68 books like Skin

With Imperial Bedrooms, Bret Easton Ellis channels many of his career-long obsessions into a nihilistic work of Hollywood noir, written in a minimalist prose style that evokes both Raymond Chandler’s staccato brutalism and Joan Didion’s haunting lyricism. Imperial Bedrooms takes a razor to Hollywood’s beautiful surfaces while drawing the reader deeper and deeper into protagonist Clay’s misanthropic paranoia. The writing is masterful, existential horror frozen into sentences so spare and focused they often resemble haiku. It features what might be my favorite closing line in fiction: “The fades, the dissolves, the rewritten scenes, all the things you wipe away—I now want to explain all these things to her but I know I never will, the most important one being: I never liked anyone and I’m afraid of people.”

Anna Kavan’s Asylum Piece presents exciting stylistic possibilities for the world of “personal fiction.” The book defies easy genre categorization, but one might describe it as an experimental, thematically connected collection of autofiction. Drawing on her own experiences in a Swiss sanitarium (from which she was dispatched in 1938), Kavan excavates her psychological traumas and filters them through sequences of vignettes and short stories, conveying states of extreme emotional distress through a restrained, intensely lucid form. An unblinking study of alienation, mental disarray, and feelings of helplessness under bureaucratic control, Asylum Piece takes up a lot of space in my mind.

Matthew Gregory Lewis wrote The Monk in his late teens, and the book glows with the heat of youthful rage, gloriously unconcerned with issues of propriety and “good taste.” The title monk, Ambrosio, unknowingly sets the course for his own damnation when he has sex with Matilda, a demon disguised as a beautiful woman. As the novel progresses, this illicit affair ignites Ambrosio’s most lurid urges, and he descends into extreme depravity: he dabbles in sorcery, he rapes, he murders. Gregory writes the book’s climax in visceral detail, gruesomely describing Ambrosio’s fate at the hands of Satan. Although The Monk features two main plotlines and, in truly Gothic fashion, periodic digressions into flashbacks and tangential subplots, it is brisk, lean, scary, and fiercely propulsive.

The narration is completely devoted to the worldview of main character Harry White. A man who climbs the ladder of corporate and social America thanks to unnatural drives inside him both dedicated to achieving his success and predicated ultimately to securing his eventual self-destruction. The demon is inside Harry White and it is the American dream. An extraordinary novel from an extraordinary writer who had already written himself into the annals of American literature with such classics as Last Exit to Brooklyn and The Room. The Demon in my view is Selby Jr.’s most personal and impersonal work.

Ursula K.Le Guin is perhaps best known as a novelist and science fiction writer. But her non-fiction is very much worth reading too. I love her values, her courage, her clarity, her persistence. Right to the end of her very long life (she died in 2018 at the age of 88), she was thinking about the art and craft of writing. I find myself deeply inspired and encouraged by Le Guin, and in particular, this book.

Queer theory can sometimes be head-scratching, but the first time I read Cruising Utopia (on a camping trip in the mountains), I found myself gazing anew at the trees above me and my lover by my side. The late great theorist pushes us to reconsider how queerness is experienced and remembered in quotidian times and spaces. From sharing a bottle of Coke with a lover to memorializing abandoned toilets in the New York City subway, Muñoz revels in the ecstatic potential of “queer utopian memory” and queer world-building. Cruising Utopia is a marriage of critical theory and thoughtful storytelling, giving readers a much-needed injection of hope in these thoroughly anti-queer times.    

A scholarly / anthology resource, this book is a collection of ideas around a theme that made a big impact on us and our approach to writing. We love this book. The book is a collection of writings that provide much debate for researchers in the field discussing themes regarding live art; the book brings together artists, theorists, and historians as contributors and addresses disciplines, such as dance, theatre, action painting and expanded cinema, as forms of live art that today’s artists are inspired by.

Wilson’s novels often interrogate art and morality in a hilarious fashion.

In this book, siblings Annie and Buster struggle to overcome their childhood personas of Child A and Child B in their parents’ performance art pieces. When Caleb and Camille disappear under mysterious circumstances, Annie and Buster must investigate to find out if their parents are really dead or if this is yet another elaborate scheme in the name of art.

What is real? What is artifice? Can they escape the myth of their parents’ making and find a healthier way to make their own art?

Published by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., this beautifully produced and generously illustrated book contains essays on many aspects of portraiture with special emphasis on the USA. Portraits are fascinating; there is just so much to say about the ways in which materials such as paper, stone, metal, and canvas, ink, crayon, and paint can conjure up a human being. Nations, institutions, professions, families, and individuals all make use of portraits to affirm their positions, persuade those who view them of their worth, and shape forms of remembrance. The essays are relatively short, which encourages readers to browse, read a contribution and then come back often to look as well as read more about one of the most extraordinary forms of visual culture that has ever been produced.    

I loved what Penn and Kim Holderness have done with this book because, as someone in an ADHD marriage, it was refreshing to hear honest (and at times humorous) accounts of how ADHD can impact marriage and how it can also, when given the right support, enhance relationships.

I also appreciate the strength-based perspective to living with and excelling with ADHD, even for all the frustrations and difficulties it can cause in our lives. Readers really do walk away feeling they, too, are awesome because of their unique brains rather than just someone with a diagnosis that needs to be fixed.