R4R @ Rutgers: Reading for Recovery

Published in 1913, this harrowing, autobiographical 'A to Z' of drinking shattered London's reputation as a clean-living adventurer and massively successful author of such books as White Fang and The Call of the Wild. It is also the first intelligent, literary treatise on alcohol in American literature.

Dr. Jekyll is a London doctor who is liked and respected for his work. Mr Hyde is an evil man, completely unknown in London society. There is a murder and Hyde seems to be responsible. So why does the good doctor give Mr. Hyde the key to his house--and decide to leave everything to Mr. Hyde in his will?

Geoffrey Firmin, a former British consul, has come to Quauhnahuac, Mexico. His debilitating malaise is drinking, an activity that has overshadowed his life. On the most fateful day of the consul's life—the Day of the Dead, 1938—his wife, Yvonne, arrives in Quauhnahuac, inspired by a vision of life together away from Mexico and the circumstances that have driven their relationship to the brink of collapse. She is determined to rescue Firmin and their failing marriage, but her mission is further complicated by the presence of Hugh, the consul's half brother, and Jacques, a childhood friend. The events of this one significant day unfold against an unforgettable backdrop of a Mexico at once magical and diabolical. Under the Volcano remains one of literature's most powerful and lyrical statements on the human condition, and a brilliant portrayal of one man's constant struggle against the elemental forces that threaten to destroy him.

A compulsive gambler himself at a certain period of his life, Dostoyevsky wrote this novel with real authority. Set in the appropriately named Roulettenburg, a German spa with a casino and an international clientele, it concerns the gambling episodes, tangled love affairs, and complicated lives of Alexey Ivanovitch, a young gambler; Polina Alexandrovna, the woman he loves; a pair of French adventurers, and other characters. Although not as dark as some of Dostoyevsky's other works, The Gambler nevertheless offers a grim and psychologically probing picture of the fatal attractions of gambling. Among its strengths are its well-drawn characters — Aunt Antonida, although lightly sketched in, is especially delightful — and its faithful depiction of life among the gambling set in fashionable German watering holes. This edition reprints Constance Garnett's authoritative translation.

On The Road, the most famous of Jack Kerouac's works, is considered by many to be the heart of the beat movement. On The Road is thinly fictionalized autobiography, filled with a cast made of Kerouac's real life friends, lovers, and fellow travelers. A formless book, it describes a series of frenetic trips back and forth across the United States by a number of penniless young people who are in love with life, beauty, jazz, sex, alcohol, speed, and mysticism.

Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch in a Tangier, Morocco, hotel room between 1954 and 1957. and his literary experiment--the much-touted "cut-up" technique--mirrored the workings of a junkie's brain. But it was junk coupled with vision: Burroughs makes teeming amalgam of allegory, sci-fi, and non-linear narration, all wrapped in a blend of humor--slapstick, Swiftian, slang-infested humor.

The quintessential novel of the Lost Generation, The Sun Also Rises is one of Ernest Hemingway's masterpieces and a classic example of his spare but powerful writing style. Alcohol and post-World War I anomie fuel the plot in an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions.

O’Hara’s classic novel about the excesses of the “Hangover Generation” focuses on the self-destruction of a social elite, Julian English. Appointment in Samarra brilliantly captures the personal politics and easy, alcohol-fueled bitterness of small-town life. It is O’Hara’s crowning achievement, and a lasting testament to the keen social intelligence of a major American novelist.

Among the most profound explorations of the effects of mind-expanding drugs ever written, Aldous Huxley, author of the bestselling Brave New World, reveals the mind's remote frontiers and the unmapped areas of human consciousness in this confessional tale of his experimentation with mescaline. This novel served as a step-by-step account of his experiences on the drug.

The earliest recognized popular literary work to reference the then-legal opium. Forging a link between artistic self-expression and addiction, Confessions seamlessly weaves the effects of drugs and the nature of dreams, memory, and imagination. First published in 1821, it paved the way for later generations of literary drug users, from Baudelaire to Burroughs, and anticipated psychoanalysis with its insights into the subconscious.