It’s a well-known fact that books have the power to transport you across time and space, but sometimes you finish a great read and you aren’t quite sure where it’s taken you. While this trippy sensation probably isn’t for the Jojo Moyes lovers out there, it is a thrill for readers who crave the bizarre, the outlandish and the flat-out confusing.
If you’re all about absurdists like Beckett, Murakami and Pynchon, then you need to get to a bookstore (or open Amazon in a tab if that’s your book-buying method of choice) because there are so many great books out right now that will make your mind melt. Between off-kilter realities, confounding characters and intricate word labyrinths, 2016 is shaping up to be “The Year of Strange Fiction” in the …show more content…
The Unfinished World: And Other Stories by Amber Sparks
Inventive and strange
While trying to describe this collection of short stories, words like inventive, arresting, weird and wonderful immediately come to mind. Featuring stories about space janitors, jazz babies and fever librarians, Sparks creates extraordinary vignettes complete with emotionally complex characters and beautiful language. Roxanne Gay raves, “With each story, Sparks defies the known world in absolutely thrilling ways.” This is a collection everyone should read this year, whether you’re a fan of magic realism or not.
4. Sudden Death by Álvaro …show more content…
To give you a sense of its peculiar plot, Sudden Death begins with a tennis match between Italian artist Caravaggio and Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo, which is attended by the likes of Mary Magdalene and Galileo. As if that wasn’t outlandish enough, the game ball is made from beheaded Anne Boleyn’s hair. Sudden Death is a hilarious, sharp and speculative novel that challenges what you know about history, art, modernity and just about everything else. The Wall Street Journal aptly deems it “mind-bending.”
5. What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi
This compulsively readable collection of intertwined short stories will engross you in its slightly askew sense of reality. The New York Times “Book Review” captures Oyeyemi’s masterful ability to augment reality best, explaining “Oyeyemi so expertly melds the everyday, the fantastic and the eternal, we have to ask if the line between 'real' and 'unreal' is murkier than we imagined — or to what extent a line exists at all.” I don’t want to go into too much detail for fear of giving too much away, but trust me when I say Oyeyemi’s haunting stories will stay with you long afterward.
6. Hystopia by David
If you’re all about absurdists like Beckett, Murakami and Pynchon, then you need to get to a bookstore (or open Amazon in a tab if that’s your book-buying method of choice) because there are so many great books out right now that will make your mind melt. Between off-kilter realities, confounding characters and intricate word labyrinths, 2016 is shaping up to be “The Year of Strange Fiction” in the …show more content…
The Unfinished World: And Other Stories by Amber Sparks
Inventive and strange
While trying to describe this collection of short stories, words like inventive, arresting, weird and wonderful immediately come to mind. Featuring stories about space janitors, jazz babies and fever librarians, Sparks creates extraordinary vignettes complete with emotionally complex characters and beautiful language. Roxanne Gay raves, “With each story, Sparks defies the known world in absolutely thrilling ways.” This is a collection everyone should read this year, whether you’re a fan of magic realism or not.
4. Sudden Death by Álvaro …show more content…
To give you a sense of its peculiar plot, Sudden Death begins with a tennis match between Italian artist Caravaggio and Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo, which is attended by the likes of Mary Magdalene and Galileo. As if that wasn’t outlandish enough, the game ball is made from beheaded Anne Boleyn’s hair. Sudden Death is a hilarious, sharp and speculative novel that challenges what you know about history, art, modernity and just about everything else. The Wall Street Journal aptly deems it “mind-bending.”
5. What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi
This compulsively readable collection of intertwined short stories will engross you in its slightly askew sense of reality. The New York Times “Book Review” captures Oyeyemi’s masterful ability to augment reality best, explaining “Oyeyemi so expertly melds the everyday, the fantastic and the eternal, we have to ask if the line between 'real' and 'unreal' is murkier than we imagined — or to what extent a line exists at all.” I don’t want to go into too much detail for fear of giving too much away, but trust me when I say Oyeyemi’s haunting stories will stay with you long afterward.
6. Hystopia by David