Although the storyclash site's main intention is simply to be a shelf on which to stack all the published (and unpublished) writing I've got scattered around, I perhaps foolishly thought it would be a good way to showcase some of the novels I've ripped through in the past and deserve to be given a shout in the new and imaginatively titled 'This Month's 4 ...' section (it also gives me an excuse to go back and re-read them) ...

This month I've selected 4 books ranging in age from the late 1890s to early 2000s. If you can get hold of them, I hope you enjoy them (if you click on the titles you can get a full synopsis and reviews, plus a discount rate to buy them from Amazon), and of course, leave comments below. Let me know what you think of them. You can also reccommend books yourself, just use the contact form and tell me about them, tell me why I should turn off TV programmes about Property, DIY, Police chases & Food to read them.

Hunger is a novel by the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun and was published in its final form in 1890. Parts of it had been published anonymously in the Danish magazine Ny Jord in 1888. The novel is hailed as the literary opening of the 20th century and an outstanding example of a modern, psychology-driven literature. It hails the irrationality of the human mind in an intriguing, novel and sometimes humorous tone.

Written after Hamsun's return from an ill-fated tour of America, Hunger is set in fin-de-siecle Kristiania. It recounts the adventures of a starving young man, whose sense of reality is giving way to a delusionary existence on the darker side of a modern metropolis. While he vainly tries to maintain an outer shell of respectability, his mental and physical decay are recounted in detail. His ordeal, enhanced by his inability or unwillingness to pursue a professional career, which he deems unfit for someone of his abilities, is pictured in a series of encounters, which Hamsun himself has described as 'a series of analyses'. In many ways, the protagonist of the novel has traits reminiscent of Raskolnikov, whose author Fyodor Dostoevsky was one of Hamsun's main influences. The influence of naturalist authors like Emile Zola is apparent in the novel, as is his rejection of the realist tradition.

Hunger encompasses two of Hamsun's literary and ideological leitmotifs:

• His insistence that the intricacies of the human mind ought to be the main object of modern literature. Hamsun's own literary program, to describe 'the whisper of the blood and the pleading of the bone marrow', is thoroughly manifest in Hunger.
• His depreciation of modern, urban civilization. In the famous opening lines of his novel, he ambigiously describes Kristiania as 'this wondrous city that no-one leaves before it has made its marks upon him'. The latter is counter-balanced in other of Hamsun's works such as Mysteries (Mysterier) (1892) and Growth of the Soil (Markens Grøde), which earned him the Nobel prize in literature.

My Brother's Gun by Ray Loriga is the most wickedly funny and breathtakingly lucid treatment of media and the cult of celebrity since Don DeLillo's White Noise, My Brother's Gun is a deftly woven tale of adolescence, murder, and insight into a country obsessed with violence and the Warholian 'fifteen minutes of fame' concept.

• 'A fascinating cross between Marguerite Duras and Jim Thompson.'
  Pedro Almodovar

• 'Ray Loriga writes like a post-existentialist bastard son of Camus, or even Emmanuel Bove. My Brother's Gun drags the corpse of The Outsider across the apocalyptic border between the twentieth century and the millennium.'
  Barry Gifford

• 'Like the rush of an electric guitar riff charging up your spine, Ray Loriga's voice angles, beautifully desperate, to grasp our place in these chaotic times.'
  Lee Ranaldo, Sonic Youth

Ask the Dust by John Fante was first published in the 1930s. Arturo Bandini is a twenty-year-old burgeoning writer, spending his days hungry for success, life and food in a dingy hotel in Los Angeles. Full of the enthusiasm of youth, and the thrill of having one short story published, the reality of poverty and prejudice has hit him hard. He meets a local waitress, Camilla Lopez, and embarks on a strange and strained love-hate relationship. Slowly, but inexorably, it descends into the realms of madness.

Fante depicts the highs and lows of the emotional state of Bandini with conviction, but without easy sentiment. In Ask the Dust, Fante is truly `telling it like it is' as a poverty-stricken son of an immigrant in `perfect' California.

• 'The humour and the pain are intermixed with a superb simplicity - A wild and enormous miracle.'
  Charles Bukowski

• 'If there's a better piece of fiction written about LA I don't know about it.'
  Robert Towne, Scriptwriter for Chinatown

• 'Bandini is a magnificent creation.'
  Times Literary Supplement

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