Given our round table last month on writers and alcohol, I thought the following from Brian McDonald might be of particular interest.  Be sure to look at the comments, for you'll find many more suggestions of titles wherein alcohol plays a prominent role, as the author's trusty muse or the subject for exploration through characters and places.
 
 http://proof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/under-the-literary-influence/?emc=eta1http://proof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/under-the-literary-influence/?emc=eta1

Would it be too much to ask list members for their own favorite authors and titles?

For my part, I don't think anyone in the twentieth century described gritty barroom intoxication better than James Farrell, especially in the last volume of his Studs Lonnigan trilogy. Of course Farrell's writing is quite dark, and certainly the tone of most writers describing drunkenness shifts considerably by the early 1960s. Ideas?
 
Brad Kadel
Fayetteville State University

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A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted - made cynical, superficial - by this understanding.

Literature can tell us what the world is like.

Literature can give us standards and pass on deep knowledge, incarnated in language, in narrative.

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.


From Susan Sontag's acceptance speech on the occasion of being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels,
the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.