Downers
Discover our curated Downers reading list, featuring soul-stirring classics like Sylvia Plath's *The Bell Jar*, Hemingway's *The Sun Also Rises*, and Faulkner's *As I Lay Dying*. Explore gripping fiction and David Sedaris' dark humor in this collection of emotionally powerful, melancholic must-reads for fans of literary depth.
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The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under--maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experiece as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.
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Barrel Fever
by David Sedaris
With a skewed sense of wit uniquely his own, satirist and popular NPR storyteller David Sedaris presents a collection of short stories and essays, wherein home surgery and an elf-abusing Santa prevail.
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The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
A group of expatriates travel from Paris to the Pamplona bullfights.
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As I Lay Dying
by William Faulkner
A true 20th-century classic from the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Sound and the Fury: the famed harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. As I Lay Dying is one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama. Narrated in turn by each of the family members, including Addie herself as well as others, the novel ranges in mood from dark comedy to the deepest pathos. “I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force. Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first word I knew what the last word would be and almost where the last period would fall.” —William Faulkner on As I Lay Dying This edition reproduces the corrected text of As I Lay Dying as established in 1985 by Noel Polk.
