Influences on and examples of Bizzaro Fiction
Explore the wild world of Bizarro Fiction—its key influences and must-read examples. Discover surreal, absurd, and mind-bending books that define this cult genre.
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Gargantua and Pantagruel
by Francois Rabelais
A masterly new translation of Rabelais’s robust scatalogical comedy Parodying everyone from classic authors to his own contemporaries, the dazzling and exuberant stories of Rabelais expose human follies with mischievous and often obscene humor. Gargantua depicts a young giant who becomes a cultured Christian knight. Pantagruel portrays Gargantua’s bookish son who becomes a Renaissance Socrates, divinely guided by wisdom and by his idiotic, self-loving companion, Panurge.
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Incest
by marquis de Sade
Incest is a chilling tale of sexual experimentation and philosophical exploration carried to its most logical--and devastating--extreme. Marquis de Sade’s semi-autobiographical protagonist, Monsieur de Franval, is rich, handsome, intelligent, and thoroughly immoral. When he marries a pious woman and fathers a daughter, he is determined to educate his progeny to be "free.” The ultimate proof of his daughter’s unfettered liberty? That she become his secret lover. But when the beautiful and accomplished daughter spurns an eligible young bachelor, instead declaring her intention to remain with her father, her na�ve and doting mother’s suspicions are at last aroused. Confused and distressed by her daughter’s behavior, Madame de Franval confronts her husband--with tragic results. A challenging and breathtaking masterpiece, Incest is a sober portrait of catastrophe in the midst of excess.
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Maldoror & the Complete Works of the Comte de Lautreamont
by comte de Lautréamont
Andre Breton wrote that MALDOROR is the expression of a revelation so complete it seems to exceed human potential.' First published in 1869, MALDOROR is the work of a mysterious genius about whom little is known aside from his birth in Uruguay, 1846, and his early death in Paris, 1870. His writings, published under the pseudonym Comte de Lautreamont, bewildered his contemporaries but have since taken their place alongside other French classics of transgression such as Sade, Baudelaire, Rimbaud. A unique translation.'
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The Diary of a Madman, the Government Inspector, and Selected Stories
by Nikolai Gogol
Author, dramatist and satirist, Nikolai Gogol deeply influenced later Russian literature with his powerful depictions of a society dominated by petty bureaucracy and base corruption. This volume includes both his most admired short fiction and his most famous drama. A biting and frequently hilarious political satire, "The Government Inspector" has been popular since its first performance and was regarded by Nabokov as the greatest Russian play every written. The stories gathered here, meanwhile, range from comic to tragic and describe the isolated lives of low-ranking clerks, lunatics and swindlers. They include "Diary of a Madman," an amusing but disturbing exploration of insanity; Nevsky Prospect, a depiction of an artist besotted with a prostitute; and "The Overcoat," a moving consideration of poverty that powerfully influenced Dostoevsky and later Russian literature. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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The Complete Stories
by Franz Kafka
The complete stories of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial. “An important book, valuable in itself and absolutely fascinating. The stories are dreamlike, allegorical, symbolic, parabolic, grotesque, ritualistic, nasty, lucent, extremely personal, ghoulishly detached, exquisitely comic, numinous, and prophetic.” —The New York Times The Complete Stories brings together all of Kafka’s stories, from the classic tales such as “The Metamorphosis,” “In the Penal Colony,” and “A Hunger Artist” to shorter pieces and fragments that Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, released after Kafka’s death. With the exception of his three novels, the whole of Kafka’s narrative work is included in this volume. “[Kafka] spoke for millions in their new unease; a century after his birth, he seems the last holy writer, and the supreme fabulist of modern man’s cosmic predicament.” —from the Foreword by John Updike
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Divine Filth
by Georges Bataille
"Divine Filth is a collection of long-overlooked erotic prose and scatological fragments rivaled only by Georges Bataille's most well-known work, "Story of the Eye, for pure "pornographic" content that transcends the limits of literature and the self. These are the shattered mystic visions of a seminal Surrealist with a deep thirst for the negation of consciousness through ecstasy, humiliation, depravity and pain.
