I’m looking for some new reading recommendations. I've noticed I have a very specific type: I love books with unreliable narrators, deep existential dread, and "plotless" character studies where a deeply flawed person just psychologically unravels.
• Stoner by John Williams
• No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai
• Hunger by Knut Hamsun
• Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• The Stranger by Albert Camus
• El túnel by Ernesto Sabato
• Boredom by Alberto Moravia
• I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
• The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima
• The Metamorphosis (and other stories) by Franz Kafka
• Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille
• Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin
• The Elementary Particles (also published as Atomised) by Michel Houellebecq
I clearly read a lot of translated literature, dark philosophy, and transgressive fiction, but I'm open to anything that fits this vibe. (For context, I'm about to start The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy).
What should I read next? Thanks!
by whatsinanameidunno
15 Comments
A Short Stay in Hell might fit the bill
Technically Tell Me I’m Worthless works, but it’s an objectively terrible book and I don’t recommend it
Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis
Prienesi, I think, fits this bill
And A Short Stay In Hell
Comfort Me With Apples might, too
Despair by Nabokov
Coming Up for Air by Orwell
The Heart of The Matter by Greene
The poetry of W.H Auden is suffused with a horror at the coming of WW2 – ‘Death’s Echo’ and ‘September 1 1939’
I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid
Wanna flip through my journal?
Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre
You might like Lazarus by Leonid Andreyev. It’s not a character study, but it’s a fantastic meditation on meaning and impermanence.
Conversations with god !!!
**The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro** 100% had this vibe for me.
DUDE grotesque by natsuo kirino is right up there and villain by shuichi yoshida
The House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera, plotless experimental novel about a deeply troubled man.
Passage to Dusk by Rashid al-Daif, similar themes. Dreamlike.
Hamlet… you’ve probably already read the play but, it holds up as the pinnacle of existential dread/character study.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.
The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith.
The last three I’ve suggested have a fair amount of plot, but the characters drive the action.
Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee
+1 for Piranesi by Susannah Clarke. Also pretty much anything by Shirley Jackson but I think The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle would both meet criteria for very different reasons.
The Bee Sting – Paul Murray
The Vegetarian Han Kang
The Wind Up Bird Chronicle- Murakami