Experimental fiction is more popular than you might expect. An impressive 37.6% of Americans prefer it to more traditional forms—that’s nearly 100 million people if you scale it to the current adult population. And of those who prefer their fiction to be formally adventurous, the experiments they most enjoy are abstract language and nonlinear plots. They do not want encyclopedic novels or prose that, like this introduction, comments on the art of writing.
I know this because a few years ago I conducted a national literary public opinion poll with a Johns Hopkins survey design expert—a poll that also measured everything from preferred genre to setting to verb tense. After surveying a representative sample of the U.S. population and studying the data, I took the poll results and wrote two very different stories: one with everything Americans prefer, The Most Wanted Novel (a James Patterson-esque technothriller), and another with everything that no one in their right mind would enjoy, The Most Unwanted Novel (an experimental blend of romance, horror, historical fiction, and classic literature set on a billionaire-colonized 22nd century Mars). Amazingly, most early readers prefer the latter.
Despite the above data, very few works of experimental fiction are published in the U.S. each year—especially by the five conglomerate publishers, often called “The Big Five,” who are responsible for 80% of all new books. Experimental literature—truly weird and formally inventive fiction—is much more likely to appear as a work in translation published by a small, independent press.
This is not by accident. Dan Sinykin’s groundbreaking book, Big Fiction, showed how a hundred years of publishing consolidation has honed readerly taste and writerly style in this country. Sinykin found one of the greatest culprits to be “comp titles,” or the list of 3-5 similar books that an agent sends to editors to try to convince them to publish a new novel. On top of contorting literature into the equivalent of real estate (this is how houses are sold—by comparing a property to the homes around it), this trend ensures the books that get published do not veer far from what has already been proven in the market. There is little room for surprise and adventure; in this climate, these things are simply “risk.”
What if the publishers are wrong? What if this poll data is right—or even close to right—and there are leagues of readers eager for new forms, stories, politics, and imaginative worlds? The below list collects “extreme fiction,” or novels that push at the limits of what we often see as possible in literature. It’s not exhaustive, rather it’s a personal collection of books I’ve enjoyed and that have changed my view of storytelling. These are also brilliant works of art that, if written today, would struggle to find homes in the current comp-title regime.
Extreme Form:
Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker
When I started out as a fiction writer, this was the first novel that blew my mind. The book follows Janey Smith from Mexico City to an autofictional-yet-cartoonish portrait of Acker’s own life in New York City and beyond. But it’s how it’s told that sets Blood and Guts apart: What begins as a story in the form of a film script soon morphs into dream maps drawn from Acker’s real life before dropping into a fairy tale pastiche of Aesop and the Brothers Grimm. The more you get into it, the more you’re not sure where one genre or narrative thread ends and the other begins. Blood and Guts is lewd and offensive. It’s a collage and a beautiful, broken mess.
Extreme Language Play:
The Mundus by N. H. Pritchard
Most fiction that plays with language incorporates puns or palindromes or invents new dialects, but Pritchard’s The Mundus goes far beyond the usual line-based games. His visual novel explodes the traditional paragraph—and even the sentence—into constellations of words, syllables and letters, creating a verbi-voco-visual language of his own. Inspired by Pritchard’s theosophical inquiries, The Mundus is composed of shifting voices and naturalistic imagery that resist clear, cohesive storytelling. Words and text-sound-images slip into one another and make reading—and meaning itself—a puzzle to be pieced together by each reader upon each reading. Once you’ve experienced The Mundus, you’ll never see novels—or language—or the world—quite the same.
Extreme Horror:
Off Season by Jack Ketchum
Our poll found that horror was the second-least-wanted genre after romance, so The Most Unwanted Novel contains an unabridged 100-page collection of horror stories. While writing this collection, I was curious what others thought the most extreme horror could be, and several websites pointed me to Off Season. Ketchum’s infamous debut follows the ill-fated travails of six city slickers vacationing in coastal Maine. In typical 80s horror-flick fashion, one-by-one they find themselves overwhelmed by a band of cannibals that locals thought were only a legend… To a scholar of extremes, it did not disappoint: this is doubtless the most gut-churning horror story I’ve ever read. Reader discretion is highly advised.
Extreme Surrealism:
What To Do by Pablo Katchajian, translated by Pricilla Posada
This novel completely destabilized me when I first read it. Sparked by a giant’s koanic question about the nature of philosophy, the narrative follows a nameless narrator and his friend Alberto through a series of rapidly changing scenes and situations, from a lecture hall to a plaza to a nightclub restroom—and this is only in the first page. From chapter to chapter, location, perspective, logic, physics, everything keeps slipping away. Nothing is solid. Everything moves. After finishing it, I was reminded of parts of Dambudzo Marechera’s House of Hunger, which similarly contorted my brain, heart, and soul. Read these books and say bye bye to “reality” as you know it.
