Experimental Literature Links
Introduction
This article is a list of links to authors, works, and categories in experimental literature. Its purpose is to give you a starting point for exploring works in this set of genres.
I've based the list's organization on The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (RCEL), a collection of scholarly essays on the subject.
This project is a work in progress.
How to use this list
If a category is well established in the field, I've linked to its Wikipedia article. If the author of the RCEL article was conducting their own survey of the category, I've listed the authors and works they cover with links to Wikipedia and LibraryThing wherever corresponding pages are available. I've also included links to a work's full text when that's available and links to background information from other sources.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia articles will give you background information on their subject, and they'll usually contain bibliographies that will point you to works related to that subject, such as works in the category or works by the author.
LibraryThing
LibraryThing is a social library catalog website that lets you catalog your collection. Here I'm using it for its recommendation features and its links to other sites.
When you visit a work's LibraryThing page, you can find related works in the "LibraryThing Recommendations" section and the "Member recommendations" section. You can also click on the tags users have assigned to it. Each tag link takes you to a page for that tag, which lists other works that have been assigned it, as well as related tags, subjects, and tagmashes, which are combinations of tags. You can create your own tagmashes.
In the upper right sidebar of a work's LibraryThing page, you'll find links to its corresponding page on other catalog websites, such as Amazon, Google Books, and WorldCat, a shared catalog of physical libraries worldwide. These sites will often let you look through a preview of the book. They'll also give you ways to find other related works, usually by recommendations or subject links on the work's page. If you're logged in, you can edit this section to show links from a long list of other sites.
General
- Experimental literature - Wikipedia
- Bray, Joe, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale, eds. The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. Routledge Companions. London: Routledge, 2015. [LibraryThing]
The historical avant-gardes
Modernist-era experimentalism
Futurism
Expressionism
Surrealism
Absurdism
Postmodernist experimentalism
Postwar experimental poetry
The nouveau roman and Tel Quel
Lettrism and situationism
OuLiPo and proceduralism
Metafiction
Postmodern literature
Experiments with identity
Twentieth century avant-garde women writers
- Kathy Acker - Wikipedia
- Djuna Barnes - Wikipedia
- Jane Bowles - Wikipedia
- H.D. - Wikipedia
- Toni Morrison - Wikipedia
- Bharati Mukherjee - Wikipedia
- Anaïs Nin - Wikipedia
- Joyce Carol Oates - Wikipedia
- Jean Rhys - Wikipedia
- Dorothy Richardson - Wikipedia
- Gertrude Stein - Wikipedia
- Virginia Woolf - Wikipedia
Twentieth century avant-garde African-American poets
- Russell Atkins - Wikipedia
- Amiri Baraka - Wikipedia
- Jayne Cortez - Wikipedia
- Negro Digest - Wikipedia
- Langston Hughes - Wikipedia
- Ted Joans - Wikipedia
- Percy Johnston - Wikipedia
- Bob Kaufman - Wikipedia
- William Melvin Kelley - Wikipedia
- Nathaniel Mackey - Wikipedia
- Clarence Major - Wikipedia
- Tracie Morris - Wikipedia
- Harryette Mullen - Wikipedia
- Claudia Rankine - Wikipedia
- Gil Scott-Heron - Wikipedia
- Lorenzo Thomas (poet) - Wikipedia
- Melvin B. Tolson - Wikipedia
- Jean Toomer - Wikipedia
- Umbra (poets) - Wikipedia
Anglophone postcolonial poetry
- Postcolonial literature - Wikipedia
- G. V. Desani - Wikipedia
- Wilson Harris - Wikipedia
- Dambudzo Marechera - Wikipedia
- Mudrooroo - Wikipedia
- Ben Okri - Wikipedia
- Salman Rushdie - Wikipedia
- Vikram Seth - Wikipedia
- Wole Soyinka - Wikipedia
- Amos Tutuola - Wikipedia
- Derek Walcott - Wikipedia
The new experimentalism
Avant-Pop
- Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation (Black Ice Books) by Larry McCaffery [LibraryThing]
- After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology by Larry McCaffery [LibraryThing]
- Tomas Alfredson - Wikipedia
- Italo Calvino - Wikipedia
- Umberto Eco - Wikipedia
- Betrayed by Rita Hayworth by Manuel Puig [LibraryThing]
- Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs [LibraryThing]
- Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth [LibraryThing]
- Industrial Poetics: Demo Tracks for a Mobile Culture (Contemp North American Poetry) by Joe Amato [LibraryThing]
- Kenneth Goldsmith - Wikipedia
- Robert Coover - Wikipedia
- Angela Carter - Wikipedia
- Aimee Bender - Wikipedia
- White Noise by Don DeLillo [LibraryThing]
- Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon [LibraryThing]
- Mark Z. Danielewski's House of leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski [LibraryThing]
- Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century by Patrik Ouředník [LibraryThing]
- Mark Leyner - Wikipedia
- Traveling to Utopia: With a Brief History of the Technology by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries [LibraryThing]
Post-postmodernism
Globalization and transnationalism
Altermodernist fiction
Manifestos and Ars Poetica
- Manifesto - Wikipedia
- Ars Poetica (Horace) - Wikipedia
- Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish [full text]
Post-criticism
- Heuretics: The Logic of Invention by Gregory L. Ulmer [LibraryThing]
Experiment now: printed matter
Experiments with language
Language poetry
Concrete poetry and prose
Found poetry and "uncreative writing"
Words in visual art
Literary inauthenticity
Experiments with narrative and fiction
Unnatural narratives
Impossible worlds
Experimental life writing
Experimental genre fiction
- Iron Council by China Miéville [LibraryThing]
- Vellum: The Book of All Hours by Hal Duncan [LibraryThing]
- Ink: The Book of All Hours by Hal Duncan [LibraryThing]
- Iain Banks - Wikipedia
- Stephen Baxter (author) - Wikipedia
- Paul Park - Wikipedia
- Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds [LibraryThing]
- Blindsight by Peter Watts [LibraryThing]
- Books of Blood | Series [LibraryThing]
- Neverwhere: The Author's Preferred Text by Neil Gaiman [LibraryThing]
- Mark Z. Danielewski's House of leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski [LibraryThing]
- The Everlasting by Tim Lebbon [LibraryThing]
Experiments with form and design
Graphic narrative
Multimodal literature
Information design
- Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau [LibraryThing]
- Double or Nothing by Raymond Federman [LibraryThing]
- The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation by Peter Norvig [full text]
- Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century by Patrik Ouředník [LibraryThing]
- 2666 by Roberto Bolaño [LibraryThing]
Interactive fiction
Experiment now: beyond the page
The digital age
Digital fiction
Code poetry and new-media literature
Computer gaming
Virtual autobiography
Planned updates
- Add a description for each category.
- Add authors and works for the categories that only have general links.
- Add links from other sites.