Archive for the ‘Experimental Fiction’ Category

THE BOOK FROM THE SKY by Robert Kelly

An unremarkable boy named Billy sets out to find the spaceship that landed near the boarding house where he lives with his family in rural Philadelphia. He’s invited on this adventure by Eileen who also lives in the boarding house and is beginning to show signs of womanhood. Young Billy is driven to distraction by her smell, her silhouette, her touch. This part of the novel reads like an epic poem.

August 2, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: Experimental Fiction, Speculative (Beyond Reality)  No Comments

THE SELECTED WORKS OF T. S. SPIVET by Reif Larson

Twelve-year-old Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet—T.S. for short—is as quirky as his name suggests. Extraordinarily gifted, his one way of making sense of the world around him, is to map it all out. So it is that Reif Larsen’s debut,THE SELECTED WORKS OF T.S. SPIVET, has many of these maps and diagrams on the margins—a glimpse into the workings of a gifted mind. Worth mentioning are maps describing the locations of McDonalds in a Midwestern town, the many physical forces acting on a rodeo cowboy and the long list of random names picked by an IBM 1401 for the soda, Tab.

July 5, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Coming-of-Age, Debut Novel, Experimental Fiction  No Comments

PYGMY by Chuck Palahniuk

Foreign exchange students from an unnamed oppressive socialist regime have arrived in an unnamed midsized Midwestern city to create chaos in America’s virtuous heartland. Armed with years of political indoctrination and martial arts tactics, their mission – Operation Havoc – consists of progressing to the National Science Fair in Washington D.C. where they will commit a massive act of biological terrorism.

June 6, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Contemporary, Experimental Fiction, Humorous, Literary, Unique Narrative  No Comments

WONDERFUL WORLD by Javier Calvo

Filled with the fragmentation, incoherence and ambiguity that typify much of post-modernist thought, WONDERFUL WORLD is a challenge for the reader, since the very characteristics which make it “post-modern” are also characteristics which are off-putting for readers who expect a novel to have a clear beginning, middle, and end. And when that novel is almost five hundred pages long, the challenges are even more daunting, since it is difficult to know how much of the incoherence and fragmentation is deliberate and how much may be the result of less than rigorous editing.

May 31, 2009  Tags:   Posted in: Debut Novel, Experimental Fiction, Spain, World Literature  No Comments