Disturbing books.

[Mark F.]

callmeburroughs.tripod.com/joan.htm

Maybe he did, maybe he didn't play Wm. Tell [extrapolating, arrow, Wm. Tell]... seems not substantiated, might have been a tabloid fabrication. Very sad. 13 days of jail... doesn't seem enough.

Re the flinging the pages over his shoulder as he wrote, trying to remember, if that was actually in the Naked Lunch? I think that it was, actually got a really good memory of it, even talked about it with others who had read the novel. He was doing meth amphetamine with of course heroin. Kerouac is my hero, haven't read that much Ginsberg, but sure they would have been supremo editors for even this challenge. Excellent genre piece. Really glad you mentioned it.

Yeah he was playing William Tell but with a hand gun. It happened in Mexico where he fled to avoid imprisonment for holding (heroin, benzedrine? I forget).

[Julian Koller]

I agree with others that Alice in Wonderland and the works Kafka and Joyce are indeed quite odd. I also think the passages of Anais Nin's diary entries dealing with her unusually close relationship with her father very outlandish as well. Even with such strangeness, these authors are able to construct the bizarre with wonderful prose.

Georges Bataille's work is quite bizarre as well

[AuntShecky]

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. It's a heavy tome indeed, including footnotes! It's set in the not-so-distance future when all of the chickens of contemporary society
come home to roost. I think that awful movie The Ring
ripped off one of the plot elements in Infinite Jest.

[PeterL]

callmeburroughs.tripod.com/joan.html

Maybe he did, maybe he didn't play Wm. Tell [extrapolating, arrow, Wm. Tell]... seems not substantiated, might have been a tabloid fabrication. Very sad. 13 days of jail... doesn't seem enough.

Re the flinging the pages over his shoulder as he wrote, trying to remember, if that was actually in the Naked Lunch? I think that it was, actually got a really good memory of it, even talked about it with others who had read the novel. He was doing meth amphetamine with of course heroin. Kerouac is my hero, haven't read that much Ginsberg, but sure they would have been supremo editors for even this challenge. Excellent genre piece. Really glad you mentioned it.

That story wasn't in Naked Lunch or in another of his novels, but it has appeared in different forms in biographies, and it was assested to by a number of people, which is why there was no legal action against him.

[Mortis Anarchy]

I recently just bought Naked Lunch...I haven't started it though House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski is pretty strange...good, but different.

[kemal]

the last man in the world

[plh]

The Dream Quest of Unknown Kaddath, by H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft is a former denizen of my adopted state, 'Lil Rhody. That is the weirdest damn thing I ever read. I don't know anyone else besides me that actually liked it, except my son, but he is a total weirdo like his old man.
-plh

[Theshizznigg]

The wierdest piece of literature so far would be the Cask of Amon Tillado by Poe. I don't necessarily like Poe, but I made the efforts to read it.

[PeterL]

The Dream Quest of Unknown Kaddath, by H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft is a former denizen of my adopted state, 'Lil Rhody. That is the weirdest damn thing I ever read. I don't know anyone else besides me that actually liked it, except my son, but he is a total weirdo like his old man.
-plh

If you read more of Lovecraft's work, you will find things that make seem as commonplace as it really is.

[emmsi_*tobyrox*]

A play rather than a book : Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett freaked me out...by its absurdness if that is a word!

[thechampion]

no. you have no conceptualization of wierd. i can't get over this guy. he freaks me out. this is a direct quote from "The Riddle of the Traveling Skull" by Harry Stephen Keeler. the chapter that this is out of is called "A Chinaman He Catch Himse'f a Light!":
It must be remembered that at the time I knew quite nothing, naturally, concerning Milo Payne, the mysterious Cockney talking Englishman with the long-beaked Sherlock-Holmesian cap; nor of the latter's "Barr-Bag" which was as like my own bag as one Milwaukee wienerwurst is like another; nor of Legga, the Human Spider, with her four legs and her six arms; nor of Ichabod Chang, exconvict, and son of Dong Chang; nor of the elusive poetess, Abigail Sprigge; nor of the Great Simon, with his 2163 pearl buttons; nor of - in short, I then knew quite nothing about anything or anybody involved in the affair of which I had now become a part, unless perchance it were my nemesis, Sophie Kratzenschneiderwumpel - or Suing Sophie!

its a mystery novel. yes, he is published

[Etienne]

The Temptation of Saint-Anthony by Flaubert

[Black Flag]

Ulysses by James Joyce. In the same vein, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, technically the prequel to Ulysses. Dubliners was kind of strange, too.
Maybe they're not exactly "weird", but are most definately difficult to follow.
I'm not sure what Joyce was smoking.
Of course, if he had written Ulysses in a normal style, it might be pretty boring. A man wakes up, eats breakfast, goes to work, takes a lunch break, wanders around the streets of Dublin for a while, plays with himself on the beach (yeah, it's what you're thinking), and goes home. And those are the highlights as I remember them. It's been a few years since I've read it.

[Zelly]

To be honest... Peter Pan.

I liked it, but it was so strange.

[amalia1985]

"The Breast" by Philip Roth, we read it in the third year in the Modern American Literature class in my university. Really fun, but realy weird, at the same time...