Hip classics: Rediscover the Beats with Kerouac or Burroughs. The old is never passe, so wow your Eggers foes with your derivative lit-crit vocabulary.
Naked Lunch (William S. Burroughs)
The Dharma Bums (Jack Kerouac)
Predecessors: For those of you who are ambivalent to dive into the mammoth Infinite Jest, try out the less hip-gilded (yet finally more sensible) predecessors to the Eggers-generation.
The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon)
Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (Douglas Coupland)
Norwegian Wood (Haruki Murakami)
The Hipster canon: To become truly hip-literate, read these standards and feel better about your life.
‹¨« A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Dave Eggers)
‹¨« Infinite Jest: A Novel (David Foster Wallace)
‹¨« On Beauty (Zadie Smith)
For more on hip lit, visit the
blog, www.rakesprogress.typepad.com.
