Here are 100 books that The Dirt fans have personally recommended if you like
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My name is Tim O’Leary and two of my books, Dick Cheney Shot Me in the Face–And Other Tales of Men in Pain and Men Behaving Badly, emanate from the minds of protagonists trying to do the right thing the wrong way or evil characters doing the wrong thing they believe to be right. I’m particularly drawn to those wonderful literary psychopaths that draw you in with compelling personalities, while reviling the reader with their heinous actions.
I found this book in college, and at the time, I thought it was the most unique book I had ever read.
Thompson’s “Gonzo Journalism” was fresh, funny, and thought-provoking, with a subtext of modern poetry, political activism, and a sense of humor I have never seen replicated.
'We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive ..."'
Hunter S. Thompson is roaring down the desert highway to Las Vegas with his attorney, the Samoan, to find the dark side of the American Dream. Armed with a drug arsenal of stupendous proportions, the duo engage in a surreal succession of chemically enhanced confrontations with casino operators, police officers and assorted Middle Americans.
This stylish reissue of Hunter S. Thompson's iconic masterpiece, a controversial bestseller when…
Where Are Your Boys is the book I always wanted to write. Watching emo bands like My Chemical Romance and Paramore soar from suburbs to stardom during my high school years inspired me to take writing seriously, that a kid like me growing up in New Jersey with few connections to the media industry could find a backdoor in, because those bands did, too. With its dense population, adjacency to New York City, and a multitude of record stores and all-ages shows, New Jersey was the setting for much of emo's 2000s boom and the home of My Chemical Romance and many other important bands.
The gold standard of rock and roll oral histories. Two authors, years and years in the making, chronicling one of music's most incendiary eras. "Will you die for the music?" Lou Reed asks in the early pages. In other words, how many knife fights, sleepless nights, and dead friends would it take to stop you from chasing artistic salvation?
Reading this book while I wrote my own made me realize just how sterilized my scene (like much of America) had gotten by the turn of the millennium. Third-wave emo wasn't famously dangerous or gritty, but many of its icons grappled with life-threatening addiction and mental health issues (even more than I expected going in). Yet, thankfully, almost all of those band members are still with us. Please Kill Me illuminated this. It's no accident the final word in my book is "survive."
This is the true story of a misunderstood culture phenomenon, one embracing Andy Warhol, Jim Morrison, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Patti Smith, The Sex Pistols, Iggy Pop, The New York Dolls, The Clash and The Damned. It is a story of sex, drugs and rock and roll, documenting a time of glorious self-destruction and perverse innocence - punk was possibly the last time so many people will have had so much fun killing themselves. Legs McNeil, founder of "Punk" magazine has interviewed those who were members of the punk scene, from the brightest stars to the most observant groupies.
Philosophical novels challenge rather than appease. They subvert. They obscure. As a former acquisitions editor at major publishing houses, I am confounded by the scarcity of chances taken on books that don’t fit the status quo or, are "difficult." I am most interested in how books—even when they meander and cavort—lead to surprising and unsettling revelations. Or how they don’t lead to revelations at all but keep the reader guessing as to when some semblance of grace will be achieved. I don’t wish to sound pessimistic; if anything, I wish to be realistic. Philosophical novels are reflections of life, which is often confusing, contradictory, and, yes, difficult. With a touch of grace for good measure.
Perhaps the most “realistic” novel of this bunch, Ralph Ellison’s National Book Award-winning novel follows an unnamed black narrator’s life in a small southern town, as detailed through his memories, dreams, and desires.
Ellison didn’t intend to write a “protest novel,” apparently, but it has become exactly that: a protestation of the inequities of an American system designed to keep Black people in the shadows. The novel’s voice, though singular, is representative of an entire social movement. A perfect novel.
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this deeply compelling novel and epic milestone of American literature, a nameless narrator tells his story from the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.
He describes growing up in a Black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood," before retreating amid violence and confusion.
Originally published in 1952 as the first novel by a then unknown author, it remained on the bestseller list for…
That’s a terrible question that gives
me spiritual anxiety. But to get right down to it, I’m just someone who loves
culture. I’m fascinated by why people do the things they do, from ethics to
aesthetics. As a music journalist, I have interviewed everyone from local bands
to Grammy award-winning artists for publications like Alternative Press,
Kerrang!, Revolver, and Loudwire. My work as a freelance
entertainment writer carried me to other types of lifestyle writing, including
food and travel. I am a regular contributor for Reader’s Digest.
American Hardcore is like the more aggressive cousin to Please
Kill Me. While the latter is more of a narrative, American Hardcore
is an audiophile’s masterpiece. It catalogs the evolution of hardcore music
from coast to coast: its code of ethics, bloody brawls, and unrelenting spirit.
It is as much a compilation of photographs and shows flyers as it is in interviews,
providing a bird’s-eye view of the subculture. I appreciate this book for its
scope and its commitment to documentation.
