I see these distinctions in a way I was unable to twenty years back, because I was caught up in a narrow margin among people who read only a handful of books, and of a certain kind: Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm, The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll, some Bukowski, some Burroughs, You Can’t Win by Jack Black, and [Denis] Johnson’s 1992 story collection Jesus’ Son. We were young bohemians who thought you were supposed to live like that.