Experimental Fiction

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Yr Dead

By Sam Sax , Rita Bullwinkel

Yr Dead is the first novel by poet Sam Sax. It is set in the interval between the moment Ezra, a 27-year-old queer Jewish New Yorker, sets themself on fire at a 2016 protest outside Trump Tower and the moment Ezra dies. Instead of a linear plot, the book moves through short vignettes: a Jewish childhood, a mother who vanishes, lovers and friends, a college reunion full of ghosts, and the imagined lives of ancestors in the old country. Sax uses this structure to ask how inherited memory, diasporic belonging, desire and political despair combine to shape one life. Longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction, this debut novel is formally inventive, emotionally heavy and best approached with care.

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The Rings of Saturn

An English Pilgrimage

By W. G. Sebald

A walking journey through coastal East Anglia becomes an investigation of memory, destruction, and the hidden connections between local landscapes and global history. The narrator passes through towns, estates, heathlands, and shorelines, but physical travel repeatedly gives way to meditations on subjects including Sir Thomas Browne, Rembrandt, Joseph Conrad, Roger Casement, the herring industry, European sericulture, colonial exploitation, the destruction of war, and imperial China. Photographs and other images interrupt the prose without settling whether they document, haunt, or complicate its accounts. Neither conventional novel nor straightforward travelogue, The Rings of Saturn follows associative paths rather than a plot-driven itinerary. Its deepest concern is the persistence of loss: how ruined buildings, depleted industries, natural processes, works of art, and unreliable recollections preserve traces of vanished lives. Sebald makes a sparsely populated English region feel li…

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To the Lighthouse

By Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf's 1927 novel follows the Ramsay family and their holiday guests across roughly a decade that takes in the First World War. The first part fills a single late-summer day with shifting viewpoints, the second lets an empty house register the passing years, and the third brings the survivors back to a boat trip postponed long before. In conventional terms very little happens, yet marriage, ambition, grief and the making of art are all reworked through private thought rather than action. For anyone assembling classic novels to read, it is one of the most approachable doorways into modernist literary fiction: short, formally daring and emotionally direct once its rhythms become familiar.

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Ficciones

By Jorge Luis Borges , Anthony Kerrigan , John Sturrock

Ficciones is Jorge Luis Borges's best-known book, a compact set of tales that turned philosophical puzzles into fiction. A secret encyclopedia leaks an invented planet into the real world. A minor author sets out to rewrite a famous novel word for word. A universe is imagined as an endless library, and a detective chases a killer through a geometry of clues. Borges often writes as a scholar, critic or witness rather than a conventional storyteller, and that choice shapes the whole book. Among short story collections, few have had so much influence on later writers worldwide. This Everyman's Library hardcover adds an introduction by John Sturrock and presents the stories in English.

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Breakfast of Champions

By Kurt Vonnegut

Breakfast of Champions is Kurt Vonnegut's 1973 satirical novel about two lonely older men heading for a collision in the fictional town of Midland City, Ohio. Kilgore Trout is an obscure science fiction writer. Dwayne Hoover is a wealthy Pontiac dealer whose mind is coming apart. Vonnegut appears in his own story as its creator. He uses plain language, his own marker-style drawings and abrupt asides to treat American myths about progress, race, money and violence as stories that people absorb and then act out. The book is short, strange, funny and at times disturbing. It is one of the books that make you think hardest about free will, mental illness and the narratives that shape behavior. This profile covers the Dell mass-market paperback edition.

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The Sound and the Fury

By William Faulkner

William Faulkner's 1929 novel traces the decline of the Compson family, once prominent in Jefferson, Mississippi, through four sections that each approach the same wreckage from a different angle. Three brothers, Benjy, Quentin and Jason, narrate in turn, followed by a third-person section centred on the family's Black housekeeper, Dilsey. The absent presence at the heart of it all is their sister Caddy. Known for its broken chronology and stream-of-consciousness prose, the book is both a demanding experiment in how fiction can render memory and a bleak portrait of family, class, race and time in the American South. It remains one of the classic novels to read for anyone curious about literary modernism.

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Steppenwolf

By Hermann Hesse , Basil Creighton , Joseph Mileck

Steppenwolf follows Harry Haller, a middle-aged writer who sees himself as half refined intellectual and half solitary wolf, and who is close to deciding to end his life. A run of chance meetings, including a young woman named Hermine and a jazz saxophonist, pulls him toward pleasures and company he has long despised, and leads to a hallucinatory night in a Magic Theatre. Published in German in 1927, Hermann Hesse's novel mixes diary, essay and fantasy to ask whether a self can ever be a single thing. It is often counted among the classic novels to read from twentieth-century German-language literature, and as translated fiction it still speaks to readers who know isolation or inner conflict. This profile describes the Holt, Rinehart and Winston edition of Basil Creighton's English version.

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The Trial

By Franz Kafka , Willa Muir , Edwin Muir , E. M. Butler , George Steiner

Franz Kafka's The Trial follows Josef K., a senior bank clerk who is arrested one morning by officials who will not name his offence. He is then left free to go about his life while a vast, unreachable court closes in on him. Kafka wrote it in 1914–15 and left it unfinished. It appeared in 1925, after his death, and became one of the most influential works of modernist fiction. Its plain, controlled prose makes bureaucracy, guilt and authority feel both darkly comic and frightening. This Schocken Definitive Edition offers the Willa and Edwin Muir translation with an introduction by George Steiner. For anyone building a list of classic novels to read, it is a short, strange and endlessly debated place to start.