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In no particular order:
The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud
Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong
Six Records of a Floating Life by Shen Fu
The Red Night Trilogy of William S. Burroughs (Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, The Western Lands)
On the Road: The Original Scroll by Jack Kerouac
Book of Haikus by Jack Kerouac
The Stranger by Albert Camus
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
After Dark by Haruki Murakami
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCainRomance of the Three Kingdoms and Please Kill Me rank high for me too. I remember the first time I heard Blank Generation: I couldn't listen to anything else for weeks. Just that album, over and over...
Are you familiar with Kharms?
Blank Generation is a special album for me too! Richard Hell is a genuinely foundational artist for my musical tastes, along with much of his NYC cohort. You know Blank Generation is going to be remarkable right out of the gate when you hear Hell wailing "Love comes in spurts! Oh, god... it hurts!"
I'm not familiar with Kharms, but a cursory search tells me that he checks a lot of boxes for what I like. Do you have any recommendations as to where I should start with him?
He wrote very short stories, so there's a complete collection available.
Excellent—thank you for the recommendation!