"American Hardcore sets the record straight about the last great American subculture"—Paper magazine
Steven Blush's "definitive treatment of Hardcore Punk" (Los Angeles Times) changed the way we look at Punk Rock. The Sony Picture Classics–distributed documentary American Hardcore premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. This revised and expanded second edition contains hundreds of new bands, thirty new interviews, flyers, a new chapter ("Destroy Babylon"), and a new art gallery with over 125 rare photos and images.
That’s a terrible question that gives
me spiritual anxiety. But to get right down to it, I’m just someone who loves
culture. I’m fascinated by why people do the things they do, from ethics to
aesthetics. As a music journalist, I have interviewed everyone from local bands
to Grammy award-winning artists for publications like Alternative Press,
Kerrang!, Revolver, and Loudwire. My work as a freelance
entertainment writer carried me to other types of lifestyle writing, including
food and travel. I am a regular contributor for Reader’s Digest.
Culture critic Chuck Klosterman is
essentially the next-gen Hunter S. Thompson. This book is a stream of
consciousness foray into contemporary pop culture, ranging from essays on
sports to music to reality TV. It’s an odd, brilliant, self-indulgent take on
the American zeitgeist. Feel smart and have a laugh at the same time.
With an exhaustive knowledge of popular culture and an effortless ability to spin brilliant prose out of unlikely subject matter, Klosterman attacks the entire spectrum of postmodern America: reality TV, Internet porn, breakfast cereal, serial killers, Pamela Anderson, literary Jesus freaks, and the real difference between apples and oranges (of which there is none). Sex, Drugs and Coca Puffs is ostensibly about movies, sport, television, music, books, video games and kittens, but really it's about us. All of us.
My tenure as editor-in-chief of Guitar magazine is well behind me now, but it always lights me up to create content for musicians, and to absorb it. These are my people, you see, a community of curious, empathic, chronically late daydreamers and night owls, good listeners all. I’m not qualified to comment on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory or Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music, but neither do I want to talk about rock-star memoirs or fawning fictionalizations. No fanfare here, thank you. Instead, these are five books in which musicians may recognize some element of their creative self and come away with a little more fuel for the fire.
Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy really, really wants everyone to write a song, and I find it terribly endearing.
I picked up his handbook amid a COVID-era creative block, and with Jeff as my songwriting sherpa, I was eventually able to drop some baggage and make my way up. I had already known that music would pay me back for the effort, but Jeff (I think he’d want me to call him Jeff) patiently walks through directly applicable strategies such as word-laddering, stealing, and the Dadaist cut-up technique for lyric writing.
His encouraging nudge made it easier to leave self-judgment and even good sense behind.
'A guide to rediscovering the joys of creating that we all felt as children.' NEW YORK TIMES
One of the century's most feted singer-songwriters, Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, digs deep into his own creative process to share his unique perspective about song-writing and offers a warm, accessible guide to writing your first song, championing the importance of making creativity part of your everyday life and experiencing the hope, inspiration and joy that accompanies it.
'Fascinating.' ROUGH TRADE 'Eloquent.' INDEPENDENT 'Nourishing.' PITCHFORK 'A proselytiser for the act of songcraft.' FINANCIAL TIMES 'A smart,…
After years as a London-based music journalist for publications such as Melody Maker, Q, and The Guardian, I turned to ghostwriting rock autobiographies and discovered how much more satisfying it is to tell someone’s full, unadulterated life story rather than to feed on carefully cultivated scraps gleaned from half-hour interviews. I never imagined anybody would be as lewdly transparent as my first memoir subject, Nikki Sixx, but many others have run him close—not least Judas Priest singer Rob Halford, in 2020’s appositely named Confess. Its follow-up, Biblical, is imminent. Does it go the extra mile? I don’t think it will disappoint…
Few musicians are able to pen their own memoir, sans ghostwriter, without toppling into weary self-indulgence. Take a bow, Viv Albertine. Named after a scathing condemnation of her teenage proclivities by her despairing mother, Clothes Clothes Clothes… brilliantly chronicled the groundbreaking all-female UK punk band The Slits’ guitarist’s brittle, self-doubting journey through music and life. Highlights? Joe Strummer’s unstinting attempts to pick her up whenever her boyfriend Mick Jones’s back was turned, and Johnny Rotten’s characteristically sneering dismissal of her failed attempt to give him a blow-job: "Oh, Vivienne, you’re trying too hard!"
SUNDAY TIMES MUSIC BOOK OF THE YEAR ROUGH TRADE BOOK OF THE YEAR MOJO BOOK OF THE YEAR
A new edition as part of the Faber Greatest Hits - books that have taken writing about music in new and exciting directions for the twenty-first century.
In 1975, Viv Albertine was obsessed with music but it never occurred to her she could be in a band as she couldn't play an instrument and she'd never seen a girl play electric guitar.
