This episode we talk about Experimental Fiction and stumble all over our words and can’t pronounce anything right. We explore experimental comics, wonder at what point experimental fiction stops being experimental, and are amazed at how a book with no plot at all can break through a reading slump.

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In this episode

Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray | Jessi

Books (and things) We Read (or tried to)

• The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli
• Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić
• 17776: What football will look like in the future by Jon Bois
• Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
• Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson (and yes, Anna hasn’t a clue how to pronounce this)
• Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra
• How to be Both by Ali Smith

Books We Mentioned

• Captain Underpants by Dav Pilkey
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley or…
• Ulysses by James Joyce (the obvious example Anna should have used of experimental fiction just becoming a “classic” of literature”
• Gertrude Stein
• To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
• Greyshirt: How Things Work Out (from Tomorrow Stories) by Alan Moore and Rick Veitch (Matthew wasn’t totally right in how he described it, but it’s been years since he read it).
• Here by Richard McGuire
• The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
• Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
• Suicide Forest by Dave Baker and Nicole Goux
• Promethea by Alan Moore and J. H. Williams III
• Longshot Comics: The Long and Unlearned Life of Roland Gethers by Shane Simmons
• Dinosaur Comics by Ryan North
• Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
• Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
• Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
• Abahn, Sabana, David by Marguerite Duras, translated by Kazim Ali
• Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar
• 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
• Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction edited by Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs (the book of literary essays about women writing experimental fiction)
• S. by J.J. Abrams, Doug Dorst
• Building Stories by Chris Ware (collected ephemera comic)
• Blindness by José Saramago
• A Void by Georges Perec (Book without the letter E)
• Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn
• There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby by by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
• Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
• The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker
• Mary Roach

Links, Articles, and Things

• Our Episode on Metafiction
• Experimental literature (Wikipedia)
• Ellen Hopkins (writes YA novels in verse)
• Jessi made a booklist once long ago for those who are into experimental fiction
• Experimental Fiction article from mapliteracy.org (The definition that Meghan quotes)
• David Foster Wallace calls Wittgenstein’s MIstress “pretty much the pinnacle of modern experimental fiction” and also calls out a few other “underappreciated” novels
• There are so many amusing reviews of Wittgenstein’s Mistress on Goodreads:
• • Like this one
  • And this one
  • Or even this one

Questions

• What counts as experimental fiction?
• What’s your favourite experimental fiction?

Contest

Winners, please contact us with your addresses!

Check out our Pinterest board and Tumblr posts for all the Experimental Fiction books we read, follow us on Twitter, join our Facebook Group, or send us an email!

Join us again on Tuesday, October 3rd, for our Halloween episode when we’ll be talking about our favourite spoooOOOOooooky books.

Then come back on Tuesday, October 17th, when we’ll be discussing non-fiction Travel books!.