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The Circus of Dr. Lao
by Charles G. Finney
Abalone, Arizona, is a sleepy southwestern town whose chief concerns are boredom and surviving the Great Depression. That is, until the circus of Dr. Lao arrives and immensely and irrevocably changes the lives of everyone drawn to its tents. Expecting a sideshow spectacle, the citizens of Abalone instead confront and learn profound lessons from the mythical made real--a chimera, a Medusa, a talking sphinx, a sea serpent, witches, the Hound of the Hedges, a werewolf, a mermaid, an ancient god, and the elusive, ever-changing Dr. Lao. The circus unfolds, spinning magical, dark strands that ensnare the town's populace: the sea serpent's tale shatters love's illusions; the fortune-teller's shocking pronouncements toll the tedium and secret dread of every person's life; sensual undercurrents pour forth for men and women alike; and the dead walk again. Dazzling and macabre, literary and philosophical, The Circus of Dr. Lao has been acclaimed as a masterpiece of speculative fiction and influenced such writers as Ray Bradbury. This Bison Frontiers of Imagination edition features a new introduction by noted fantasy writer John Marco and striking illustrations by Boris Artzybasheff from the first edition.
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The Woman in the Dunes
by Kobo Abe
The Woman in the Dunes, by celebrated writer and thinker Kobo Abe, combines the essence of myth, suspense and the existential novel. After missing the last bus home following a day trip to the seashore, an amateur entomologist is offered lodging for the night at the bottom of a vast sand pit. But when he attempts to leave the next morning, he quickly discovers that the locals have other plans. Held captive with seemingly no chance of escape, he is tasked with shoveling back the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten to destroy the village. His only companion is an odd young woman. Together their fates become intertwined as they work side by side at this Sisyphean task.
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The Bald Soprano, and Other Plays
by Eugène Ionesco
Four original plays by French author Eugène Ionesco.
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Exterminator!
by William S. Burroughs
A wity, rauchy, satrical novel from the Beat legend and author of Naked Lunch Conspirators plot to explode a train carrying nerve gas. A perfect servant suddenly reveals himself to be the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. Science-fantasy wars, racism, corporate capitalism, drug addiction, and various medical and psychiatric horrors all play their parts in this mosaiclike, experimental novel. Here is William S. Burroughs at his coruscating and hilarious best.
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Guernica, and Other Plays
by Fernando Arrabal
The celebrated Spanish playwright Fernando Arrabal, who lived in Madrid under the oppression of the Franco regime, writes passionately of human atrocity and of hope. This collection of plays embodies Arrabal's "theatre of panic," named after the god Pan. The homme panique is a man who refuses to take risks, who avoids danger and therefore heroism, who avoids the irreparable act, but who, ironically, is caught up in a world of chance that forces him to make choices. The collection includes Guernica, an earthy verbal re-creation of Picasso's famous painting, in which an old Basque couple is caught in the air raids; And They Put Handcuffs on the Flowers, a violent protest against the Franco regime; the ingenious and poetic The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria; and Garden of Delights, which explores the lesbian tendencies of strong adoles-cent attachments and the sadomasochistic experience of adult love. Includes: 'Guernica' 'And They Put Handcuffs on the Flowers' 'The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria' 'Garden of Delights'
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Forty Stories
by Donald Barthelme
This collection of pithy, brilliantly acerbic pieces is a companion to Sixty Stories, Barthelme's earlier retrospective volume. Barthelme spotlights the idiosyncratic, haughty, sometimes downright ludicrous behavior of human beings, but it is style rather than content which takes precedence.
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Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
by Philip K. Dick
A Los Angeles television celebrity awakens one morning to find there is no record of his existence.
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Welcome to the Monkey House
by Kurt Vonnegut
“[Kurt Vonnegut] strips the flesh from bone and makes you laugh while he does it. . . . There are twenty-five stories here, and each hits a nerve ending.”—The Charlotte Observer Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, these superb stories share Vonnegut’s audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision. Includes the following stories: “Where I Live” “Harrison Bergeron” “Who Am I This Time?” “Welcome to the Monkey House” “Long Walk to Forever” “The Foster Portfolio” “Miss Temptation” “All the King’s Horses” “Tom Edison’s Shaggy Dog” “New Dictionary” “Next Door” “More Stately Mansions” “The Hyannis Port Story” “D.P.” “Report on the Barnhouse Effect” “The Euphio Question” “Go Back to Your Precious Wife and Son” “Deer in the Works” “The Lie” “Unready to Wear” “The Kid Nobody Could Handle” “The Manned Missiles” “Epicac” “Adam” “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”
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Between C & D
by Joel Rose
This anthology of short stories from the new magazine Between C & D presents 25 stories that best represent the spirit of the magazine: gritty, urban, sometimes ironic, sometimes gutsy, erotic, violent, dead-pan, playing with form, but clearly narrative in intention.
