Best Post-Modern Fiction
Explore the best post-modern fiction books with our curated list of top modern post-fiction reads. Discover groundbreaking narratives and avant-garde storytelling today.
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The Lost Books of the Odyssey
by Zachary Mason
Following the structure of the ancient Greek classic, "The Lost Books of the Odyssey" features alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions of Homer's original Odyssey and, equipped as well with a faux-authoritative scholarly introduction, richly carries off the illusion of being the lost ur-text of Homer's masterpiece.
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Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino
In Kublai Khan's garden, at sunset, the young Marco Polo diverts the aged emperor from his obsession with the impending end of his empire with tales of countless cities past, present, and future.
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The Cyberiad
by Stanislaw Lem
Trurl and Klaupacius are constructor robots who try to out-invent each other. They travel to the far corners of the cosmos to take on freelance problem-solving jobs, with dire consequences for their employers. The most completely successful of his books ... here Lem comes closest to inventing a real universe (Boston Globe). Translated by Michael Kandel.
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The Castle of Crossed Destinies
by Italo Calvino
"A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then a tavern. Their powers of speech are magically taken from them and instead they have only tarot cards with which to tell their tales. What follows is an exquisite interlinking of narratives, and a fantastic, surreal, and chaotic history of all human consciousness."--Goodreads
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Pale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years The urbane authority that Vladimir Nabokov brought to every word he ever wrote, and the ironic amusement he cultivated in response to being uprooted and politically exiled twice in his life, never found fuller expression than in Pale Fire published in 1962 after the critical and popular success of Lolita had made him an international literary figure. An ingeniously constructed parody of detective fiction and learned commentary, Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures, at the center of which is a 999-line poem written by the literary genius John Shade just before his death. Surrounding the poem is a foreword and commentary by the demented scholar Charles Kinbote, who interweaves adoring literary analysis with the fantastical tale of an assassin from the land of Zembla in pursuit of a deposed king. Brilliantly constructed and wildly inventive, this darkly witty novel of suspense, literary one-upmanship, and political intrigue achieves that rarest of things in literature–perfect tragicomic balance. With an introduction by Richard Rorty.
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Dictionary of the Khazars (F)
by Milorad Pavic
A national bestseller, Dictionary of the Khazars was cited by The New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of the year. Written in two versions, male and female (both available in Vintage International), which are identical save for seventeen crucial lines, Dictionary is the imaginary book of knowledge of the Khazars, a people who flourished somewhere beyond Transylvania between the seventh and ninth centuries. Eschewing conventional narrative and plot, this lexicon novel combines the dictionaries of the world's three major religions with entries that leap between past and future, featuring three unruly wise men, a book printed in poison ink, suicide by mirrors, a chimerical princess, a sect of priests who can infiltrate one's dreams, romances between the living and the dead, and much more.
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Ficciones
by Jorge Luis Borges
El presente libro reúne todos los elementos que convirtieron a Jorge Luis Borges en un clásico de la literatura contemporánea. 'Funes el memorioso' narra la historia de un pequeño dios cimarrón, provisto de un catálogo mental de imágenes que combina desde un catre de campaña; 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' plantea y define la posibilidad de un mundo impersonal regido por el idealismo; 'El jardÃn de senderos que se bifurcan' es la precisa reconstrucción de una muerte futura; 'Las ruinas circulares' une la especulación metafÃsica con la magia; en 'La Biblioteca de Babel', perfecta metáfora del vacÃo, el ambiente general remite a otro de los grandes escritores del siglo XX - Franz Kafka. Entre las matemáticas, la poesÃa y la metafÃsica, los relatos de 'Ficciones' establecen un callado pacto de inteligencia y sensibilidad con los lectores que se renueva con cada edición.
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Dreamtigers
by Jorge Luis Borges
Poems, stories, and personal reflections reveal the interwoven existence of imagination and reality in the mind of the South American writer