Ten top books set in bars

Preety Sidhu, an intern at Electric Literature, tagged ten books to tide you over until cocktail lounges and local pubs are safe again, including:

Hysteria by Jessica Gross

The unnamed millennial narrator of Gross’s debut novel lives too close to her parents and can’t seem to escape their shadow. A sex addict, she stumbles drunkenly from one encounter to another, from her psychiatrist’s parents’ colleague to her roommate’s brother. When she encounters a sympathetic bartender at local Pilz Bar who looks just like Sigmund Freud, she imagines them into a client-therapist relationship and begins to sort through her complex feelings for older men. The book is like “if Ottessa Moshfegh and Phoebe Waller-Bridge painted the town red together,” according to Courtney Maum’s front cover endorsement.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue