Good "post-modern" novels?

[Savs165]

Hi guys,

Im a big fan of writers like Thomas Pynchon, James Joyce, William Gaddis, DFW, etc.

Can anyone recommend more books similar to these styles? Im trying to read as many as possible.

Thanks!

[Pierre Menard]

John Barth.
Donald Barthelme.


Also, James Joyce wasn't a post-modernist. A massive influence to the 'post-modern' writers no doubt, but he came before it and them.

[R.F. Schiller]

Nabokov was kind of a bridge from Modernism to Post-Modernism and a lot of his later works are considered post-modern. Pale Fire primarily, but also Ada, or Ardor. Funny you mentioned Wallace, because I'm currently writing a paper regarding the influence of Pale Fire (and Nabokov in general) on Wallace's first novel, The Broom of the System. Also, try Philip Roth, John Updike and Martin Amis. Perhaps Norm Mailer too.

[Poetaster]

Don Delillo too, check him out.

Maybe House of Leaves too.

[Savs165]

Thanks. I really should have named this thread "experimental fiction". I guess post modern was the wrong terminology.

Has anyone read Sleepers Awake by Kenneth Patchen? I can't find much info about it other than people saying its good.

[AuntShecky]

There are plenty of works which break the fourth wall:

At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O' Brien

Lost in the Fun House by John Barth

The Kugelmass Episode (a short story) by Woody Allen

And the grand-daddy of them all -- Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

[jangling]

Paul Auster? New York Trilogy seems to be the classic popular postmodern noire novel (perhaps the literary equivalent of the movie "Pulp Fiction"). Maybe Italo Calvino.

[Poetaster]

Italio Calvino is worth checking out,yeah. Very much worth it.

[Eiseabhal]

John Hawkes. "The Cannibal" is an extraordinary piece of work. It contrives to be brief yet bloated. Ignores plot setting and character but yet bursts with all three and elevates the paragraph to iconhood rather than just a bolt in structure.

[AuntShecky]

Italio Calvino is worth checking out,yeah. Very much worth it.

"If a traveler" is the title. I"m going to look for the book next trip to the lib. Not optimistic about finding it, though. Danielle Steele has hogged all the shelves.

[ennison]

Hawkes? I could not take the deliberate obfuscation of "The Cannibal". I understand he moved closer to traditional narrative later and he did have a large output but I don't think he is on my bucket list of novelists. I defer however to your greater tolerance of post-modernist writers Eiseabhal. I like novelists to use the traditional elements rather than abuse them and I do not agree with Mr Gass' suggestion that that implies People like me are more interested in "folks" than in literature.

[ennison]

I find the term post-modernist weird. I am sure Hawkes no more thought of himself as a post-modernist than Donne thought of himself as a metaphysical. Writers have always explored the fictive nature of fiction and pushed at various boundaries with varying degrees of interest. I am sure than not many people read Finnegan's taigh-fhaire with great enjoyment. No doubt it was pushing at fiction's boundaries too. But Sterne was also. And arguably Defoe was playing with "faction". So although some writers in the sixties did start grouping themselves under that heading there are others who displayed some of these characteristics long before the coining of that term. Does it do a writer any good to belong to a "school" or type?