Good Postmodern Fiction (Whatever That Means)
Explore a curated list of the best postmodern fiction books that challenge conventions and redefine storytelling. Discover mind-bending narratives and iconic works that blur reality and fiction.
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Girl with Curious Hair
by David Foster Wallace
A collection of short stories by David Foster Wallace that explore the different ways people live their lives.
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CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
by George Saunders
From the New York Times bestselling author of Tenth of December, a 2013 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction, and the novel Lincoln in the Bardo. A New York Times Notable Book Six short stories and a novella. Set in a dystopian near-future in which America has become little more than a theme park in terminal disrepair, they constitute a searching and bitterly humorous commentary on the current state of the American Dream. Funny, sad, bleak, weird, toxic - the future of America as the Free Market runs rampant,the environment skids into disarray, and civilization dissolves into surreal chaos. These wacky, brilliant, hilarious and entirely original stories cue us in on George Saunder's skewed vision of the legacy we are creating. Against the backdrop of our devolvement, our own worst tendencies and greatest virtues are weirdly illuminated.
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Safety of Objects
by A. M. Homes
Published to overwhelming critical acclaim, this extraordinary collection of short stories established A. M. Homes as one of the most provocative and daring writers of her generation. Here you'll find the cult classic A Real Doll, the tale of a teenage boy's erotic obsession with his sister's favorite doll; Adults Alone, which first introduced Paul and Elaine, the crack-smoking yuppie couple whose marriage careens out of control in Homes's novel Music for Torching; and Looking for Johnny, in which a kidnapped boy, having failed his abductor's expectations, is returned home. Brilliantly conceived, sharply etched, and exceptionally satisfying, these stories explore the American dream in ways you're not likely soon to forget. Working in Kodacolor hues, Homes offers an uncanny picture of a surreal suburbia-outrageous and utterly believable.
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Amnesia Moon
by Jonathan Lethem
The much-anticipated second novel from the author of Gun, with Occasional Music. Since the war and the bombs, Hatfork, Wyoming, is a broken-down, mutant-ridden town. Young Chaos lives in a projection booth therem trying to blot out his present, unable to remember his past. Then the local tyrant, Kellog, reveals to him over a can of dog food that the bombs never fell. The truth is a little more complicated. . . .
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Election
by Tom Perrotta
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Leftovers and Tracy Flick Can't Win comes a darkly hilarious novel about a high school election that brings out the worst in everyone—the basis for the film starring Reese Witherspoon! Tracy Flick wants to be President of Winwood High. She’s one of those ambitious girls who finds time to do it all: edit the yearbook, star in the musical, sleep with her English teacher. But another teacher, staunch idealist Jim McAllister, aka “Mr. M.,” thinks the students deserve better. So he persuades Paul Warren—a well-liked, good-hearted jock—to throw in his hat. But that puts Paul’s sister Tammy in a snit. So she runs too, on an apathy platform, before starting a real campaign...to get herself kicked out of school. The idea was to educate the students at this suburban New Jersey school in the democratic process and the American way. But with all the sex scandals, smear campaigns, and behind-the-scenes power brokers at Winwood High, it doesn’t look as if they need any lessons....
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The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
by Aimee Bender
"A collection of wistful, witty stories." --Esquire "Hilarious, deep and a little bit dirty." --Harper's Bazaar A grief-stricken librarian decides to have sex with every man who enters her library. A half-mad, unbearably beautiful heiress follows a strange man home, seeking total sexual abandon: He only wants to watch game shows. A woman falls in love with a hunchback; when his deformity turns out to be a prosthesis, she leaves him. A wife whose husband has just returned from the war struggles with the heartrending question: Can she still love a man who has no lips? Aimee Bender's stories portray a world twisted on its axis, a place of unconvention that resembles nothing so much as real life, in all its grotesque, beautiful glory. From the first line of each tale she lets us know she is telling a story, but the moral is never quite what we expect. Bender's prose is glorious: musical and colloquial, inimitable and heartrending. Here are stories of men and women whose lives are shaped--and sometimes twisted--by the power of extraordinary desires, erotic and otherwise. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is the debut of a major American writer. A 1998 New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Selected by the Los Angeles Times as one of the best works of fiction of 1998.
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Among the Missing
by Dan Chaon
Focusing on the condition of the modern family, a thematically linked collection of short fiction captures the lives, dreams, and fates of men, women, and children who live outside of the American Dream.
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Almost No Memory
by Lydia Davis
Stories by an experimental writer, ranging in length from a sentence to several pages. One story describes the way a few ill-chosen words can turn a minor dispute into high drama, another is on the bad luck of an explorer who accomplishes a perilous expedition, only to die on his way home. By the author of The End of the Story.