Obscure reading suggestions

[toni]

I'd recommend Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami.
The plot's got my head twisted on some bits but it will definitely keep you up at night.

[white camellia]

Yes, Nikolai Gogol, with his weird stories.

[Leo The Lion]

I love a lot of these suggestions.. I am a huge Bukowski fan, and The Great Gatsby is one amazing book.
I am very interested in reading nerval

[zolasdisciple]

id recommend avarice house by julian green. and venus in furs . and oroonoko by aphra behn.

[Hobbes]

I feel like I'm barging into someone else's territory.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald's This side of paradise, the one trait he did capture the best was the gossamer kingdom of "upper class". Vocab word (2 points).

For my own suggest, I think it unorthadox, but Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson.
Innocent philosophy alongside things we all want to know, great moments of child mentality and absurdity, and good humor (caution: though it can get a little crude and basic).

[Etienne]

Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo
Next Episode by Hubert Aquin
Men in the Sun by Kanafani
Petersburg Tales by Gogol
Justine by de Sade
The Songs of Maldoror by Lautreamont
Cruel Tales by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
Short Stories by Poe
The Temptation of Saint-Anthony by Flaubert

Are you looking for poetry as well?

[librarius_qui]

I'm reading something that somewhat matches a bit of what you seem to be looking for ...

Escritores e Espiões ("Writers and Spies"), by a Spanish guy, Fernando Martinez Lainez.

It brings little biographies of many writers who were spies ... (Don't have it right here now, I'm reading it at work, so it's there.) (&, Anyway, you'll probably finish before me, if I ever make it, for I'm as well in the middle of other five or six books, so ...)

I don't know if there's translation to English already. There's a Brasilian edition, in Portuguese. I don't dare reading Spanish. (Long story.)


librarius

[librarius_qui]

I read a part about Marlowe, and am in the end of another about John LeCarré ... (I didn' know J. LC. to have been a real spy! ...) And there was another writer, in the middle, a Spanish-Italian one, that I didn't know, but whose biography was the most interesting, up till now. I'm curious about the biographical essay on Miguel Cervantes Saavedra, and there's at least one more whom I know, in the list of seven or eight writers ...

[blp]

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

[TheFifthElement]

Excellent suggestions:

I'd recommend Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami.
The plot's got my head twisted on some bits but it will definitely keep you up at night.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

[kelby_lake]

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

Liked the part I did read but I couldn't read the whole thing

[Bitterfly]

Antonin Artaud! I'd forgotten about him but he was completely crazy. I've only read The theatre and its double, and his translation into French of Lewis's The Monk, but both were wonderful.

[Leo The Lion]

Poetry as well. Yes, Antonin Artaud is just the type of person i'm looking for.

[JBI]

You may wish to try Sinclair Ross's As for Me and My House. I don't know how readily available it is outside of Canada, but the Novel is easily available here. Though not dealing with the life of a mad writer, it deals strangely with the life of a prairie wife, and her husband, in the great depression, and their struggles as artists with themselves, the world around them, and the people around them.

Also, Canadian literature in general seems to be about struggling artists up to until 1980 or so, when it really goes in an opposite direction. you may wish, if you can get a hold of it in the library, to look into that thematic chapter in Atwood's criticism on Canadian literature, Survival, which describes the struggling artist, and survival as the two central points in Canadian literature.

That being said, this is just for more obscure examples. The above are more general, and far more international, as the struggles in those books for the most part are rooted in the artists themselves, rather than the artist in relation to the landscape.

[Emil Miller]

I read a part about Marlowe, and am in the end of another about John LeCarré ... (I didn' know J. LC. to have been a real spy! ...) And there was another writer, in the middle, a Spanish-Italian one, that I didn't know, but whose biography was the most interesting, up till now. I'm curious about the biographical essay on Miguel Cervantes Saavedra, and there's at least one more whom I know, in the list of seven or eight writers ...

I also wasn`t aware that that JLC was a spy, although he did spend some time in West Germany working for the British government at our embassy in Bonn during the Cold War. But perhaps the book you have mentioned has W.S.Maugham as one of its subjects. During World War 1 he was a secret agent spying for Britain in Switzerland; which being neutral was a hotbed of enemy agents from all countries engaged in the conflict. His semi-autobiographical novel Ashenden is vividly realistic and probably the best book ever written on the subject of espionage.