Here are 100 books that Jesus' Son fans have personally recommended if you like
Jesus' Son.
Shepherd is a community of 10,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.
I look to books as an enlightening way to escape. I’ve always sought out things that paint the world in different hues than what is often presented in reality. When the lines between what you’re told and what it really is become blurry, I like to find the truth that is often available by reading between the lines.
Does this book qualify today as non-fiction? Everything about this tale is eye-opening and applicable to our present. Written during the Great Depression, this is a must-read for anyone who has a feeling that not everything is what it seems.
I adore the gripping narrative, notable arcs, and subtle humor, which give this stark tale some needed levity. I always come away from this book with a lot of questions: How can we as a civilization do better? How did Aldous Huxley so accurately portray life in the 21st century? If I had to build a bookshelf of must-reads for my kids, which I may actually do, this book is on the list.
**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**
EVERYONE BELONGS TO EVERYONE ELSE. Read the dystopian classic that inspired the hit Sky TV series.
'A masterpiece of speculation... As vibrant, fresh, and somehow shocking as it was when I first read it' Margaret Atwood, bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale.
Welcome to New London. Everybody is happy here. Our perfect society achieved peace and stability through the prohibition of monogamy, privacy, money, family and history itself. Now everyone belongs.
You can be happy too. All you need to do is take your Soma pills.
Given the state of the world today, laughter truly is the best coping mechanism. The best satire is all about excess in design, intention, characterization, and deployment of attitude. The more extreme, the better; leave restraint to the prudish moralists!
Why didn’t anyone think of it sooner? I’m guessing it took the excesses of the 1980s for a novelist to draw a direct connection between the psychopathic behavior of Wall Street traders and serial killing.
Greed and senseless violence are two vices that America seems to have something of a monopoly on, and this macabre tale, alternatively hilarious and disgusting, proves it.
I loved bars before I could drink. Maybe it was a steady diet of Cheers reruns as a child. Or perhaps it was growing up in Los Angeles, a city without a center, a city of cars, a city that seemed—at least when I was a child—to lack real community. Bars, in my imagination, provided that. So when I started actually finding myself in bars—and often working in them—I also found myself writing fiction, and those bars ended up in that fiction. In each of my novels, a bar is a gathering place for those wanting a church sans theology, a place, where, yes, everyone knows your name.
Maybe I just want to have a drink with Zadie Smith. She could tell me how she managed to write such a breathtaking novel by the age of 23. In this fictional encounter, I’d ask her about O’Connell’s, the pub in White Teethfrequented by her constantly put-upon war vets Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. “O’Connell’s is the kind of place family men come to for a different kind of family. Unlike blood relations, it is necessary here to earn one’s passion in the community; it takes years of devoted fucking around, time-wasting, lying-about, shooting the breeze, watching paint dry—far more dedication than men invest in the careless moment of procreation.” The whole book is this keenly observed, and this funny.
One of the most talked about fictional debuts of recent years, "White Teeth" is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike. Dealing - among many other things - with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle, it is a life-affirming, riotous must-read of a book.
Flannery O’Connor once said that all fiction is ultimately about the “mystery of personality.” I agree. In fact, I have always suspected that all good novels, genre-based or otherwise, are secretly mystery novels, if only in the psychological sense. Conversely, many so-called genre novels have just as much depth, insight, and realism as any literary work. I have read a lot of genre and literary fiction in my time, and I have long been fascinated by works that blur the line between the two. My favorite kind of book is one that feels like a genre novel (that is, it has a great plot) but also has the depth and vividness of a literary novel.
What I really love about this novel is the voice of the main character, Ezekial “Easy” Rollins. Easy is not your typical P.I. A recently fired machinist in post-war Los Angeles, he’s just a guy trying to pay his bills. But he’s also a black man from the South trying to survive in a white, west-coast world. When a white gangster hires him to find a missing girl, Easy senses that he’s in extreme danger, but he has no choice but to take the job.
Told in the first-person, this book captures all of Easy’s doubt, dread, and defiance as he unravels the mystery.
Devil in a Blue Dress honors the tradition of the classic American detective novel by bestowing on it a vivid social canvas and the freshest new voice in crime writing in years, mixing the hard-boiled poetry of Raymond Chandler with the racial realism of Richard Wright to explosive effect.