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American Psycho
by Bret Easton Ellis
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this modern classic, the acclaimed author of The Shards explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. "A seminal book.” —The Washington Post One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront. “A masterful satire and a ferocious, hilarious, ambitious, inspiring piece of writing.... An important book.” —Katherine Dunn, bestselling author of Geek Love Look for Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel, The Shards!
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My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
by Mark Leyner
Welcome to Mark Leyner’s America, where you can order gallium arsenide sushi at a roadside diner, get loaded on a cocktail of growth hormones and anabolic steroids, and support your habit by appearing on TV game shows. Welcome to a wildly post-Einsteinian fictional universe where the locals include a speech pathologist with a waterbug fetish, a kamikaze airline pilot, and the lead singer for Brazil’s most notoriously nihilistic samba band.
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The Sadness of Sex
by Barry Yourgrau
From the man The New York Times Book Review called "an uncommon diagnostician of the curiosities of the human heart" and hailed on NPR (National Public Radio) as "the stand-up comedian of the unconscious" comes this extraordinary new collction of metaphor-rich, wildly imaginative short-short stories. Barry Yourgrau, who performs his written work in clubs across the country and on NPR, Comedy Central, MTVs Spoken Word programs, and in an upcoming one-man feature film, now explores the imagination's twilight terrain in which love, lust, and loss reside in this achingly beautiful and rich surreal tour de force. An affair with a cannibal woman is filled with devouring kisses. A flower sprouts from a woman's flesh wherever a man kisses her, impeding their lovemaking. An abandoned lover seeks repair of the cuckoo clock that is his heart. Exploring the archetypal he-and-she from the first glance to the last tortured look, this exhilirating new collection of flash-fiction--short-short stories thematically connected--merges Freud with Fellini, Kafka with Woody Allen. At once sad, alarming, and wickedly brilliant, Barry Yourgrau is, in the uneasy land of desire and heartbreak, the spokesman for our secret self.
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Haunted
by Chuck Palahniuk
Haunted is a novel made up of twenty-three horrifying, hilarious, and stomach-churning stories. They’re told by people who have answered an ad for a writer’s retreat and unwittingly joined a “Survivor”-like scenario where the host withholds heat, power, and food. As the storytellers grow more desperate, their tales become more extreme, and they ruthlessly plot to make themselves the hero of the reality show that will surely be made from their plight. This is one of the most disturbing and outrageous books you’ll ever read, one that could only come from the mind of Chuck Palahniuk.
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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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Nymphomation
by Jeff Noon
Set both in a real and imaginary Manchester, Jeff Noon's story concerns a sinister corporate takeover of the City of Manchester in the form of a revolutionary lottery game that is engulfing the people in a tide of gambling fever.
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What the Fuck
by Michael Hemmingson
Experimental Erotica From Some Of The Best-Known Names In Modern Literature; Shunning the notion that erotic literature is hastily created thrown-away words and sentences, a new literary, experimental aesthetic pervades this anthology. The writers here show that human sexuality is broad, and the range of desire is exciting and vast. Sex is as vital as food, politics, and conflict. The Avant Pornographers are not afraid to explore and exploit the nature of postmodern human sexuality in the 21st Century, with their own brand of twists and curves. Like Mirrorshades was to cyberpunk and Avant Pop was to avant pop, What The Fuck will be a new brand of post-pomo sexualised fiction. Contributors include William T Vollmann, one of the most important writers of the 1990s; leading sci-fi writer Don Webb, pomo novelist Robert Coover, anthologist Larry McCaffrey of the Avant Pop anthology from Viking Penguin, underground sensation Thom Metzger as well as L A Ruocco, author of the challenging and labyrinthian Document Zippo.