It’s still experimental literature month here at the Orem Public Library, and we’ve got nine more wild and unusual titles for you to check out. Come browse the display in the fiction area of the Orem Library for more, and if you missed part 1 of our experimental literature list you can read it here.
Dear Committee Members
By Julie Schumacher
Adult Fiction
A hilarious novel-in-letters about a creative writing professor and his stagnating career, budget woes, and passive-aggressive relationships with his colleagues, written entirely in the recommendation letters he constantly has to write for his students. Full of wry wit and sarcasm, this book comes highly recommended for recovering students and academics.
Illuminae
By Amie Kaufman
Teen Fiction
In this engaging cyberpunk series of teen novels, Kady and Ezra are hackers up against the two biggest megacorporations ever – and it’s up to them to save the world. This is a fast paced, gripping story – and it’s told exclusively in the form of instant messages, news articles, hacked materials, and other documents. If you like teen apocalyptic novels, give this one a try!
Codex Seraphinianus
By Luigi Serafini
Adult Nonfiction
A huge, illustrated encyclopedia of a fictional world in an invented, unreadable language. A fantastic conversation piece, and great browsing material!
Grief is the Thing with Feathers
By Max Porter
Adult Fiction
Two young boys faced with the sudden death of their mother are visited by Crow — a trickster spirit who teaches them about moving on. A profound and touching novella about grief, loss, and healing that also plays with formatting and wordplay in just the way you’d expect a trickster spirit might.
Cloud Atlas
By Paul Mitchell
Adult Fiction
An engaging Matryoshka doll of a book, with six narratives nested within one another. Mitchell is a captivating author, and this work of speculative fiction about reincarnation is one of his best. Also check out the film adaptation!
This Is Not A Novel
By David Markson
Adult Fiction
This is metafiction at its finest. The writer is, himself, the protagonist of the story. Too lazy to invent other characters, he steals historical figures and characters from other novels and mashes them together in the greatest crossover ever written — and an interesting piece of commentary on literature and writing.
The Mezzanine : A Novel
By Nicholson Baker
Adult Fiction
A stream of consciousness novel that takes place entirely on an escalator during the protagonist’s lunch break. The novel uses footnotes extensively to show digressions of thought and develop the brief ideas that float through the protagonist’s mind as he travels between the floors.
Life: A User’s Manual
By George Perec
Adult Fiction
An opened-up dollhouse of a book, with a set of one hundred concurrent stories that take place in the one hundred apartments in a fictional Parisian tenement at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier. Read for the joy of discovery of the overlapping story elements between the apartments and chapters — or for the sheer pleasure of people-watching.
Pale Fire
By Vladimir Nabokov
Adult Fiction
Translated from Russian, this novel consists of a 999 line poem, with the story mostly being told in the commentary, footnotes, references, and index. A classic work of post-modern, post-structuralist literature.
Written by Austin M. (General Reference and Media)
