books with non linear narrative, experiments with the form, etc: go!
please do not all say house of leaves i know some of you bitches read books
Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire: each chapter takes place in the same chunk of London over something like 1000 years
if we can count comics, Moore's Promethea too, one of the volumes is a trip around the Tree of Life, i think the whole narrative can be mapped on the Tarot Majors too
Mark Danielewski's Only Revolutions is a book length prose poem that you read from the ends in to the center. i haven't gotten through it but respect the ambitious structure
i feel like Hal Duncan's Vellum & Ink had something interesting structurally between them but i don't think i finished them, specifically bc i waited too long to start Ink after Vellum & got completely lost
Honorable mention/not sure if it counts but the language was interesting enough that I'm tempted to include it: The Tide Will Erase All by Justin Hellstrom is an Improbability Drive-style apocalypse told by a ten(?) year old but might also be a radio/satellite announcement of their story after the fact? needs a revisit
OH SHIT Koji Suzuki's Ring Cycle. Ring is a horror novel that happens on an entirely different level of operation than what we find out about it on Spiral & Loop
Jeff Vandermee's Dead Astronauts, i actually don't know how to describe what he did with it but it's nuts
The Dictionary of the Khazars is a novel that's a lexicon
this is turning up a whole bunch of things I hadn't heard of which is EXACTLY what i wanted god bless you all:
So Stories of Your Life and Others has been on my wishlist for ages as has Pale Fire; Voice of the Fire is on my bookshelf waiting for me and I think I read Promethea or parts thereof when it first came out; I read Catch-22 recently and will rave about it at the drop of a hat, read Cloud Atlas… a couple of years ago I think? After having it on my shelf for a million billion years & dug the matryoska structure muchly, but yeah! Otherwise I hadn't heard of most of these?!?! excellent work everyone well done
Got a few I haven't seen in the notes:
Blake Butler's There Is No Year is decidedly nonlinear, bordering on nonsensical, with upsetting vibes and such perfect pacing that I couldn't put it down
Matt Bell plays in this territory a lot; pretty much anything by him is going to be fighting you back a little but my introduction was the short story "The Cartographer's Girl"
John Elizabeth Stintzi takes a pretty oblique approach to structure in Vanishing Monuments and, I understand, in My Volcano. (Disclaimer: they are also a friend of mine, but I make the recommendation in earnest)
The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins is like if Warren Ellis tried to write House of Leaves, and I mean that as a compliment
I'm sure you're aware of Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez, but it is, in fact, all that and a bag of chips, especially in its structure
Monica Ojeda does some fun things with structure, especially in Nefando but definitely also in Jawbone, though I'll note that Nefando especially deals in some very dark territory
Steven Millhauser's short stories are pretty distinctly nonlinear and often outright weird in a very fun way -- I love his collection The Barnum Museum, notably the source of the short story that inspired the movie The Illusionist
I feel like Ayse Papatya Bucak's The Trojan War Museum fits here, but I also just feel like that collection is underrated, so cum grano salis
I think the movie is better-known, but Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Satantango is formally and topically very weird in a way that I found delightful
I also enthusiastically cosign the recommendations of Coup de Grace and Pale Fire. For what it's worth, Pale Fire is also one of the funniest books I've ever read.
I am not aware of Our Share of Night! Also, "bordering on nonsensical, with upsetting vibes" is like catnip. Thank you.
253 by Geoff Ryman (originally published on the web with hyperlinks, later published as a paper book) now at : https://www.253novel.com/
The Bridge by Iain Banks
and
Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welsh
(both have the dude in a coma)
See Under: Love by David Grossman. It's in four parts, two of them are straightforward lit fic, one is salmon point-of-view, if I recall correctly, one is a story told in dictionary definitions.
And short stories:
Stet by Sarah Gailey (the story emerges from the footnotes)
Wikihistory by Desmond Warzel (a story in forum posts)
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue
Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge
The Angel of History by Rabih Alameddine
Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien
Human Acts by Han Kang
If on winter’s night a traveller by Italo Calvino is GORGEOUS, it’s a bunch of stories in a story about a story trying to find a story with an underlying mystery and a lot of love for stories in themselves


















