Top Underrated Experimental Fiction
Discover hidden gems in experimental fiction with our list of top underrated books. Explore avant-garde narratives and groundbreaking storytelling that defy conventions.
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15 Serial Killers
by Harold Jaffe
Exploring dangerous territory, Jafee uses illustrations, letters, monologues, interviews, and "unsituated dialogues" to bring to life some of the most infamous serial killers of all time.
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Take Five
by D. Keith Mano
Con-man, filmmaker (currently working on producing Jesus 2001, what he calls the religious equivalent of The Godfather), descendent of a wealthy and prestigious New York family whose wealth and prestige are in sharp decline, racist and anti-Semite (though Simon dislikes all ethnic groups equally), possessor of never-satisfied appetites (food, women, drink, but most of all, money and more money), and the fastest talker since Falstaff, Simon is on a quest that goes backwards.
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Eden Eden Eden
by Pierre Guyotat
Eden Eden Eden is Pierre Guyotat's legendary novel of atrocity and obscenity. It is a masterpiece of literary innovation, which is taught on numerous university courses. In Guyotat's native France, the novel is highly esteemed, being hailed as 'a new landmark and starting-point for new writing' by the renowned philosopher Roland Barthes, who also writes the novel's preface. Introduced by Stephen Barber, the Eden Eden Eden is one of the most graphic accounts of queer sex ever written, and will therefore cross over into this market.
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Nil
by James Turner
Read the travails and tribulations of Proun Nul, citizen of Nil, where the only thing to believe in is Nothing. Nul keeps Nil's great bureaucratic morass free from both ideology and idealism in his job on the deconstruction ship, the Derrida, destroying belief systems before they can infect the blank ranks of unbelievers. But when Nul is falsely charged with murder, he embarks on a journey that takes him to the front lines of the war with Nil's cheery neighbour, Optima, and to the very brink of hope.
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Ten One
by Lance Olsen
Fiction. You're sitting in a darkened theater, waiting for the movie to begin when American culture explodes all around in I-Max, Sensurround, Technicolor--this is the experience of reading Lance Olsen's brilliant 10:01, a novel in frames that unreels the random thoughts of a random movie audience: a screening of our own moment that Olsen lights with the white heat of a a projector beam. Be sure to check out Lance Olsen's other titles at SPD, including SEWING SHUT MY EYES.
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Flet
by Joyelle McSweeney
Flet is an Administration flunky who begins to suspect that the oft-invoked Emergency, after which all public spaces are off-limits, is a tool of sociopolitical manipulation, if not oppression: the decentralized citizenry binge on endless, aimless file tape transmissions drained into their homes. A face-off between this tentative muckraker and her icy superior is set to go down at a mandatory, nationwide Reenactment, in advance of which Flet finds herself dreaming and driving endlessly off the map. Will she find the missing cities, or will she lose herself in the flood-tide of images that wash over the Nation? An elegant entry in the field of speculative fiction, Flet finds McSweeney slowing her distinctively hyperactive imagination and syntax down to the speed of a narrative.
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Voices
by Kyle Muntz
Taking place in a kind of "internal space," populated by living ideas, Voices utilizes broken typography within the context of an equally broken narrative to examine an existence in which identity and self have become, themselves, imaginary, but have allowed human thought and feeling to reshape the very nature of perceptual reality. Language is given a new, unfamiliar shape: complete freedom to explore the framework of an intricate semiotic landscape.
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Unlucky Lucky Days
by Daniel Grandbois
Surreal, satirical, absurdist tales with an underlying tenderness revealed through meticulously detailed worlds and poetic words.
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The Unwelcome Guest Plus Nin and Nan
by Eckhard Gerdes
Fan-favorite novelist Eckhard Gerdes is back, and this time with both barrels loaded! These two novels tackle modern life's complexities as only the twelve-gauge pen of Eckhard Gerdes can. The Unwelcome Guest is the story of one man's flight from paranoia, and Nin & Nan features a gender-ambiguous couple who take on the entire federal government. Both novels are richly humorous, but at the core of each is the pressing concern that modern concerns are pressing on us too much. Twice a top-ten finisher in the Preditors and Editors annual readers' poll of the best novels of the year, Gerdes is certain to delight his legion of loyal literati with his legendary legerdemain in this new double offering . Sit down, relax, and take off your socks-you'd laugh them off anyway as you read The Unwelcome Guest and Nin and Nan.
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The Book of Lazarus
by Richard Grossman
The death of Mitchell O'Banion, a former political terrorist with family ties to organized crime, brings together a bizarre lot of ex-anarchists whose paths have crossed from the sixties to the present
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The Sheep Look Up
by John Brunner
John Brunner's classic novel of ecological catastrophe, now more relevant than ever.
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Wittgenstein's Mistress
by David Markson
Wittgenstein's Mistress is a novel unlike anything David Markson or anyone else has ever written before. It is the story of a woman who is convinced and, astonishingly, will ultimately convince the reader as well that she is the only person left on earth. Presumably she is mad. And yet so appealing is her character, and so witty and seductive her narrative voice, that we will follow her hypnotically as she unloads the intellectual baggage of a lifetime in a series of irreverent meditations on everything and everybody from Brahms to sex to Heidegger to Helen of Troy. And as she contemplates aspects of the troubled past which have brought her to her present state--obviously a metaphor for ultimate loneliness--so too will her drama become one of the few certifiably original fictions of our time. "The novel I liked best this year," said the Washington Times upon the book's publication; "one dizzying, delightful, funny passage after another . . . Wittgenstein's Mistress gives proof positive that the experimental novel can produce high, pure works of imagination."
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The Age of Wire and String
by Ben Marcus
"A rare, genius-struck achievement . . . filled with great beauties, high themes, enormous sorrows." Kirkus Reviews
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Zero
by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão
José and Rosa meet with the help of the Happy Heart Marriage Agency. Buying a house becomes the focus of their marriage. To get the money for a house, José becomes a robber, sniper, and political subversive, all the while exposing the absurdity of the repressive political regime in which he lives.
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Scorch Atlas
by Blake Butler
Scorch Atlas is a series of maps, or worlds, "tied so tight they couldn't crane their necks." Everything is either destroyed, rotting or festering--and nopt only the physical objects, but allegiances, hopes, covenants. The sole glimmer of light comes in recollection ... -- Cover.