects of extreme horror and dislocation.This Library of America Bowles set, the first annotated edition, offers the full range of his achievement: the portrait of an outsider who was one of the essential American writers of the last century. In addition to his novels -- The Sheltering Sky (1949), Let It Come Down (1952), The Spider's House (1955), Up Above the World (1966) -- and his collected stories -- including such classics as "A Distant Episode" and "Pages from Cold Point" -- they contain his masterpiece of travel writing, Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue (1963). Throughout, Bowles shows himself a master of gothic terror and a diabolically funny observer of manners as well as a prescient guide to everything from the roots of Islamist politics to the world of Moghrebi music. With a hallucinatory clarity as dry and unforgiving as the desert air, Bowles sends his characters toward encounters with unknown and terrifying forces both outside them and within them.

Life Inside My Mind: 31 Authors Share Their Personal Struggles


Jessica BurkhartCindy L. Rodriguez - 2018
    Millions of people are going through similar things. And many of them are people you know—you know them because they write the books that you’re reading.Life Inside My Mind is an anthology of true-life events from writers of this generation, for this generation. It takes aim at ending the shame of mental illness. With the intention of providing hope to those who are suffering, awareness to those who are witnessing a friend or family member battle mental illness, and opening the floodgates to conversations about mental illness, Side Effects tackles the stigmas around mental illness in a new and refreshing way.

The Tenant


Roland Topor - 1964
    More than a tale of possession, the novel probes disturbing depths of guilt, paranoia, and sexual obsession with an unsparing detachment.

I Will Find You: Solving Killer Cases from My Life Fighting Crime


Joe Kenda - 2017
    Joe Kenda, star of Homicide Hunter, shares his deepest, darkest, and never before revealed case files from his 19 years as a homicide detective.Are you horrified yet fascinated by abhorrent murders? Do you crave to know the gory details of these crimes, and do you seek comfort in the solving of the most gruesome? In I WILL FIND YOU, the star of Homicide Hunter: Lt. Joe Kenda shares his deepest, darkest, and never-before-revealed case files from his two decades as a homicide detective and reminds us that crimes like these are very real and can happen even in our own backyards. Gruesome, macabre, and complex cases. Joe Kenda investigated 387 murder cases during his 23 years with the Colorado Springs Police Department and solved almost all of them. And he is ready to detail the cases that are too gruesome to air on television, cases that still haunt him, and the few cases where the killer got away. These cases are horrifyingly real, and the detail is so mesmerizing you won't be able to look away. The tales in I WILL FIND YOU will shock you like the best horror stories-divulging insights into the actions, motivations, and proclivities of nature's most dangerous species. Don't mind the blood.