-insert comment about my love of painfully hip lit here-
Discover a curated list of painfully hip literature that defines modern cool. Dive into books that blend sharp wit, avant-garde style, and raw authenticity—perfect for the discerning literary rebel.
Item Not Found
ID: 0140277749
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0684857022
(Type: books)

Book
Anthem
by Ayn Rand
Anthem is Ayn Rand’s classic tale of a dystopian future of the great “We”—a world that deprives individuals of a name or independence—that anticipates her later masterpieces, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. They existed only to serve the state. They were conceived in controlled Palaces of Mating. They died in the Home of the Useless. From cradle to grave, the crowd was one—the great WE. In all that was left of humanity there was only one man who dared to think, seek, and love. He lived in the dark ages of the future. In a loveless world, he dared to love the woman of his choice. In an age that had lost all trace of science and civilization, he had the courage to seek and find knowledge. But these were not the crimes for which he would be hunted. He was marked for death because he had committed the unpardonable sin: He had stood forth from the mindless human herd. He was a man alone. He had rediscovered the lost and holy word—I. “I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals, and I loathe humanity, for its failure to live up to these possibilities.”—Ayn Rand

Book
Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
Huxley's story shows a futuristic World State where all emotion, love, art, and human individuality have been replaced by social stability. An ominous warning to the world's population, this literary classic is a must-read.

Book
Nineteen Eighty-four
by George Orwell
Eternal warfare is the price of bleak prosperity in this satire of totalitarian barbarism.

Book
Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury
Guy Montag is a fireman, his job is to burn books, which are forbidden.

Book
On the Road
by Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac’s classic American novel of freedom and the search for originality that defined a generation “An authentic work of art.”—The New York Times Inspired by Jack Kerouac’s adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naïveté and wild abandon and imbued with Kerouac’s love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope—a book that changed American literature and changed anyone who has ever picked it up.

Item Not Found
ID: 0871136341
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0449909859
(Type: books)

Book
Kiss My Tiara
by Susan Jane Gilman
Irreverent, provocative, hip - this guide to power and attitude offers women an intelligent alternative to the negative messages we hear every day from magazines, TV and relatives. Gilman serves up advice on everything from sex to politics.
Item Not Found
ID: 0786866942
(Type: books)

Book
Prozac Nation
by Elizabeth Wurtzel
"A book that became a cultural touchstone." -- The New Yorker Elizabeth Wurtzel writes with her finger in the faint pulse of an overdiagnosed generation whose ruling icons are Kurt Cobain, Xanax, and pierced tongues. In this famous memoir of her bouts with depression and skirmishes with drugs, Prozac Nation is a witty and sharp account of the psychopharmacology of an era for readers of Girl, Interrupted and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar.
Item Not Found
ID: 0517882949
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0571129021
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0573692386
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0872862364
(Type: books)

Item Not Found
ID: 0761119396
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0802135986
(Type: books)

Book
Suicide Blonde
by Darcey Steinke
S. alone, "Suicide Blonde" is a beautiful, brutal cult classic that "Details" calls "a shocking and electrifying journey into the inferno of sexual obsession."