Requiem for a Dream

Hubert Selby Jr. 1978

Devastation Rating

Existential Dread
addiction grief mental health trauma literary fiction

Our Take

Selby writes addiction like a gravitational collapse. Four people falling, and the fall is so specific and so total there is no distance between you and the page. Sara Goldfarb's decline is the most unbearable thing in the novel. The dreams are real. The endings are not. Nothing survives.

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