Imagine a book that merges the visceral rush of Nan Goldin's confessional storytelling style with the sombre, black-and-white documentary approach of W Eugene Smith or Bruce Davidson and you are approaching the territory of this big, sprawling saga of self-destruction.
From the coma induced by a tranquilliser-and-champagne cocktail in Rome a month earlier (now regarded as a first suicide attempt), to the tales of long-term heroin addiction, to the self-pitying note he left behind - it was a saga of self-destruction that made Cobain look like nothing more than a Nineties Sid Vicious.
The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru (Penguin) is an exuberant saga of self-discovery in which a young half English/half Indian boy moves from the slums of Bombay to a Maharajah's palace to an English public school to an anthropological expedition in the heart of Africa.
When I first heard about Hanya Yanagihara's "A Little Life" — a seven-hundred-and-twenty-page, four-friends-in-New-York novel that unexpectedly morphs into the saga of the self-loathing and self-harm of the disabled survivor of serial homosexual pedophilia — I didn't plan on reading it.
It's a classic britches-to-riches saga of the self-made entrepreneur (and workaholic) "who has created a standard of excellence for the Canadian Women's Fashion Industry," according to nygard.com's hagiographic account.
"Shame," which opens Friday in select cities, is a wrenching saga of sex addiction set in executive-suite New York, where self-destruction plays out against minimalist décor, sophisticated hotels and other trappings of upscale urban life.
It mythologizes Williams's guilt-ridden attempt to flee his mother in order to claim his artistic destiny, but it is also Edwina's narrative of the Williams family — a saga of hatred, abandonment, abuse, self-sacrifice, and endurance.
But if you're looking for someone who symbolizes the human saga of revival, take an Uber (self-driving or not) from downtown Pittsburgh a few miles up the Monongahela River to the old mill town of Braddock.
Leon Botstein and his American Symphony Orchestra have brought Ethel Smyth's "The Wreckers," the three-act British saga of land pirates, sex, betrayal and self-sacrifice, to the American stage for the first time.
He reportedly showed no emotion as the judge read out the decision, which was reached by nine white and three black jurors and capped off a saga of a high school dropout who self-radicalized by reading racist material on the internet.
He wrote sweeping historical sagas, intensely personal novels of self-discovery, and at least one scathing political parable.
