38 Books Like Loitering with Intent

This book gives Sylvia Plath her due as a uniquely original and groundbreaking poet who struggled against the patriarchal disdain of female poets in the 1950s&60s, the appropriation of her life story by her famous poet husband and others, and by her untimely, tragic death. I have loved everything by and about Sylvia Plath ever since I discovered The Bell Jar (her novel) and Ariel (her latest poetry collection) as a preteen. I’ve read every biography about her, various editions of her journals and letters, her juvenilia, everything. Yet, because she had been reduced to her suicide, her perfectionism and her ambition, over the years since she died, I wondered if there was something wrong with me for finding her language so fresh and forceful and fascinating. This book delves into her life, her ambition, her contradictions and the world she inhabited like no other book before it, finally giving… show more.

This book is dense and enthralling, taking the reader deep into the subconscious of the narrator, a bitter, infuriatingly passive, utterly lucid screen writer who’s witnessing the disintegration of his marriage, as his wife is slowly seduced by the film director. Or has the narrator offered her to the film director or the sake of his career? Is his career worth the cost of his creative love which is theater? The writing is gorgeous and melancholy. Not an easy read but a worthwhile one.

The Scottish author Muriel Spark’s specialty was short, mordant, corrosive novels, the best known being, of course, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. This one, published in 1970, was among her most striking.

A repressed woman’s vacation during the free-loving sixties turns out to be a date with death she may have initiated: the question lingers after you finish.

It became a flawed yet fascinating 1974 film with Elizabeth Taylor at her most—literally and figuratively—exposed.

Yes, yes, I know the novel came out in 1961 and the movie in 1969. But I’d never read it. I finally got around to it a scant 62 years later.

I was blown away by how modern it felt, especially in its description of the very particular kind of teacher who believes they are the center of the universe and it’s their job to teach their students what to think, not how to think. It’s manipulation bordering on child abuse… which also happens to be hysterically funny.

In a tough prostitute named Virginia, escaped convict Timothy Sunblade finds the perfect partner to help execute the perfect crime. The extraordinary relationship between these two makes the book memorable. Sunblade is clear-eyed, thoughtful, disillusioned, sensitive, brutish, self-assured at times, and wavering at others. Virginia is wise, world-weary, sure of herself and what she wants, sometimes crazed like a caged animal, but always strong.

Chaze's atmospheric detail adds depth and presence to the story. The characters' arc is one of darkening fate and inevitable tragedy. Watching their slow descent is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. The characters continue to deepen throughout the story, all the way to the final page, and they stay with you long after you've put the book down.

Nausea does not rely on the extreme or outlandish scenarios of science fiction to explore philosophical themes. Rather, this novel is about a person’s growing malaise over his conscious relationship to objects, people, and ultimately himself. It reaches into some very fundamental aspects of our relationship to the world, and asks you to look at the mere structure of existence after all particularities (names, shapes, colors, history, etc.) are wiped away, and then asks you how you feel about it. Through an existentialist lens, it also explores certain political questions. And for those more technically interested in philosophy, the novel does a better job of showing existentialism’s relationship to phenomenology than many academic papers. 

Released in the early ‘90s, Frisk was adapted into a film in the mid-90s by Todd Verow. Both received mixed reviews due its transgressive content about madness and bizarre sexual aesthetic. Frisk leaves little to the imagination as the narrator explores taboo photography and sexual deviance while traveling through Holland. Critics and fans found this breakthrough novel deeply polarizing because it involves a gay character obsessed with annihilation. Nevertheless, the overall theme is about victimization, and a culture obsessed with objectification. Despite the novel’s punk prose and hypnotic pacing, there’s something to be said when humanity has a tendency to destroy what society deems perfect. Cooper definitely explores how human desire can become just as fanatical as a religious zealot. A must read for fans of cinematic gore.

Simenon is a master storyteller and father of the noir genre. He quit school as a teenager and never attended a writing program. Dirty Snow is filled with psychological insight and hard facts about life. The main character, Frank Friedmaier, is a brawny young man who lives in his mother’s brothel in France under German occupation. A horrible crime, along with heinous acts, are committed because he cares about nothing and does things without reason. His life is deprived of a father and that void quickly becomes occupied by whores that facilitate a man without optimism. Simenon vividly takes us on a trip into the mind of a creature that can be uncomfortable for a lot of people. This is yet another dark classic about an anti-hero challenged by the notion that he is a man like any other.

One of my favorite novels of any length, Nathanael West’s short 1939 classic is at the very least the most disturbing portrait of Golden Age Hollywood and its hangers-on ever written—hideous, poignant, horribly funny.

West himself wrote scripts for B-movies in the thirties. His death at thirty-three in a car crash was perhaps, in its awful and infuriating ridiculousness, fitting. And it was the day after F. Scott Fitzgerald died.

I reread this book recently and was fascinated to see how accurate (if perhaps overly optimistic) Egan was about the rise of social media and its role in our lives.

Egan resisted calling this book either a novel or a short story collection; in a June 2010 interview in Salon, she said, “You might say that discontinuity is the book’s organizing principle.” One of the book’s most commented-on chapters, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses by Alison Blake,” is presented as slides in a PowerPoint presentation.

Though Alison Blake’s mother, Sasha, and her record company executive boss Bennie Salazar appear at various points in the book, the chapters, or stories, stand alone, moving back and forth in time from the 1970s to a near future.