Surrealism balances a rational vision of life with one that asserts the power of the unconscious and dreams and often finds beauty in the strange and the supernatural. Surreal stories balance reality and imagination to create something new that is also unsettling. Check out our reading list for 10 Surreal Books that will blow you mind. Enjoy!
Through the Arc of the Rain Forest by Karen Tei Yamashita
Through the Arc of the Rain Forest is a burlesque of comic-strip adventures and apocalyptic portents that stretches familiar truths to their logical extreme in a future world that is just recognizable enough to be frightening. The stage is a vast, mysterious field of impenetrable plastic in the Brazilian rain forest set against a backdrop of rampant environmental destruction, commercialization, poverty, and religious rapture. Through the Arc of the Rainforest is narrated by a small satellite hovering permanently around the head of an innocent character named Kazumasa.
This book is simultaneously entertaining and depressing, with all the rollicking pessimism you’d expect of a good soap opera or a good political satire.
The Famished Road by Ben Okri
“I felt on the edge of reality.” These are the words uttered by the narrator of The Famished Road as he recalls his venturing to a location that looked like “a strange fairyland in the real world.” The sentence perfectly encapsulates the ambivalent and fragile position of a child whose wanderings take him and the readers of Ben Okri’s The Famished Road to a myriad of places set in the real or the supernatural realm, or a mixture of both. A child of miracles, who knows no boundaries and observes what surrounds him with eyes wide open, Azaro is our very special guide into these enchanting and terrifying worlds.
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
First published over 60 years ago, William S. Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch is a dark, wild ride through the terror of heroin addiction and withdrawal, filled with paranoia, erotica and drug-fueled hallucinations.
In an introduction (of sorts) to the novel, Burroughs wrote that the book was a result of “detailed notes on sickness and delirium” that he took during his 15 years of heroin addiction. As he explained in a 1985 interview: “It was just my character. … I always was attracted to the run-down, or the old or the offbeat.”
Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms
A master of formally inventive poetry and what today would be called micro-fiction, Kharms built off the legacy of Russian Futurist writers to create a uniquely deadpan style written out of and in spite of the absurdities of life in Stalinist Russia. Featuring the acclaimed novella The Old Woman and darkly humorous short prose sequence Events (Sluchai), Today I Wrote Nothing also includes dozens of short prose pieces, plays, and poems long admired in Russia, but never before available in English. I Wrote Nothing is an invaluable collection for readers of innovative writing everywhere.
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
In a future world racked by violence and environmental catastrophes, George Orr wakes up one day to discover that his dreams have the ability to alter reality. He seeks help from Dr. William Haber, a psychiatrist who immediately grasps the power George wields. Soon George must preserve reality itself as Dr. Haber becomes adept at manipulating George’s dreams for his own purposes.
The Lathe of Heaven is an eerily prescient novel from award-winning author Ursula K. Le Guin that masterfully addresses the dangers of power and humanity’s self-destructiveness, questioning the nature of reality itself.
Conversations by César Aira
The narrator starts by recalling his practice of revisiting the day’s conversations every night before falling asleep. In this case, the conversation concerns a movie in which a gold Rolex can be seen plainly adorning the wrist of the actor playing the goatherd. Is it an error on the part of the filmmakers? Or, as the narrator’s friend argues, a portal into a subjective third reality somewhere between real life and film, actor and fictional character?
One thing is certain: this telltale watch explodes the differences between the two men and opens up a dazzling inquiry into subjects as far ranging as eastern European political instability, the fragmentary nature of fiction, Kant’s critiques, and the film’s equally oddball plot (featuring mutant algae and feral beauty queens). Short enough to read in a single sitting, this book is, like all Aira’s work, fodder for the kind of late-night speculations that lend themselves to seamless dreaming.
Kangaroo Notebook by Kobo Abe
In the last novel written before his death in 1993, one of Japan’s most distinguished novelists proffered a surreal vision of Japanese society that manages to be simultaneously fearful and jarringly funny. The narrator of Kangaroo Notebook wakes on morning to discover that his legs are growing radish sprouts, an ailment that repulses his doctor but provides the patient with the unusual ability to snack on himself. In short order, Kobo Abe’s unraveling protagonist finds himself hurtling in a hospital bed to the very shores of hell. Abe has assembled a cast of oddities into a coherent novel, one imbued with unexpected meaning. Translated from the Japanese by Maryellen Toman Mori.
Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue
A daring, kaleidoscopic novel about the clash of empires and ideas, told through a tennis match in the sixteenth century between the radical Italian artist Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo, played with a ball made from the hair of the beheaded Anne Boleyn.
Álvaro Enrigue’s mind-bending story features assassinations and executions, hallucinogenic mushrooms, bawdy criminals, carnal liaisons and papal schemes, artistic and religious revolutions, love and war. A blazingly original voice and a postmodern visionary, Enrigue tells the grand adventure of the dawn of the modern era, breaking down traditions and upending expectations, in this bold, powerful gut-punch of a novel.
The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns
The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns is a vivid, witty and touching story of love and mystery.
Growing up in Edwardian south London, Alice Rowlands longs for romance and excitement, for a release from a life that is dreary, restrictive and lonely. Her father, a vet, is harsh and domineering; his new girlfriend brash and lascivious. Alice seeks refuge in memories and fantasies, in her rapturous longing for Nicholas, a handsome young sailor, and in the blossoming of what she perceives as her occult powers.
A series of strange events unfolds that leads her, dressed in bridal white, to a scene of ecstatic triumph and disaster among the crowds on Clapham Common.
The Metamorphosis by Frans Kafka
When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis.
It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing–though absurdly comic–meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction. As W.H. Auden wrote, “Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man.”
If you enjoyed our recommendations for Best Surreal Books, check out our selection of Dystopian Books
