Oh boy – I think you came to the right forum for literary fiction with wierdnesses, and I hope you get lots of good answers as I can’t wait to see what other people are reading in this vein. I'll go typically overboard, as I bet you'll have already read half of these, and there's nothing brand new here. I'm keeping towards the wierd end of things:
All The Names by Jose Saramago
Senhor Jos is buried in names: the names of the newly born, the newly wed, and the newly dead, in a seething mass of paper at the government registry where he works as a clerk, vicariously living through the identities that surround him. Quite by chance, one index card catches his eye, and he becomes obsessed with the anonymous woman whose unknown life is recorded there. As his obsession takes him nearer to the mystery woman, will it lead him out into the light, or draw him towards the center of the labyrinth and the monsters that dwell there?
Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov
Viktor writes obituaries of living people for a Kiev newspaper. The fact that his subjects all seem to be dying as soon as he writes about them is odd, but not half so strange as what ensues when Viktor adopts a penguin named Mischa from a bankrupt zoo, and both he and his new pet go to the ends of the earth to outrun their impending mortality. Kurkov's wry, deadpan political fable harkens back to the strange fictions Daniil Kharms and the nineteenth century Russian master, Nikolai Gogol.
Going Home Again by Howard Waldrop
Nostalgic fantasies flit back and forth across time as author Tom Wolfe and Fats Waller ride home in a dirigible, Peter Lorre subversively strikes out against a triumphant Hitler, Charles Dickens unveils a new high-tech "Christmas Carol," and masked Mexican wrestlers square off in a metaphysical battle royal.
Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Stephen Millhauser
In this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, industrious young entrepreneur Martin pulls himself up by his bootstraps in turn of the century New York, creating a series of cafeterias and hotels. Yet every achievement palls, and Dressler risks it all when he conceives and creates an amazing hotel — the Grand Cosmo — that is to be not merely the biggest in the world, but bigger than the world, unfolding in an endless succession of delights. Millhauser's strange fables are suffused with a distinctly American brand of magic realism.
Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link
In Link's frank yet freakish universe, you might find packs of eerie rabbits standing vigil in your front yard as darkness falls, or run into phantom dogs and zombies at the 7-11, or get married to a ghost. Charming and haunting, these accessible stories take the reader into a world at once familiar and astonishing; you've never had this much fun or felt so much at home in such a strange place, or have you?
Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories by Elizabeth Hand
A tattoo artist finds a curious tarot deck containing images that transform more than mere flesh. What would the lepidopterist Nabokov have made of the lovely lass who literally pins down her romantic conquests? Eight atmospheric explorations of myth and magic, love and loss, from the award-winner author of Waking the Moon.
Report to the Men’s Club by Carol Emshwiller
At once strikingly familiar and otherworldly, Emshwiller tells of love and longing in an array of sincere, deeply human voices, from the grandma who steps out one day on an impetuous quest to outrun fate, to the spinster sister who captures a wounded man-bat in her orchard and nurses him back to health.
Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead by Alan De Niro
Nothing is as it is, and all is as it might be, in this challenging debut collection of esoteric, offbeat stories that envision medieval time travelers touching down in Wal-Mart, ancient warriors sweeping through a sleepy small town, and cherished American dreams mingled with obscure, idiosyncratic fantasies.
The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead
Lila Mae is the city's first black female elevator inspector, owing to her uncanny intuitions about impending disaster, but a rival group of empiricist elevator inspectors attempt to bring her new prominence crashing down around her. Submerging herself into research she discovers the lost plans for a revolutionary new kind of elevator that could radically change the world. Whitehead's remarkable debut novel presents a recognizable world whose political and social struggles are highlighted by dashes of fantasy.
Nice Big American Baby by Judy Budnitz
Desperate to give her unborn child every advantage, Precious carries him for years until he emerges fully grown into a land of promise where traveling salesmen refuse to leave their open cages and courageous surgeons save limbs, but not lives. These bleak, unsettling fairy tales shine their harsh light into the deepest recesses of our collective unconscious.
Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler
An enigmatic, speechless wild woman, a Chinese railroad laborer, an escaped madman, and an opinionated free-thinking lady lecturer; this odd band of misfits experience strange and harrowing adventures, natural and supernatural on their way from the wilds of Puget Sound circa 1873 to San Francisco. Molly Gloss's Wild Life is another surreal account of a strong pioneer woman's encounter with the ineffable when she enters the forests in search of a missing child.
Attack of the Jazz Giants, and Other Stories by Gregory Frost
Self-destructive suburbanites, messianic theme parks, slapstick spacemen, gothic shivers, dystopian comedies and hilarious nightmares: in fourteen absurd stories, Frost runs homo sapiens through his self-devised, desperately innovative mazes.
Strange But Not a Stranger by James Patrick Kelly
In Kelly's disarming stories, our most magnificent inventions and innovations serve only to distract us from the inexorable pull of fate, the mysterious nature of existence, and the inevitable embrace of death's sweet entropy. The more we overstep our natural bounds in thought and deed, the more we are reminded of our human frailty and limitations not as a curse, but a blessing.
The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier
When a virus spread via Coca-Cola kills off everyone on earth save one, a large number of disembodied spirits dwelling on in a strange city on edge of oblivion discover the link that holds them together in the memories of Laura Byrd, a wildlife scientist in Antarctica and the sole human survivor.
The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe
A scientist who heads to the seashore in quest of an obscure type of beetle finds himself the unwelcome guest of a strange group of villagers — and of one enigmatic woman in particular — who make their tenuous dwelling amidst shifting sands which they must perpetually dig away as they pour down and engulf their homes, threatening to erase their very lives. This existential classic has been compared to the works of Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka.
White Apples by Jonathan Carroll
For Vincent Ettrich, the day holds many revelations. His lover Isabella is pregnant with his child — a child destined to be some sort of savior — and Vincent himself has died of cancer, a fact of his recent past that had somehow slipped his mind. The afterlife is riddled with startling phenomena, and jealous rivalries emerge between the living and the dead who struggle for control of Chaos. The strangeness continues — replete with deific polar bears and octopi that can drive — in Glass Soup.
Little, Big by John Crowley Being the saga of the Drinkwater clan, whose Victorian country house is encircled by an enchanted forest, and the family's ongoing interactions with fairy folk are far from the strangest of their escapades, which involve the Holy Roman Empire and perpetual motion. This masterpiece of modern fantasy juxtaposes magic and the mundane in delightful ways.
In the Forest of Forgetting, by Theodora Goss
In Goss's spin on Sleeping Beauty, prince charming is a bulldozer who clear cuts the forest to reach his somnolent sweetie. Meanwhile a sweet thing from down South marries a bear, and a painter learns that his true masterpiece would be to lay down his brushes forever. There are morals to be drawn from these wry, uncanny gothic tales. See Also the anthology of modern fairy tales, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father She Ate Me, and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby.
The Stolen Child, by Keith Donohue
Have you ever wondered whose life you're living? Perhaps you're a changeling, one of an ageless band of hobgoblins who hide in the woods awaiting their chance to step into the lives of others. In Donohue's poignant, realistic fairy tale, young Henry Day is changed and we witness the divergent streams of his own new life as the ageless Aniday, and the life of his new self, a German boy who has been waiting a hundred years for a mortal existence of his own.
The Glass Book of the Dream Eaters, by Gordon Dahlquist
Young Miss Temple follows her errant fiancé right through the looking glass and into a bizarre Victorian landscape of shadowy exotic villains, haunting erotic rituals and dreamlike visions. This epic journey through an ornate, absinthe-laced labyrinth calls to mind Wilkie Collins's novels of sensation and the fantasmal fever dreams of Edgar Allan Poe.
In Sam Lipsyte's mordantly funny Home Land, Lewis Miner — aka Teabag — is so fed up with the cheerful banalities of his status-conscious High School alumni bulletin that he endeavors to set the collective record straight with a succession of scathing, outrageously profane letters about his actual crappy life presented with eye-opening candor. The upcoming reunion of the class of '89 promises to be one for the books. Lipsyte's irreverent, black humor and vitriolic jeremiads against modern society is kind of reminscent of ChuckPalahniuk.
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