Title Recommendations based on Amelie Poulain
A ticking-time-bomb insomniac and a slippery soap salesman channel primal male aggression into a shocking new form of therapy. Their concept catches on, with underground "fight clubs" forming in every town, until an eccentric gets in the way and ignites an out-of-control spiral toward oblivion.
With his wife's disappearance having become the focus of an intense media circus, a man sees the spotlight turned on him when it's suspected that he may not be innocent.
A young girl named Juno gets herself pregnant and tries to stand on her own, but soon learns a few lessons about being grown up.
Inspired by actual events, a group of fame-obsessed teenagers use the Internet to track celebrities' whereabouts in order to rob their homes.
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time, Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world's great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we fear most.
Through the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach, Camus explored what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd."
A group of male friends become obsessed with five mysterious sisters who are sheltered by their strict, religious parents.
The Godfather chronicles the lives of the fictional Italian-American Corleone crime family in teh 1940's. When organized crime family patriarch, Vito Corleone barely survives an attempt on his life, his youngest son Michael steps in to take care of the would-be killers—launching a campaign of bloody revenge.
Awe and exhilaration—along with heartbreak and mordant wit—abound in this account of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America, but most of all, it is a meditation on love—love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.
In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis imaginatively explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.
War and Peace broadly focuses on Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman who intrigues both men. As Napoleon's army invades, Tolstoy brilliantly follows characters from diverse backgrounds—peasants and nobility, civilians and soldiers—as they struggle with the problems unique to their era, their history, and their culture.
Don Draper is the creative director at Madison Avenue advertising agency Sterling Cooper. As a man who created his own entirely new identity that he successfully sells to the world every day, Don is a natural. But his whole carefully constructed life could come crumbling down if his secret is discovered. Don't be fooled by Mad Men's gorgeous characters and sets; the show is easier on the eyes than it is on the soul.
A burger-loving hit man, his philosophical partner, a drug-addled gangster's moll and a washed-up boxer converge in this dark crime caper. Their adventures unfurl in three stories that ingeniously trip back and forth in time.
Some of literature's most terrifying characters, including Dr. Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, and iconic figures from the novel Dracula are lurking in the darkest corners of Victorian London. Penny Dreadful is a frightening psychological thriller that weaves together these classic horror origin stories into a new drama.
Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer are a pair of broke twenty-something slackers roaming the streets of New York City. Ilana's approach to life is infectious, perhaps due to all the pot she smokes. And Abbi is the ultimate wingwoman. Sure, there may be awkward moments in the night, and they might black out on you before midnight. But if all goes well, they're the perfect friends to have in your corner.
