Books like Pleasant Hell by John Carroll Dolan

Cormac McCarthy's tenth novel, The Road, is his most harrowing yet deeply personal work. Some unnamed catastrophe has scourged the world to a burnt-out cinder, inhabited by the last remnants of mankind and a very few surviving dogs and fungi. The sky is perpetually shrouded by dust and toxic particulates; the seasons are merely varied intensities of cold and dampness. Bands of cannibals roam the roads and inhabit what few dwellings remain intact in the woods. Through this nightmarish residue of America a haggard father and his young son attempt to flee the oncoming Appalachian winter and head towards the southern coast along carefully chosen back roads. Mummified corpses are their only benign companions, sitting in doorways and automobiles, variously impaled or displayed on pikes and tables and in cake bells, or they rise in frozen poses of horror and agony out of congealed asphalt. The boy and his father hope to avoid the marauders, reach a milder climate, and perhaps locate some remnants of civilization still worthy of that name. They possess only what they can scavenge to eat, and the rags they wear and the heat of their own bodies are all the shelter they have. A pistol with only a few bullets is their only defense besides flight. Before them the father pushes a shopping cart filled with blankets, cans of food and a few other assets, like jars of lamp oil or gasoline siphoned from the tanks of abandoned vehicles—the cart is equipped with a bicycle mirror so that they will not be surprised from behind. Through encounters with other survivors brutal, desperate or pathetic, the father and son are both hardened and sustained by their will, their hard-won survivalist savvy, and most of all by their love for each other. They struggle over mountains, navigate perilous roads and forests reduced to ash and cinders, endure killing cold and freezing rainfall. Passing through charred ghost towns and ransacking abandoned markets for meager provisions, the pair battle to remain hopeful. They seek the most rudimentary sort of salvation. However, in The Road, such redemption as might be permitted by their circumstances depends on the boy’s ability to sustain his own instincts for compassion and empathy in opposition to his father’s insistence upon their mutual self-interest and survival at all physical and moral costs. The Road was the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Literature. ([source][1]) [1]: https://www.cormacmccarthy.com/works/the-road/

Nothing, in all it's entirety.

Inspector Tyador Borlú must travel to Ul Qoma to search for answers in the murder of a woman found in the city of Besźel.

A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human - and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.

I changed the Publication year from 1973 to 1980. This digital edition is a scan copy of the 9th printing edition of this book (1980) not the first printing(1973)

From book jacket: Adrian Mole is a worrier. The problems of existence hit him hard. Spots, bits of him that won't seem to keep still, the cracks in his parents' marriage, all prey heavily on his mind. There are some consolations. A 14 year old feminist, an 89 year old chain smoker and his spoilt best friend all help to lift the gloomy introspection of Mole's moods. Mole believes he is an intellectual. He is certainly a poet. He buys strikingly coloured stationery on which to write his poems and send them to the B.B.C. He is dogged by ill health as well as by an infuriatingly ever-present pet dog, and by a catalogue of misfortunes familiar to anyone over the age of 13. ... Sue Townsend's original creation .. [is] a hilarious delight.

Obsessed with seventeenth-century Flemish masterpieces, Wyatt Gwyon forges original artwork amazingly faithful to the spirit and techniques of the time.

The four hunks have almost despaired of turning Sunako into a lady when a toddler named Rin shows up and starts calling Ranmaru "Daddy." Ranmaru denies being his father, but Sunako softens up around the boy. Could he be what finally transforms her?

Narrated as a memoir, this excellent novel tells the story of one summer at the turn of the century when the narrator was a young boy. The boy spends the summer in question as a guest at a country estate where he befriends a local farmer. He soon finds himself acting as an unwitting messenger, carrying letters back and forth between the farmer and the daughter of his host on whom he has a crush.

It's East Texas in the 1950's, somewhere between the sand hills of that region and the black gumbo soil of Central Texas, a place where the disparate faces of rural America live and breathe-the solid ethics of work and religion are set over and against the open wounds of prejudice and bigotry. Haley, Texas 1959 is about that place and time. It contains two novellas: imaginative shapings and interweavings of events, both invented and actual, that occurred when Donley Watt was growing up. In the novellaSeven Days Working, an older man recalls his own childhood and an impossible task he was given by his father when he was 14-to clear out 70 acres of mesquite, using an axe. The way the boy sees it, he'll never finish. He has only seven days and during that time-camping out alone in the pasture with a dozen brindle cows, some lizards, frogs, rabbits and a lot of flies for company-he strikes at the trunks of those thorny, unyielding trees even as he hacks through the rough places in his own understanding. The boy has the task of clearing mesquite, while the man, recalling, uses the memory to get at the root of who he is. God, death, women, his family, why he is always restless, always hungry to move on-these are the issues the man wrestles with as he meditates on and sifts through each one of those long boyhood days, one day at a time. In the title novella-Haley, Texas 1959-Watt uses the intense racial prejudices of a small town in East Texas to paint the backdrop for the murder of a black man. A young teenage boy-the "preacher's boy" as he is referred to-is an unwitting accomplice. He's bored. His older cousin lets him tag along as he and two rowdy friends cruise the back roads in a '55 Chevy. What starts out as a joy ride-a chance to have a little fun and teach a black man a "much-deserved" lesson-quickly turns deadly. The boy's father, Reverend Wallace Wilson, is called in after the murder to help bring about a softening of hearts between the white and black community, little suspecting that his own son is involved. When the boy finally confesses to the truth, his father looks desperately for a solution that will fall outside the bounds of punishment and ruined lives-yet finds himself estranged from everything he believes in.

Three teenage friends, Dino, Jonathon, and Ben, confront the confusions, fears, and joys of adolescent male sexuality.