Disturbing books.

Hands down The Robber Bridegroom by Eudora Welty. Most strange books don't really surprise me. I wasn't surprised when Ulysses turned out to be weird. However, this one really surprised me. She wrote many strange stories, but none quite so much as this one.

I sure am dissapointed that everyone associates weirdness with drug use. It seems that a book written by someone on drugs or about someone on drugs usually isn't very weird because you expect unusual things to happen. I have much more respect for writers who pull their strange ideas from the real world. That makes a book much more interesting for me.

A Clockwork Orange maybe?

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Originally Posted by EricP

"The 120 Days of Sodom" by Marquis de Sade

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Rather than weirdest... one of the 'Pornest'...:D

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Originally Posted by EricP

"The 120 Days of Sodom" by Marquis de Sade

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ha ha! how about grossest:sick:

Woman of the Dunes by Kōbō Abe is weird, it's about an entomologist who is trapped in a house at the bottom of a sandpit by some locals and made to dig for sand to keep the house from caving in.

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Originally Posted by Tallon

Woman of the Dunes by Kōbō Abe is weird, it's about an entomologist who is trapped in a house at the bottom of a sandpit by some locals and made to dig for sand to keep the house from caving in.

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Also by Kobo Abe: The Kangaroo Notebook. A story about a man who finds radishes growing on his legs one day. Very, very strange.

Yes i must seek more Abe, it was ages ago i read WITD.

OK, interesting topic and I'll bite...(newbie here)...

The majority of works of literary fiction that I have read so far certainly could be described as "bizarre or eccentrlc". I read in a DFW interview that a creative writing teacher advised him that good writing should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable...

I second all those that mentioned Beckett, Kafka, Joyce etc as all being "weird". Breaking of old previous accepted traditional forms in any medium would probably be called that...

I agree that some works are weird with seeming goal to sell themselves or to be heard, as in "shock value"-ie. Weirdness for weirdness sake (could be a good thread topic for debate!)

Read any drama by Ionesco (major writer from the theater of the absurd school) will make Beckett seem like the Sunday Times...

I loved the "weirdness" of Pynchon, Brautigan and Barth. Barthelme's short stories are pretty out there!
I can't wait to try Murakami's books from what I have heard!

From reading this thread, I need to find the Third Policeman from O'brien and some works by Abe

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Originally Posted by malwethien

Hmmm...define "weird." Hard to say, really....The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is wierd. So is A Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinsi...Kafka's "Metamorpohsis" is weird too...and anything by James Joyce...

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Hi malwethien! "A Painted Bird" was one weird novel; I am with you on this one. I read it when I was in college along with "Steppenwolf" - I agree, that was pretty weird too, although I do like Hermann Hesse's other works very much. "Steppenwolf" was good, but strange and mostly based on dreams/fantasies, I believe. He probably was on drugs when he wrote it.
Yes, some of James work certainly is weird, at least to me. Some of Virginia Wolfe's later work is a bit strange, I think, such as "Orlando". I didn't read it but heard it was different and a bit weird.

This might not count because it is a short story - but 'The Yellow Wallpaper' is super strange but good. 'A Rose for Emily' is another strange short story but interesting.

I want some completely out-there concepts- what are some of the strangest books you have heard of or read yourself?

Thanks as always!

The Bible

LOL! I'm with you on that....:thumbs_up

This will probably get joined with the other thread like this, i recommended Kobo Abe's Woman in the Dunes. Abe is generally bizzare.

What do you mean by bizarre?

For example you can have something completely twisted like Apolinnaire's Eleven Thousand Rods or something rather crazy like Perec's Disparition (a novel with no letter "e"). Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke is quite crazy as well, Boris Vian's Écume des jours, Beckett in general, Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, or Broch Death of Virgil, Lautreamont's Maldoror, Caroll's Alice in Wonderland (why not?), Borges too could fit that category often, Raymond Queneau's Exercises of Style, etc.

But maybe being more precise in what you're looking for would help...

Check out the Oulipo, a group of writers which might interest you (Perec and Queneau previously mentionned were members of that group, and so was Calvino).

Any of the middle to late works of Samuel Beckett, and Absurdity in general.