Desperate People on the Edge of Existence
Explore powerful books about desperate people on the edge of existence. Discover gripping stories of survival, resilience, and human struggle in this curated collection.
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
by Raymond Carver
The most celebrated story collection from “one of the true American masters” (The New York Review of Books)—a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark that includes the iconic and much-referenced title story featured in the Academy Award-winning film Birdman. "Raymond Carver's America is ... clouded by pain and the loss of dreams, but it is not as fragile as it looks. It is a place of survivors and a place of stories.... [Carver] has done what many of the most gifted writers fail to do: He has invented a country of his own, like no other except that very world, as Wordsworth said, which is the world to all of us." —The New York Times Book Review
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The Stories of John Cheever
by John Cheever
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A seminal collection from one of the true masters of the short story. Spanning the duration of Cheever’s long and distinguished career, these sixty-one stories chronicle and encapsulate the lives of what has been called “the greatest generation.” From the early wonder and disillusionment of city life in “The Enormous Radio” to the surprising discoveries and common mysteries of suburbia in “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” and “The Swimmer,” these are tales that have helped define the form. Featuring a preface by the Pulizter Prize-winning author, The Stories of John Cheever brings together some of the finest short stories ever written. "Cheever’s crowning achievement is the ability to be simultaneously generous and cynical, to see that the absurd and the profound can reside in the same moment, and to acknowledge both at the detriment of neither." —The Guardian
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This Other Eden
by Michael Hemmingson
Terrorism, crack cocaine and rape. Failure, miscarriages and suicide. Divorce, incest and misery. This Other Eden is Michael Hemmingson at his most brutal. A man wins the lottery and loses his family. A book agent must deal with a wild girl writer, a white trash genius and a limousine full of angry teenagers. His protagonists scratch at the bottom of society desperate to maintain delusions of adequacy. They fall into each other with hatred and bile; emerging with their own unique form of heroism. Provocative and intriguing, THIS OTHER EDEN by Michael Hemmingson is akin to reading a cross between someone's private journal and a True Crime magazine. Feeling titillated and naughty, as if reading a sibling's most private and dirty secrets, I found myself wholly unwilling to put this book down. It is glorious train wreck of loss, betrayal, and crime mixed with intimate thoughts and a poignant sense of loneliness. THIS OTHER EDEN is the kind of book that will make you forget your own life for a while but will also allow you to be grateful for it when you put the book down. Jennifer Brozek, Submissions Editor, Apex Book Company
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Badass Horror
by Michael Hemmingson
Seven stories written by some of the best writers of modern fiction including Garry Kilworth, Ron Damien Malfi, Michael Boatman, and Michael Hemmingson reach to the edge of human endurance and push all the harder.
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Women
by Charles Bukowski
Low-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at fifty, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life, running three hundred hangovers a year, and maintaining a sex life that would cripple Casanova. With all of Bukowski's trademark humor and gritty, dark honesty, this 1978 follow-up to Post Office and Factotum is an uncompromising account of life on the edge.
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Naked Lunch
by William S. Burroughs
Bill Lee, an addict and hustler, travels to Mexico and then Tangier in order to find easy access to drugs, and ends up in the Interzone, a bizarre fantasy world, in an edition that features restored text, archival material, and an essay on psychoactive drugs.
