Requiem for a Dream

Hubert Selby Jr.'s Requiem for a Dream follows four working-class Brooklynites whose modest dreams curdle into addiction. Sara Goldfarb, a lonely widow, becomes fixated on appearing on a television game show and spirals into amphetamine dependency chasing the thin figure she thinks the cameras demand. Her son Harry, his girlfriend Marion, and his best friend Tyrone pursue a different fantasy — get rich quick by buying heroin wholesale and dealing it — as a way out of the ghetto and into a life they can't otherwise reach.

Written in Selby's signature unpunctuated, run-on prose that mimics the characters' spiraling desperation, the novel intercuts all four descents: Sara's amphetamine-fueled breakdown, Harry and Tyrone's slide into addiction and imprisonment, and Marion's fall into prostitution to fund her habit.

Bleak and unrelenting, Requiem for a Dream is less a story about drugs than about the American promise of a better life curdling into self-destruction, and it remains one of the starkest addiction narratives in American fiction.