I spent my early childhood in a rural, isolated, multi-generational household. During summers we rarely saw anyone unrelated to us. My twin sister and I spent our days reading, hiding, and naming our menagerie of barn cats (final count: 36). In my career as a lifestyle journalist, I’ve gotten to interview famous eccentrics ranging from Loretta Lynn to David Sedaris. I live in the North Carolina mountains with my husband, our teenage son, and my aforementioned twin sister. This past summer, a black bear walked the 22 steps up to our front porch and stared in the window, raising his huge paws high in exasperation.
Unlike Welty’s works featuring honorable or broadly comic characters, this dense story cycle was never excerpted in anthologies. It’s a trickier cast: consider Jinny Love Stark and Virgie Rainey, who cut through the languor of Depression-era Mississippi with stone-cold intention. Jinny Love plays croquet with her lover to enrage her volatile husband; she encourages her daughter to wear lizards as earrings to offend the propriety of her own controlling mother. Impoverished piano prodigy Virgie flouts her gift merely to watch her teacher go mad. Later, she trims her dead mother’s yard with sewing scissors while neighbors do the real work of laying out the body and receiving mourners. The heat presses forward. What day is it? What hour? This is weird, experimental Welty, and the payoff is sweet.
First published in 1949, THE GOLDEN APPLES is an acutely observed, richly atmospheric portrayal of small town life in Morgana, Mississippi. There's Snowdie, who has to bring up her twin boys alone after her husband, King Maclain, disappears one day, discarding his hat on the banks of the Big Black. There's Loch Morrison, convalescing with malaria, who watches from his bedroom window as wayward Virgie Rainey meets a sailor in the vacant house opposite. Meanwhile, Miss Eckhart the piano teacher, grieving the loss of her most promising pupil, tries her hand at arson.
I’m a nerd who fights. Started my professional life as a programmer, then switched to telling stories in advertising and entertainment. But my passion for technology and martial arts have always played a role in my life. Influenced by my father’s stories about judo, I studied a lot of styles of fighting, including kung fu, karate, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and also dabbled with boxing, Muay Thai, capoeira, taichi, bagua, Silat, and judo. Along that journey, one of my favorite ways to learn was by watching my female training partners, and how they had to develop a much more nuanced and sophisticated technique. An experience that would later inspire the birth of The Girl from Wudang.
A little confession: fighting awakens a beast inside of me.
Sometimes when I’m in a crowded place, I walk by someone, usually a bigger person, and wonder: “Can I take him down?” Other times, especially in situations of conflict and mostly in the business world, I catch myself looking at my opposition and think “I can totally crush you if I want.”
I’m not sure Palahniuk has ever traded punches with another human being. But one thing he got right: learning to fight, especially at a place that makes you spar at every session, often creates this maddening sense of power, that can be dangerous, but is a little fun too.
Chuck Palahniuk showed himself to be his generation's most visionary satirist in this, his first book. Fight Club's estranged narrator leaves his lackluster job when he comes under the thrall of Tyler Durden, an enigmatic young man who holds secret after-hours boxing matches in the basements of bars. There, two men fight "as long as they have to." This is a gloriously original work that exposes the darkness at the core of our modern world.
I’ve always been drawn to characters who are no longer on the edge but have stepped off and are halfway down the plummet—and while they’re falling through their trauma, they see the world’s darkness from an angle that translates into a beautiful kind of philosophy. People who have lived through hell have a perspective unlike those who have never struggled. The hell I lived through has given way to my own kind of philosophy and I let the darkness from my life come through my writing in streaks of light.
Whoa, this book is a fun, chaotic dip into burnout. I had to just let go when I was reading, let the words crash over me like a wave, and get bashed around by the crazy stream-of-consciousness. The narrator's memories, fantasies, thoughts, delusions, worries, and everything else are all mixed up with crazy secondary characters and set in a realistically gritty and raw New York City. As a former resident of NYC, who has heard horror stories from lifelong residents, I could hear the desperate truth in every line. The narrator wants to quit—quit the trauma, the stress eating away at his nerves, but he keeps drinking, shooting up, and speeding to the next overdose, shooting, and heart attack. The narrator’s struggle between giving up on everything and trying one more time to find redemption in a broken city full of violence, sickness, and death took me one step closer…
The author of Taxi Driver returns to the darkest streets of New York City for another story of lost souls. It is the early 1990s: Frank Pierce is an EMS paramedic, driving an ambulance through the city's darkest streets on the 'graveyard shift'. Surrounded by the injured and the dying, Frank is dwelling in an urban night-world, and crumbling under the accumulated weight of too many years spent saving - and losing - lives. Bringing Out the Dead is the account of fifty-six hours in Frank's life - two days and three nights on the job - as, hungering for…
I spent my early childhood in a rural, isolated, multi-generational household. During summers we rarely saw anyone unrelated to us. My twin sister and I spent our days reading, hiding, and naming our menagerie of barn cats (final count: 36). In my career as a lifestyle journalist, I’ve gotten to interview famous eccentrics ranging from Loretta Lynn to David Sedaris. I live in the North Carolina mountains with my husband, our teenage son, and my aforementioned twin sister. This past summer, a black bear walked the 22 steps up to our front porch and stared in the window, raising his huge paws high in exasperation.
