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<\/a><\/p>\nI know this because a few years ago I conducted a national literary public opinion poll with a Johns Hopkins survey design expert\u2014a poll that also measured everything from preferred genre to setting to verb tense. After surveying a representative sample of the U.S. population and studying the data, I took the poll results and wrote two very different stories: one with everything Americans prefer, The Most Wanted Novel<\/a> (a James Patterson-esque technothriller), and another with everything that no one in their right mind would enjoy, The Most Unwanted Novel<\/a> (an experimental blend of romance, horror, historical fiction, and classic literature set on a billionaire-colonized 22nd century Mars). Amazingly, most early readers prefer the latter.<\/p>\n Despite the above data, very few works of experimental fiction are published in the U.S. each year\u2014especially by the five conglomerate publishers, often called \u201cThe Big Five,\u201d who are responsible for 80% of all new books. Experimental literature\u2014truly weird and formally inventive fiction\u2014is much more likely to appear as a work in translation published by a small, independent press.<\/p>\n This is not by accident. Dan Sinykin\u2019s groundbreaking book, Big Fiction<\/a>, showed how a hundred years of publishing consolidation has honed readerly taste and writerly style in this country. Sinykin found one of the greatest culprits to be \u201ccomp titles,\u201d or the list of 3-5 similar books that an agent sends to editors to try to convince them to publish a new novel. On top of contorting literature into the equivalent of real estate (this is how houses are sold\u2014by comparing a property to the homes around it), this trend ensures the books that get published do not veer far from what has already been proven in the market. There is little room for surprise and adventure; in this climate, these things are simply \u201crisk.\u201d<\/p>\n What if the publishers are wrong? What if this poll data is right\u2014or even close to right\u2014and there are leagues of readers eager for new forms, stories, politics, and imaginative worlds? The below list collects \u201cextreme fiction,\u201d or novels that push at the limits of what we often see as possible in literature. It\u2019s not exhaustive, rather it\u2019s a personal collection of books I\u2019ve enjoyed and that have changed my view of storytelling. These are also brilliant works of art that, if written today, would struggle to find homes in the current comp-title regime.<\/p>\n Extreme Form:Blood and Guts in High School<\/a> by Kathy Acker<\/p>\n When I started out as a fiction writer, this was the first novel that blew my mind. The book follows Janey Smith from Mexico City to an autofictional-yet-cartoonish portrait of Acker\u2019s own life in New York City and beyond. But it\u2019s how it\u2019s told that sets Blood and Guts apart: What begins as a story in the form of a film script soon morphs into dream maps drawn from Acker\u2019s real life before dropping into a fairy tale pastiche of Aesop and the Brothers Grimm. The more you get into it, the more you\u2019re not sure where one genre or narrative thread ends and the other begins. Blood and Guts is lewd and offensive. It\u2019s a collage and a beautiful, broken mess.\u00a0<\/p>\n Extreme Language Play:The Mundus<\/a> by N. H. Pritchard<\/p>\n Most fiction that plays with language incorporates puns or palindromes or invents new dialects, but Pritchard\u2019s The Mundus goes far beyond the usual line-based games. His visual novel explodes the traditional paragraph\u2014and even the sentence\u2014into constellations of words, syllables and letters, creating a verbi-voco-visual language of his own. Inspired by Pritchard\u2019s theosophical inquiries, The Mundus is composed of shifting voices and naturalistic imagery that resist clear, cohesive storytelling. Words and text-sound-images slip into one another and make reading\u2014and meaning itself\u2014a puzzle to be pieced together by each reader upon each reading. Once you\u2019ve experienced The Mundus, you\u2019ll never see novels\u2014or language\u2014or the world\u2014quite the same.<\/p>\n Extreme Horror:Off Season<\/a> by Jack Ketchum<\/p>\n Our poll found that horror was the second-least-wanted genre after romance, so The Most Unwanted Novel contains an unabridged 100-page collection of horror stories. While writing this collection, I was curious what others thought the most extreme horror could be, and several websites pointed me to Off Season. Ketchum\u2019s infamous debut follows the ill-fated travails of six city slickers vacationing in coastal Maine. In typical 80s horror-flick fashion, one-by-one they find themselves overwhelmed by a band of cannibals that locals thought were only a legend\u2026 To a scholar of extremes, it did not disappoint: this is doubtless the most gut-churning horror story I\u2019ve ever read. Reader discretion is highly advised.