Books like Imperial Bedrooms — picked by fans

Like its classic predecessor, The Cipher, Kathe Koja’s second novel brilliantly navigates artistic and romantic movements between the somatic and the transcendent, the erotic and the morbid, and ultimately between creativity and destruction. The book centers on metal sculptor Tess’s burgeoning relationship with Bibi, a transgressive performance artist whose radical visions aspire to an extreme embodiment of posthuman aesthetics.

Incorporating Tess’s metal sculptures into her performances, Bibi explores increasingly intense modes of expression through self-mutilation, cutting, and scarification, and the book plunges fearlessly into the parallel arcs of an eroding love and an increasingly deadly obsession. Koja’s prose bristles with a violent passion channeled into hyperfocus, deftly bounding between her characters’ intense interiorities and vivid descriptions of environments and embodied experiences. 

Anna Kavan’s Asylum Piece presents exciting stylistic possibilities for the world of “personal fiction.” The book defies easy genre categorization, but one might describe it as an experimental, thematically connected collection of autofiction. Drawing on her own experiences in a Swiss sanitarium (from which she was dispatched in 1938), Kavan excavates her psychological traumas and filters them through sequences of vignettes and short stories, conveying states of extreme emotional distress through a restrained, intensely lucid form. An unblinking study of alienation, mental disarray, and feelings of helplessness under bureaucratic control, Asylum Piece takes up a lot of space in my mind.

Matthew Gregory Lewis wrote The Monk in his late teens, and the book glows with the heat of youthful rage, gloriously unconcerned with issues of propriety and “good taste.” The title monk, Ambrosio, unknowingly sets the course for his own damnation when he has sex with Matilda, a demon disguised as a beautiful woman. As the novel progresses, this illicit affair ignites Ambrosio’s most lurid urges, and he descends into extreme depravity: he dabbles in sorcery, he rapes, he murders. Gregory writes the book’s climax in visceral detail, gruesomely describing Ambrosio’s fate at the hands of Satan. Although The Monk features two main plotlines and, in truly Gothic fashion, periodic digressions into flashbacks and tangential subplots, it is brisk, lean, scary, and fiercely propulsive.

The narration is completely devoted to the worldview of main character Harry White. A man who climbs the ladder of corporate and social America thanks to unnatural drives inside him both dedicated to achieving his success and predicated ultimately to securing his eventual self-destruction. The demon is inside Harry White and it is the American dream. An extraordinary novel from an extraordinary writer who had already written himself into the annals of American literature with such classics as Last Exit to Brooklyn and The Room. The Demon in my view is Selby Jr.’s most personal and impersonal work.

When I was a homeless artist living on Chicago’s cold streets for six months, it was hard for me to believe in a compassionate Judeo-Christian God. It was difficult for me to reconcile how a just and benevolent God would let African pregnant women be thrown into the Atlantic Ocean and perish with thousands of other slaves.

That is why I became agnostic and was attracted to Sartre’s belief in the essential freedom of individuals, and he also believed that as free beings, people are responsible for all elements of themselves, their consciousness, and their actions. It made me question why I was homeless. Was it because of bad choices in life? Or was it just the experience of being a black male in a racist capitalist society?

Sartre became an existentialist because of the war and an encounter with Merleav Ponty, who taught him the political dimension of human… show more.

As a teenager I was struggling to understand the absurdities of life, and then I read Nausea, and found what I was looking for.

This is Sartre’s existential philosophy through fiction. It makes it readable and understandable to the layman and is a compelling psychological study of a breakdown brought on by the absurdity of life. It serves as a panacea when feeling overwhelmed by the fruitlessness of existence, from the absurdity of mortality to the solution to finding a sense of purpose.

It gets into the guts of the mental trauma of questioning anything and everything. Fortunately, there is a way out, and Nausea points the way.

After extensive research, this is the only book in existence that answers the question: What is existentialism? Existentialism may be understood as the correct point of departure for addressing the philosophy of being as it relates to the individual. In other words, existentialism provides the philosophical framework with which to answer the question: What does it mean to be?

Existentialism is the culmination of the philosophical tradition moving from Kant through the German Romantics to Heidegger and Sartre, among the other existentialists. In regard to Kant’s division, it differs from Deleuze’s choice to articulate transcendental philosophy with cosmology as the point of departure, in that it takes psychology as the point of departure. Yet, at the same time, just as understanding “the moment of vision” brings about a kind of gestalt shift in the reader’s perspective, so too though existentialism may be characterized as transcendental psychology, it has a higher… show more.

Nothing much seems to happen in this remarkable novella, which describes a single lunch break of a man at work.

Actually, though, the reader gets to eavesdrop on the man’s ruminations about everyday things—shoelaces, bathroom blow dryers, vending machines, office supplies, and so much more.

These ruminations are practically Proustian; they start with something ordinary (a milk carton), followed by a digression (memories of having milk delivered to his home), interrupted by another digression (about his sister’s milk allergy), and veering into philosophical territory (pondering the nature of all childhood memories).

Reading this novella is both exhausting and exhilarating. It’s like wandering haphazardly through a maze of ideas and memories. Luckily, the novella is short enough that the reader never grows bored or tired.

I feel as though this book isn’t widely known. The plot is quite bizarre and surreal–a man falls in love with a woman who is growing a water lily in her lung.

The novel’s theme of grief stood out to me, and I feel it was perfectly illustrated by Collin’s desperate attempts to keep his wife alive. It is evident that Vian used Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist philosophy as inspiration for this novel.

This is an amazing and brief explanation of what existentialism is and why it should matter to anyone looking for meaning in their life.

I love that Satre demystifies his philosophy, making it accessible and understandable to anyone. The book is actually the transcription of a lecture he gave, so it is wonderfully readable and full of examples and situations that I learned a lot from.

He also defends existentialism from some of its common critiques, which makes the book even more useful as an introduction. Many of my questions were answered here!