
The Diary of a Drug Fiend
A much harsher version of pleasure and escape becoming dependence.
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by Hubert Selby Jr.
Four people chase better futures until substances and fantasies consume the lives they were meant to improve.
Selby follows addiction without glamour, showing several characters becoming consumed by drugs and by the futures they keep imagining for themselves.
Four people pursue love, success, money, beauty, and escape while addiction steadily replaces the futures they imagine.
Selby follows the movement from substances improving life to substances replacing it.


A much harsher version of pleasure and escape becoming dependence.
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A leaner account of addiction as the routine around which everything else is arranged.
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The doctor of the Paris slums who wrote the century's blackest, funniest novel — and changed the sound of French prose.
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French writer and philosopher whose novels, memoirs, and social analysis examined freedom, gender, responsibility, aging, and the material conditions that shape a life.
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American writer and illustrator (1892–1982). She was a New York newspaper reporter for eight years before she was a novelist, spent the 1920s and 1930s in Paris, and wrote Nightwood, the 1936 novel T. S. Eliot took to Faber and introduced.
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