\u00a0<\/p>\n Extreme Surrealism:What To Do<\/a> by Pablo Katchajian, translated by Pricilla Posada<\/p>\n This novel completely destabilized me when I first read it. Sparked by a giant\u2019s koanic question about the nature of philosophy, the narrative follows a nameless narrator and his friend Alberto through a series of rapidly changing scenes and situations, from a lecture hall to a plaza to a nightclub restroom\u2014and this is only in the first page. From chapter to chapter, location, perspective, logic, physics, everything keeps slipping away. Nothing is solid. Everything moves. After finishing it, I was reminded of parts of Dambudzo Marechera\u2019s House of Hunger<\/a>, which similarly contorted my brain, heart, and soul. Read these books and say bye bye to \u201creality\u201d as you know it.<\/p>\n Extreme Braininess:Glyph<\/a> by Percival Everett<\/p>\n Glyph is a postmodern heist thriller told from the perspective of a mute baby genius named Ralph. We follow the polymath infant through a series of increasingly absurd kidnappings\u2014from a psychiatrist seeking to exploit Ralph\u2019s smarts to G-men recruiting him for espionage. Glyph pairs these pulpy scenes with a generous helping of Wittgensteinian meditations on poststructuralist language theory that will twist your brain into five-dimensional pretzels (no one will be surprised to learn that Everett started out as a philosopher). If you read Glyph\u2014and you must\u2014you\u2019ll also want to check out Dr. No<\/a>, its James Bond-esque sequel that shows, when placed beside Everett\u2019s dozens of other books (see the westerns, the detective novels, the historical fictions), that his stylistic range is unparalleled in American literature.<\/p>\n Extreme Humor:Castle Faggot<\/a> by Derek McCormack<\/p>\n Extreme humor requires laugh-out-loud laughter and real cringe. Castle Faggot delivers both and more: it\u2019s a scatological tour of a demented, Disneyland-esque theme park, run by Count Choc-o-log and his demented children\u2019s cereal mascot friends. We move from the Arse de Triumphe to the Rue de Doo, meeting the disco-dancing Franken-Fudge and Boo-Brownie along the way\u2014even Bataille shows up as a vampire bat. The language is bouncy and harsh and yet somehow addictive, its comedy laced with a stinging subtext of despair\u2014there\u2019s the slur of course, and the constant reappearance of death and suicide. At times the story reads like a visual poem, complete with empty line drawings, and a final chapter shaped like an inverted castle. This is a text that breaks and rebuilds you before breaking you again, all while wrapping you up in its tender, drippy Choc-o-log-ic embrace.<\/p>\n Extreme Prolificness:Conversations<\/a> by C\u00e9sar Aira (and the rest of his oeuvre)<\/p>\n C\u00e9sar Aira is in a class of his own, having published over 100 novels, each of them about 100 pages long. He does this through a process he calls the \u201cflight forward\u201d method, wherein he writes without editing, launching out from the first page with a general idea of where he might go and improvising all the way until the end. Conversations is his most flamboyant\u2014and fun\u2014use of this method, turning the idea of a frame narrative into a hall of mirrors. The rambling thoughts of a sleeping dreamer slip into a conversation the dreamer had the previous day about a continuity error in a Hollywood movie, which telegraphs into actual scenes of this movie, featuring mutant algae, flying goats, and feral beauty queens. And that\u2019s just the start because once you\u2019ve finished Conversations, the rest of Aira\u2019s ever-expanding literary universe will be beckoning you forth.<\/p>\n Extreme Constraint:The Sphinx<\/a> by Anne Garr\u00e9ta, translated by Emma Ramadan<\/p>\n The Sphinx is a love story that follows a nameless narrator, a DJ, and their lover, A***, a dancer, through the Parisian underground nightclub scene. The story is genderless. Or rather, the gender of the protagonist and the lover are absent throughout. This is a hard feat in English and an even harder one in the original French, a language ruled by gendered nouns, articles, and verbs. As a member of Oulipo, the Paris-based avant garde group who put literary constraint on the map, Gar\u00e9ta\u2019s book channels George Perec, who similarly went to extreme lengths in La Disparation<\/a> by writing a novel without the most common letter in French (or English): \u201ce.\u201d Here Gar\u00e9tta queers the often-male-dominated work of Oulipo, contorting the confines of gendered language and our desire for easy and fixed identities.<\/p>\n When I first read what\u2019s commonly called \u201cminimalist fiction,\u201d i.e. Ernest Hemingway, I was confused. Why so many words? Why so little repetition? Prior to Markson publishing his spare, final quartet of novels, it seems to me Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, and a handful of others were the only prose writers to truly realize what literary minimalism can be. Markson joins them with his late novels that combine simple stories with thousands of interspersed facts about the lives and deaths of canonical writers and artists. In Reader\u2019s Block, we follow the nonlinear, almost ambient internal monologue of an aging writer struggling to write a novel\u2014supposedly the very one we are reading. Malcolm Gladwell says that good writing includes \u201ccandy,\u201d or scrumptious little factoids that a reader can chew on and even share at dinner parties. If most books offer a generous helping of sweets, Reader\u2019s Block gives you the whole candy factory.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/1751022914_700_image-7.png\")
<\/a>Extreme Minimalism:Reader\u2019s Block<\/a> by David Markson<\/p>\n