Neil Strauss portrait

Neil Strauss' Top Book Recommendations

Bestselling Author

Want to know what books Neil Strauss recommends? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Neil Strauss' favorite book recommendations of all time. At Shortform, we know books. Our book guides are the best in the world. Learn why.

Journey to the End of the Night book cover1

Journey to the End of the Night

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Ralph Manheim, William T. Vollmann

4.3
Louis-Ferdinand Celine's revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every page of this novel. Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932,
Neil Strauss portraitDavid Downie portraitQuentin Hardy portrait Recommended by Neil Strauss, David Downie, Quentin Hardy, and 1 others.
David Downie portrait
David Downie

I was particularly fascinated by Céline’s portrait of the city because Paris is one of the characters in the book. You get a real sense of what Paris looked like. [source]

Quentin Hardy portrait
Quentin Hardy

@p1lonn Terrible human, but that's a great book. [source]

2

Ask the Dust

John Fante

4.2
Arturo Bandini is a struggling writer lodging in a seedy LA hotel. While basking in the glory of having had a single short story published in a small magazine, he meets local waitress Camilla Lopez and they embark on a strange and strained love-hate relationship. Slowly, but inexorably, it descends into the realm of madness.

Ask the Dust is one of the truly great, yet unsung, American novels of the
Neil Strauss portraitRyan Holiday portraitJonathan Evison portrait Recommended by Neil Strauss, Ryan Holiday, and Jonathan Evison.
Ryan Holiday portrait
Ryan Holiday

Author

I found John Fante through Neil Strauss, who considers Ask the Dustone of his favorite books. I read it in one day, LOVED it and subsequently read everything by Fante I could get my hands on. In 2011, I read seven Fante novels, one biography by his son and a book of letters between John and H.L Mencken. I utterly immersed myself in his world, from spending hours in Downtown LA where the books are based to reading everything I could find by his contemporaries. I even found out one of his novels is set in the random Northern California town I grew up in and that Fante lived just down the road from where I lived. NO fiction writer made a bigger impact on me this year and there were no book I enjoyed reading more (or read faster) than Fante’s books. My favorites, in order, are: Ask the Dust, Dreams from Bunker Hill, The Brotherhood of the Grape, Full of Life, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, The Road to Los Angeles, 1933 Was a Bad Year. Once you read those, you will almost certainly enjoy Fante/Mencken, and Fante: A Family’s Legacy of Writing, Drinking and Surviving. [source]

Jonathan Evison portrait
Jonathan Evison

I won’t say this is the book that made me want to be a writer, because I always wanted to be that, but it solidified my insistence on becoming some hopelessly young, starving misfit awash in an urban landscape somewhere, working my ass off, just really throwing my heart out there and getting it kicked around. Ask the Dust is just a really powerful book for me. It’s a chronicle of the immigrant experience in America in the 1930s. [source]

3

Life is Elsewhere

Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher

4.1
Kundera initially intended to call this novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, according to Kundera, is youth, and this novel, above all, is an epic of adolescence; an ironic epic that tenderly erodes sacrosanct values: childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry. Jaromil is in fact a poet. His mother made him a poet and accompanies him (figuratively) to his love bed, and (literally) to hi
Neil Strauss portrait Recommended by Neil Strauss.