When Movern Callar wakes up to find her boyfriend dead in the kitchen, having taken his own life, she decides to steal and sell his unpublished novel, passing it off as her own work. Warner won the prestigious Somerset Maugham prize for his debut novel, and it was also made into a film by Lynne Ramsay. A young American Jew travels to the Ukraine to try and find the woman who saved his grandfather’s life during the Nazi occupation. Bizarre, funny and touching, it marked its author Jonathan Safran Foer out as a smouldering talent. Imagine this. You are lying in a hospital bed, in a coma, apparently dead to what is happening around you. But you experience it all the same, hear what is being said about and to you, and try in vain to communicate with your loved ones and the world outside. OK, if you want to be pedantic, Howl isn’t really a book, it’s a poem. However, in terms of provocative prose and scandalous storytelling, Howl can’t be bettered. From its oft-quoted opening line (‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness’) to its portrayal of radical jazz loving, drug-taking, homosexual communists running counter to the vows of the American Dream, Howl has long been a key beat generation text. Probably the most well-thumbed text in the Beat writers’ canon, Kerouac’s On The Road has been credited with much influence in creating the counter-culture that would blossom in the 60s and 70s. Written in spontaneous prose, it is the ultimate literary road trip, a patchwork of Americana, jazz, booze and drugs.

This fantastic graphic novel, from the author who created the Bechdel Test, is a fantastic looks at someone's childhood through diary entries and literary nods. The book beautifully plays out Bechdel's relationship with her father, his eventual death and her coming out to her family. How to Plot a Novel Using the 3-Act Story Structure. Kristen Kieffer, founder of Well-Storied.com, walks you step-by-step through one of the most popular story structures in this free 10-day course.

UPDATE: Ready for another injection of cool? We've added a couple of more recent reads to our list, ones that became part of the cultural zeitgeist in the years in which they were released. These are Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends and cult fave My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh.

Controversy and cool fit each other like hand and glove. The greater the controversy, the greater the cool. So it goes without saying that Hubert Selby Jr’s notorious debut novel has acquired something of a hip rep. Depicting a rundown area of New York in the 1950s, Last Exit to Brooklyn features drug addicts, wanton violence, rape, crime and any other deviancy you care to mention. Penned in everyman, spontaneous prose, it’s the book most aspiring writers hope to emulate.

The setting is possibly unique in literature. It is all in the head of a boy in a coma. His observations are better than many authors can write for any character in any situation. One part does set the book at a specific period of time which helps to also ground it. Mind-bending and thoroughly post-modern, Calvino’s masterpiece of self-reference (‘you’ are part of the plot), its dizzyingly clever, labyrinthine construction has made it a classic. If there was ever a novel to make you look like an urbane Poindexter on the train/bus, then this is it. Few writers manage to say so much about what appears to be so little as acclaimed Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Norwegian Wood might be his best known work, but The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is arguably his best. A typically mesmeric story, it focusses on the supposedly ordinary life of Toru Okada. In expertly drawing Okada in a bewildering variety of colours, Murakami succeeds in saying much about the confusion of late 20th century life. This book is about a boy called Robbie who was chasing his dog aross the road because a car was coming and his dog was running after a cat.He ran out into the road and a car hit him.He was raced to hospital and thats all he could remember. Have you ever read a book and still think about it weeks and even months later? That's how we felt after we finished Nagamatsu's How High We Go in the Dark. It's a series of interconnected short stories set in a dystopian – and at times fantastical – future. Although it's very much science-fiction, you'll find deeply human and emotional stories here.