Extreme Braininess:
Glyph by Percival Everett
Glyph is a postmodern heist thriller told from the perspective of a mute baby genius named Ralph. We follow the polymath infant through a series of increasingly absurd kidnappings—from a psychiatrist seeking to exploit Ralph’s smarts to G-men recruiting him for espionage. Glyph pairs these pulpy scenes with a generous helping of Wittgensteinian meditations on poststructuralist language theory that will twist your brain into five-dimensional pretzels (no one will be surprised to learn that Everett started out as a philosopher). If you read Glyph—and you must—you’ll also want to check out Dr. No, its James Bond-esque sequel that shows, when placed beside Everett’s dozens of other books (see the westerns, the detective novels, the historical fictions), that his stylistic range is unparalleled in American literature.
Extreme Humor:
Castle Faggot by Derek McCormack
Extreme humor requires laugh-out-loud laughter and real cringe. Castle Faggot delivers both and more: it’s a scatological tour of a demented, Disneyland-esque theme park, run by Count Choc-o-log and his demented children’s cereal mascot friends. We move from the Arse de Triumphe to the Rue de Doo, meeting the disco-dancing Franken-Fudge and Boo-Brownie along the way—even Bataille shows up as a vampire bat. The language is bouncy and harsh and yet somehow addictive, its comedy laced with a stinging subtext of despair—there’s the slur of course, and the constant reappearance of death and suicide. At times the story reads like a visual poem, complete with empty line drawings, and a final chapter shaped like an inverted castle. This is a text that breaks and rebuilds you before breaking you again, all while wrapping you up in its tender, drippy Choc-o-log-ic embrace.
Extreme Prolificness:
Conversations by César Aira (and the rest of his oeuvre)
César Aira is in a class of his own, having published over 100 novels, each of them about 100 pages long. He does this through a process he calls the “flight forward” method, wherein he writes without editing, launching out from the first page with a general idea of where he might go and improvising all the way until the end. Conversations is his most flamboyant—and fun—use of this method, turning the idea of a frame narrative into a hall of mirrors. The rambling thoughts of a sleeping dreamer slip into a conversation the dreamer had the previous day about a continuity error in a Hollywood movie, which telegraphs into actual scenes of this movie, featuring mutant algae, flying goats, and feral beauty queens. And that’s just the start because once you’ve finished Conversations, the rest of Aira’s ever-expanding literary universe will be beckoning you forth.
Extreme Constraint:
The Sphinx by Anne Garréta, translated by Emma Ramadan
The Sphinx is a love story that follows a nameless narrator, a DJ, and their lover, A***, a dancer, through the Parisian underground nightclub scene. The story is genderless. Or rather, the gender of the protagonist and the lover are absent throughout. This is a hard feat in English and an even harder one in the original French, a language ruled by gendered nouns, articles, and verbs. As a member of Oulipo, the Paris-based avant garde group who put literary constraint on the map, Garéta’s book channels George Perec, who similarly went to extreme lengths in La Disparation by writing a novel without the most common letter in French (or English): “e.” Here Garétta queers the often-male-dominated work of Oulipo, contorting the confines of gendered language and our desire for easy and fixed identities.
Extreme Minimalism:
Reader’s Block by David Markson
When I first read what’s commonly called “minimalist fiction,” i.e. Ernest Hemingway, I was confused. Why so many words? Why so little repetition? Prior to Markson publishing his spare, final quartet of novels, it seems to me Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, and a handful of others were the only prose writers to truly realize what literary minimalism can be. Markson joins them with his late novels that combine simple stories with thousands of interspersed facts about the lives and deaths of canonical writers and artists. In Reader’s Block, we follow the nonlinear, almost ambient internal monologue of an aging writer struggling to write a novel—supposedly the very one we are reading. Malcolm Gladwell says that good writing includes “candy,” or scrumptious little factoids that a reader can chew on and even share at dinner parties. If most books offer a generous helping of sweets, Reader’s Block gives you the whole candy factory.
Extreme Improvisation:
TOAF: To After That by Renee Gladman
I haven’t taught creative writing in years, but the next time I do, Renee Gladman’s TOAF: To After That is the first book we’ll read. To my mind, there is no more honest text about the writing process and the writer’s life. TOAF is an homage to Gladman’s—in her own words—failed novel called After That, a book she loved and whose problems she mourned enough to do the seemingly impossible task of turning its “failure” into an original work about said failure. Part memoir, part philosophical mediation on the incomplete book and the cities and spaces that shaped it, TOAF is also a “report,” as Gladman calls it, preserving the only fragments of After That we’ll ever get to see. It’s one of the most beautiful books on writing you’ll find and an extraordinary literary improvisation in the face of creative struggle.