Falling somewhere between Trainspotting and Like Water for Chocolate, Adam Gnade's self-described food novel frames each chapter around a meal, and from there moves wild in all directions. After Tonight, Everything Will Be Different takes place in San Diego taco shops and rundown beach apartments, on the amusement park boardwalk at 3am and in cars bound for Tijuana and drunken glory. Like Proust's baroque autobiographical fantasies, this is a book rich with details and life. Gnade's youthful characters sink to hard drugs and deep depression as they navigate life at the end of the last century. They celebrate and they battle with their demons and throughout it all they eat. This is not a food snob's novel. Instead Gnade writes about the pain and joy of life and the ways that common, everyday food is there with us at each step. This is a book of deli sub sandwiches, endless burritos, eggplant parmesan, the magnificence of good sourdough bread, of box brownies and Nacho Cheese Doritos, rolled tacos and the perfect tortilla. After Tonight, Everything Will Be Different is a raging, ecstatic, troubled book that shows a world of food and a world of life, each inextricable from the other.

Self-described as an anti-depression guide/guide to a freer, more lawless life. Gnade's book looks at the root causes of sadness, anxiety, and general malaise/boredom and offers helpful point-by-point suggestions (in list form) and short essay pep-talks on how to move beyond your demons for a better, smarter, happier life. Like a letter from a trusted friend in the trenches, this guide will work with you through all phases of your life, thick and thin.

Like a child born of the bell hooks classic All About Love and Maggie Nelson's Bluets, Adam Gnade's latest book takes a good, hard look at love in many forms--romantic, platonic, love of place, of chosen family, of destiny and purpose. Structured in large part as a book of lists, I Wish to Say Lovely Things is a big-hearted look at what it is to stay loving and gentle in a violent age--a graceful, philosophical, clear-eyed beacon with which to light your path through this painful, exhausting, and tremendously magnificent life.

Adam Gnade's pocketsize novel The Internet Newspaper is about working at the online version of a daily newspaper during the weird, clumsy, well-funded early days of the internet. Set in Southern California in the year 2000, Gnade's book shows an America that doesn't exist anymore--an awkward, wild, innocent place that has since given way to fury and regression.

Here we bear witness to HTML coding and late-night party crime, hard drugs, and the birth of the cats on the internet phenomenon. The Internet Newspaper is lyrical, dark, philosophical, and true like all good fiction is true.

Recommended if you like: Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney, Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, Sex and Rage by Eve Babitz, Bright Eyes, The Cure, Mexican food, committing crime, being a fucking badass, and Patti Smith's Just Kids.