A charismatic Brit and his entourage of overeducated dropouts take over a piano factory in Oakland, intending to squat there and throw the most massive raves the Bay Area has ever seen. But, as their project progresses, they find the mix of their idealistic youthful hormones and the hard drugs they gobble up like Captain Crunch has turned their enterprise into a paranoid schizophrenic cult called Ecstasy Club bent on time travel and transcendence. Things get weird when they actually succeed. But all is not well in Nirvana. Rushkoff manages to hard-wire a psychotically charged volume that connects all the pop-culture dots, like conspiracy theories, aliens, and MTV. The ironic distance of the narrator seems malleable, like physical distance on too much acid. Ecstasy Club seems to turn its own pages.

You will want to take a shower after reading Chum, and you might even need a support group. Roughly based on a play by Celine, author of Death on the Installment Plan, Chum drags us laughing through the lust, murder, and rape that the inhabitants of a small fishing village in the Bering Sea call recreation. Spitzer is a shockingly good student of human nature, and maybe that's why he can make us laugh at this shit. No. Not haw haw academic "how clever" laughter. I mean really laugh as he spins his tale in the language of nasty porno and exploitation movies. Spitzer writes in American. Be afraid.

William Vollmann loves Asian whores, and writes extremely well about fucking them throughout the first half of Butterfly Stories. He also illustrates his chapters with psychotic ink sketches and builds a tenuous foundation of sympathy for the narrator/protagonist in scenes of his bullied childhood and first loves. But the second half has nowhere to go. The author then outlines the fall of the anti-hero in what looks like reflexive old-fashioned moral retribution amid gimmicky Pynchonesque postmodernism and much talk of love. (Sound of cat choking up a hairball.) The author parachuted at the last second and sacrificed his narrator to save himself from feminist (read moralist) and post-colonial theorist (read moralist) flack. I don't think even "love" redeems this character, but, in earlier chapters, I think paradoxically his unrepentant honesty did. This book gets a little tough, but I finished it, which is a hundred pages more than I can say about On The Road or War and Peace.

This guy Beatty writes so well it's scary. Tuff follows a black street thug through the urban black community we never see. Beatty isn't afraid to write about the rampant stupidity of his nonetheless poetic black characters, who each seem to represent a different urban pathos that they can't see beyond. The author is also a poet, and sometimes Tuff reads like a prose poem, high literacy set to a slamming beat.

Jesus' Son is a great work to put in the new canon. But just because it's literature, doesn't mean it's bad. With sharp-edged realism, Johnson drags us through the desolation of the junky life, and when we hit bottom, he pushes us right into the sacred with passages that sometimes approach magical realism. Sometimes passages hit so hard, you almost have to put the book down to catch your breath, as at the beginning of Happy Hour: "I was after a seventeen year old belly dancer who was always in the company of a boy who claimed to be her brother, but he wasn't her brother, he was just somebody who was in love with her, and she let him hang around because life can be that way." A new classic from the wasteland. The movie was close, but no banana.

Another one for the new canon. Chuck Pahahniuk's backlash genreation novel Fight Club lands the old one-two on the self-help book culture spawned in the 70s. This ain't I'm Okay, You're Okay. This is NOBODY'S OKAY. If you're looking for sweet lies, do not click on this book. A myth for a generation of men raised by women, Fight Club tries to slug its way back to what it means to be a man through a commercial culture full of cute junk and bullshit. Palahniuk's social commentary is always dead-on. A movie is not the same thing as a book. Buy it.

Maybe the grand-daddy of the new canon, Trainspotting is written in thick Scottish dialect, ya dos cunt. It's about heroin addicts. Welsh gets a little PC when he tries to write about women, but the rest of the book stays truthful as it chronicles the lives of a group of welfare cunts in Scotland who variously fall prey to and kick heroin. Drugs, violent crime, drug running. Very real.

Non-Fiction

The Re Search Pranks issue is my Bible. Perhaps the greatest book ever written. Comprised of interviews with the likes of Mark Pauline, of Survival Research Laboratories, Timothy Leary, and many more, the Pranks issue explores the philosophy of the prank with hilarious and thought-provoking anecdotes. Laughter is the one phenomenon unexplored by philosophy, because, what the fuck, it isn't serious, is it? But after you read this from cover to cover, you might take the art of the prank a little more seriously. Some of my favorites are the guy who makes psychotic municipal parking signs and posts them, the guy who did a photo essay on having a pet cemetery funeral with all the trimmings for a store-bought chicken in a plastic bag, the guy who had some random person's house disassembled and carted away over the weekend without his knowledge by simply making phone calls, or the guys who saw a guy on the street who looked like Edi Amin, and talked him into doing a press conference with the national media... who fell for it!

Douglas Rushkoff offers this heavily researched expose on how marketers and other scum influence people like us. As marketers come up with more and more devious ways to divide and conquer, we become immune to the new techniques. This means an unprecedented "arms race" to develop ways to control you, even down the the level of smells that induce feelings in department stores, malls designed to confuse you into submission, and ads designed to produce actual hypnotic induction and reduce you the level of an impressionable child. Did you know car salesmen base their high-pressure selling techniques on the CIA's recently declassified interrogation manual? Do you know the 20 characteristics of all cults and their similarity to multi-level marketing schemes? Do you know I'm doing it to you right now? Get Coercion, and rescue yourself before it's too late!

Dee Dee Ramone's autobiography, Lobotomy, Surviving the Ramones, reads with the quick simplicity and entertainment value of a Ramones song. Follow him as he jumps from continent to continent in search of heroin and anything else he can pack into his already crowded bloodstream. Lot's of anecdotes about other musicians of the punk era. He fills us in on how and by whom the different Ramones songs got written. I love the part where he gets paranoid. I like him now more than I ever did.

Science Fiction

Michael Moorcock, one of the old gods of "new" science fiction (From the 60s), gives us this history of the Dancers at the End of Time, a group of eccentrics with almost unlimited powers, which free them to indulge their personalities to their most perverse extremes. One of these unimaginably jaded immortal and immoral people begins to research "love" and "virtue," finds himself completely confused by the concepts, and decides to try to fall in love. To this end, he travels back in time to bring a Victorian teetotaler back to his own end times. Bizarre and good-natured, Moorcock gives us in this volume the most free science fiction ever written. You will see a lot of passages in Dancers that seems to have been stolen by Douglas Adams, so if you like Adams, you need to see the real stuff!

In Neuromancer, William Gibson takes the tough-guy novel tone and vamps on it into cyberspace. Lot's of ideas to get your head working, and lots of adventure to keep you reading. Violence, sex, drugs, hacking. The texture of the prose is really not that great, but he's one of the first to really exploit cyberspace, and science fiction really needs to go there. He even invented the word "cyberspace." Give him his credit for that. A classic.

Poetry

There are so many great Charles Bukowski volumes of poetry, it's hard to pick one to recommend above the others. This is the first one I ever owned, and it changed my opinion of poetry in general, so maybe it will for you, too. Bukowski writes about hard-drinking and whores, fighting and fucking, loving and hating, getting a boil on the ass, then getting your ass kicked, sleeping in skid row rooms, working in nameless factories and the psychosis and animus that comes from working for the US Postal Service for ten years.