Now 91, the Canadian short-story guru won The Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013. She also made “Southern Ontario Gothic” a genre. Where to start in Selected Stories’ canon of genius? At the end, with “Vandals,” the last, long story in this important early anthology. Under the guise of house sitting, a rootless young woman, Liza, desecrates the home of Bea and Ladner, an older couple whose taxidermy-filled rural property was her childhood playground. Ladner has recently died, and Bea and Liza have maintained a friendly correspondence—and so Liza’s violent act seems bizarre and random. Her reasons for wrecking the place are proven emotionally valid, but the reveal is so subtle, so masterful, it might make everything else you’ve ever read (or written) feel overdone.
This first-ever selection of Alice Munro's stories sums up her genius. Her territory is the secrets that cackle beneath the facade of everyday lives, the pain and promises, loves and fears of apparently ordinary men and women whom she renders extraordinary and unforgettable.
I’m the author of Fraternity: Stories. I don’t consider myself a fraternity bro, but I hold the Greek men and women I write about very close to my heart because I know the feeling of being young and lost and wanting a guidebook for behavior, and how easily the young can be exiled, in one way or another, by their peers. I feel for every young person who’s disgraced and humiliated, whether it’s on social media or in a tumbledown colonial with wooden letters nailed to the front. I also feel for every young person who lives in fear of disgrace and humiliation.
Times in my life when I’ve made terrible choices, I’ve thought, while making those choices: To hell with you people, I don’t care what you think of me, I’m going to be my own person, screw appearances and reputation. Other times I’ve made terrible choices, I’ve thought: I’m doing what’s expected of me, that’s all. This collection of short stories offers a gallery of complex and warm characters, some of whom disgrace themselves via transgression, some via passivity.
An electrifying first collection from one of the most exciting short story writers of our time
"I can't recall the last time I laughed this hard at a book. Simultaneously, I'm shocked and scandalized. She's brilliant, this young woman."-David Sedaris
Ottessa Moshfegh's debut novel Eileen was one of the literary events of 2015. Garlanded with critical acclaim, it was named a book of the year by The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and won…
I loved bars before I could drink. Maybe it was a steady diet of Cheers reruns as a child. Or perhaps it was growing up in Los Angeles, a city without a center, a city of cars, a city that seemed—at least when I was a child—to lack real community. Bars, in my imagination, provided that. So when I started actually finding myself in bars—and often working in them—I also found myself writing fiction, and those bars ended up in that fiction. In each of my novels, a bar is a gathering place for those wanting a church sans theology, a place, where, yes, everyone knows your name.
Crime novels, like bars, live or die on their vibe. The plot may have rat-sized holes and the ending might spill into deux ex machina, but if you dig the atmosphere, you’ll forgive almost any narrative sin. Not that The Mexican Tree Duck commits any worthy of confession. You’re in safe hands with CW Sughrue, part-time PI and owner of the Hell Roaring Liquor Store and Lounge up in Montana. What I love about Crumley is the lovely, complex language that pours out like gin into a martini glass. “The first time I set foot in the Hell Roaring as the sixties drifted, late as usual and dying, into the seventies, I found that soft autumn light filling the magic afternoon easiness of the bar.”
One night up in Montana, C.W. Sughrue sets his seedy bar’s pricey jukebox in front of an oncoming freight train. When predictable results ensue, he needs to find a way to make some money and pay back the jukebox company. So even though Sughrue’s officially retired from P.I. work, he picks up one small-time case involving some kidnapped fish. That fishy trail leads to a much bigger case involving a Texas politician's kidnapped wife, a valuable piece of pre-Columbian pottery, and a single mother who packs guns and stolen goods in her infant son's…
Interested in
heroin and heroin addiction,
Jesus,
and
neurology?
10,000+ authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them.
Browse their picks for the best books about
heroin and heroin addiction,
Jesus,
and
neurology.
