The Great Heresy
Discover the Great Heresy book list: a curated collection of subversive fiction exploring madness, chaos, and the absurd. Featuring Thomas Bernhard’s Gargoyles, Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos, and Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, these classic novels and short stories defy convention. Explore unsettling tales from Gogol, Chesterton, and more in this essential reading guide for lovers of literary transgression and dark, philosophical storytelling.
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Cosmos
by Witold Gombrowicz
Within the genre of crime fiction, Gombrowicz explores the angst of human existence
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Gargoyles
by Thomas Bernhard
The playwright and novelist Thomas Bernhard was one of the most widely translated and admired writers of his generation, winner of the three most coveted literary prizes in Germany. Gargoyles, one of his earliest novels, is a singular, surreal study of the nature of humanity. One morning a doctor and his son set out on daily rounds through the grim mountainous Austrian countryside. They observe the colorful characters they encounter—from an innkeeper whose wife has been murdered to a crippled musical prodigy kept in a cage—coping with physical misery, madness, and the brutality of the austere landscape. The parade of human grotesques culminates in a hundred-page monologue by an eccentric, paranoid prince, a relentlessly flowing cascade of words that is classic Bernhard.
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The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
by Nikolai Gogol
When Pushkin first read some of the stories in this collection, he declared himself "amazed." "Here is real gaiety," he wrote, "honest, unconstrained, without mincing, without primness. And in places what poetry! . . . I still haven't recovered." More than a century and a half later, Nikolai Gogol's stories continue to delight readers the world over. Now a stunning new translation--from an award-winning team of translators--presents these stories in all their inventive, exuberant glory to English-speaking readers. For the first time, the best of Gogol's short fiction is brought together in a single volume: from the colorful Ukrainian tales that led some critics to call him "the Russian Dickens" to the Petersburg stories, with their black humor and wonderfully demented attitude toward the powers that be. All of Gogol's most memorable creations are here: the minor official who misplaces his nose, the downtrodden clerk whose life is changed by the acquisition of a splendid new overcoat, the wily madman who becomes convinced that a dog can tell him everything he needs to know. These fantastic, comic, utterly Russian characters have dazzled generations of readers and had a profound influence on writers such as Dostoevsky and Nabokov. Now they are brilliantly rendered in the first new translation in twenty-five years--one that is destined to become the definitive edition of Gogol's most important stories.
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Pedro Páramo
by Juan Rulfo
Deserted villages of rural Mexico, where images and memories of the past linger like unquiet ghosts, haunted the imaginations of the author. In one such village of the mind, Comala, he set his classic novel Pedro Páramo, a dream-like tale that intertwines a man's quest to find his lost father and reclaim his patrimony with the father's obsessive love for a woman who will not be possessed, Susana San Juan.
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The Man who was Thursday
by Gilbert Keith Chesterton
The Supreme Anarchists Council is dedicated to overthrowing the world order. To keep their identities a secret, each of the members has been named after a day of the week. Gabriel Syme, an eccentric poet, is recruited by Scotland Yard to infiltrate the group. He tracks down the six other men and manages to win a place on the council. But after a bizarre twist of events, Syme quickly realizes that appearances are never what they seem in the dangerous world of the political underground.
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Seven Gothic Tales
by Isak Dinesen
Originally published in 1934, Seven Gothic Tales, the first book by "one of the finest and most singular artists of our time" (The Atlantic), is a modern classic. Here are seven exquisite tales combining the keen psychological insight characteristic of the modern short story with the haunting mystery of the nineteenth-century Gothic tale, in the tradition of writers such as Goethe, Hoffmann, and Poe.