A year later, she was the guitarist in the hugely influential all-girl band the Slits, who fearlessly took on the…
Ever since childhood, I’ve been interested in dark stories, and this led me to writing dark fantasy. To this day, my main inspirations as a writer are Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock, both dark fantasists. I think it is only through understanding evil that we can appreciate goodness. As such, I strive to explore the darker parts of my characters’ psyches. I also write a fair deal about racism, which is a socially accepted, even celebrated form of evil. Fiction, because it has so few limits as far as subject matter, is, in my opinion, the best medium to have these conversations. Thank you for reading my list!
Statutory rape between teachers and students is a very uncomfortable subject that Alissa Nutting tackles head-on in her 2013 breakthrough novel.
I was impressed with how Nutting avoided sympathy for the devil. Her hebephilic protagonist, Celeste, is a terrible person who, like Richard III, conspiratorially lets the reader in on her plans to manipulate and seduce 12-year-old boys. The longer the book goes on, the clearer it becomes that Celeste isn’t some evil mastermind, just a dunderheaded rapist who gets out of trouble by virtue of being an attractive white woman.
I respect Nutting for writing this book. By staring at the monster in all her ugliness, she creates sympathy for the people whose lives are destroyed by Celeste and by people like her in the real world.
Celeste Price is an eighth-grade English teacher in suburban Tampa. She is attractive. She drives a red Corvette. Her husband, Ford, is rich, square-jawed and devoted to her. But Celeste has a secret. She has a singular sexual obsession - fourteen-year-old boys. It is a craving she pursues with sociopathic meticulousness and forethought. Within weeks of her first term at a new school, Celeste has lured the charmingly modest Jack Patrick into her web - car rides after dark, rendezvous at Jack's house while his single father works the late shift, and body-slamming encounters in Celeste's empty classroom between periods.…
My tenure as editor-in-chief of Guitar magazine is well behind me now, but it always lights me up to create content for musicians, and to absorb it. These are my people, you see, a community of curious, empathic, chronically late daydreamers and night owls, good listeners all. I’m not qualified to comment on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory or Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music, but neither do I want to talk about rock-star memoirs or fawning fictionalizations. No fanfare here, thank you. Instead, these are five books in which musicians may recognize some element of their creative self and come away with a little more fuel for the fire.
Mingus reveals a life so foreign to my own upbringing—uninhibited, dangerous, angry, crude, at once vulnerable and invulnerable—that I was shocked by this book as a teenage jazz head.
I found his autobiography intimidating, much the way his music shoved me out of my comfort zone. In Mingus’s prose, there is no mistaking the cadences, dissonance, and strange beauty that characterize his formidable body of musical work.
I’ve never bought into the trope that one has to suffer for one’s art but I believed Mingus when he said, “I'm trying to play the truth of what I am."
Bass player extraordinaire Charles Mingus, who died in 1979, is one of the essential composers in the history of jazz, and Beneath the Underdog, his celebrated, wild, funny, demonic, anguished, shocking and profoundly moving memoir, is the greatest autobiography ever written by a jazz musician.
It tells of his God-haunted childhood in Watts during the 1920s and 1930s; his outcast adolescent years; his apprenticeship, not only with jazzmen but also with pimps, hookers, junkies, and hoodlums; and his golden years in New York City with such legendary figures as Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie.…
After years as a London-based music journalist for publications such as Melody Maker, Q, and The Guardian, I turned to ghostwriting rock autobiographies and discovered how much more satisfying it is to tell someone’s full, unadulterated life story rather than to feed on carefully cultivated scraps gleaned from half-hour interviews. I never imagined anybody would be as lewdly transparent as my first memoir subject, Nikki Sixx, but many others have run him close—not least Judas Priest singer Rob Halford, in 2020’s appositely named Confess. Its follow-up, Biblical, is imminent. Does it go the extra mile? I don’t think it will disappoint…
Autobiographies by genuine A-listers can prove disappointing experiences, as the superstars in question tread delicately lest they puncture their carefully cultivated public images. Not so Sir Elton John, who in Meworked closely with Guardianwriter Alexis Petridis to deliver a racy, rambunctious, scurrilous account of his serial misdoings. Everyone had always known that Elton John was doing crazy shit. Nobody had grasped that he was doing quite as much as this.
In his first and only official autobiography, music icon Elton John reveals the truth about his extraordinary life. Me is the joyously funny, honest and moving story of the most enduringly successful singer/songwriter of all time.
The Sunday Times bestseller with a new chapter bringing the story up to date.
'The rock memoir of the decade' - Daily Mail 'The rock star's gloriously entertaining and candid memoir is a gift to the reader' - Sunday Times ______________
Christened Reginald Dwight, he was a shy boy with Buddy Holly glasses who grew up in the London suburb of Pinner and dreamed…
