![]() This glorious, dumbstruck, searing collection of poems - saturated with desperation and gratitude - includes a series of "portraits of the alcoholic": "With Home Invader and Housefly," "With Doubt and Kingfisher," "With Withdrawal." Akbar observes the granular texture of sobriety - the severity of its miracles and the range of its grace. It's a gripping story that feels simultaneously sadistic and illuminating.Ĭalling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar (2017). How can a book so unapologetically bleak also be so deeply compelling? With sentences like razors, Rhys makes the story of an alcoholic drinking herself to the brink of death impossible to turn away from. ![]() Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys (1939). Don Gately is easily the most compelling fictional rehab house counselor you'll ever meet. ![]() I first read Infinite Jest when I was nine months sober, and found an unexpectedly poignant account of recovery where I'd been expecting mere intellectual virtuosity. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996). Ultimately, it took her to a Manhattan hospital where she died handcuffed to her bed. Instead, with her sharp eye trained on the racial politics of drug laws, she recounts the unrelenting toll of an addiction that took her to prison (where she tried to make moonshine from potato peelings). In her searing memoir, Holiday resists the ways other people turn her heroin addiction into something mythic or villainous. ![]() Lady Sings the Blues by Billie Holiday (1956). ![]()
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