The Fragmented Novel: A Reading List
(with links to essays on each book)
by Ted Gioia
(with links to essays on each book)
by Ted Gioia
1 Winesburg, Ohio
Sherwood Anderson
Anderson's 1919 book blurred the boundaries
between the short story collection and the novel.
To read more, click here
2 The Golden Ass
Apuleius
Apuleius set the blueprint for the discursive,
disjointed novel back in the 2th century AD.
To read more, click here
3 The Atrocity Exhbition
J.G. Ballard
Ballard tells readers they don't need to read these
fragments sequentially, and can even skip passages.
To read more, click here
4 2666
Roberto Bolaño
Originally envisioned as 5 separate books, 2666
was published a single novel by Bolaño's estate.
To read more, click here
5 When the Killing's Done
T.C. Boyle
Boyle is a master of intersecting stories where history,
biography and sheer imagination mix effortlessly.
To read more, click here
6 The Martian Chronicles
Ray Bradbury
Imagine traveling to Mars, but instead of aliens you
discover the equivalent of Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio.
To read more click here
7 The Illustrated Man
Ray Bradbury
Bradbury draws on 'cinematic tattoos' to develop
many of his pet themes of the era.
To read more click here
8 People of the Book
Geraldine Brooks
Brooks covers 700 years of history in this
page turner about, yes, turning pages.
To read more click here
9 Stand on Zanzibar
John Brunner
John Brunner draws on the techniques of John Dos
Passos in crafting this prescient New Wave sci-fi novel.
To read more, click here
10 The Master and the Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
Ancient Rome and the 20th century Soviet Union
intersect in this multilayered novel by Mikhail Bulgakov.
To read more, click here
11 The Soft Machine
William Burroughs
Long before Microsoft Word taught us about cut-and-
paste, William Burroughs applied it to his fiction.
To read more, click here
12 Possession
A.S. Byatt
Byatt integrates diary entries, letters and poetry in
this Victorian and modern fiction mash-up
To read more, click here
13 If On a Winter's Night a Traveler
Italo Calvino
Calvino offers his readers a glimpse of ten separate
unfinished novels in this classic of lectio interruptus.
To read more, click here
14 Answered Prayers
Truman Capote
Capote promised a grand Proustian gossip novel, but
only a few disconnected chapters were ever written.
To read more, click here
15 The House on Mango Street
Sandra Cisneros
Cisneros proved that the fragmented novel could also
serve as entry-level fiction for student readers.
To read more, click here
16 Hopscotch
Julio Cortázar
Why would you start reading a novel at chapter 73? Only
Julio Cortázar knows for sure.
To read more, click here
17 House of Leaves
Mark Z. Danielewski
You can read it as a verbal equivalent of a cabinet of horrors,
or as some sort of a Borgesian nightmare brought to life.
To read more, click here
18 The Fifty Year Sword
Mark Z. Danielewski
Danielewski's novels are a cross between a typographer's
nightmare and regurgitated alphabet soup.
To read more, click here
19 Only Revolutions
Mark Z. Danielewski
The reader is advised to turn the book upside down
every 8 pages and read it in the opposite direction.
To read more, click here
20 Underworld
Don DeLillo
DeLilllo jumps freely, without warning, from vignette to
vignette, character to character, decade to decade.
To read more, click here
21 VALIS
Philip K. Dick
Dick drew on a 8,000 page journal, which he called Exegisis,
in creating the strangest sci-fi novel of its day.
To read more, click here
22 Manhattan Transfer
John Dos Passos
Dos Passos jotted down dialogue, facts, slogans, a textual
collage waiting to be assembled into something larger.
To read more, click here
23 USA Trilogy
John Dos Passos
Dos Passos draws on everything from headlines to song
lyrics in constructing a novel that resembles a scrapbook.
To read more, click here
24 A Visit from the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan
One story begets another, and on and on. But what goes
around eventually comes around in Egan's rich novel.
To read more, click here
25 The Serialist
David Gordon
Gordon mixes in trashy sci-fi, hard-boiled detective fiction
and a vampire story into this mash-up of genre styles.
To read more, click here
26 The Red House
Mark Haddon
Haddon's novel imitates cinematic techniques with its
frequent scene shifts and changing angles of perspective.
To read more, click here
27 Demon Box
Ken Kesey
It's the middle of the Reagan administration, and Ken Kesey
starts talking about writing a novel-in-a-box
To read more, click here
28 Gods Without Men
Hari Kunzru
Kunzru's century-hopping novel is, in many ways,
emblematic of the new style of fragmented fiction.
To read more, click here
29 The Wanderer
Fritz Leiber
In this Hugo-winning novel, Leiber juggles 15 separate
plots, changing scene and characters every few paragraphs.
To read more, click here
30 The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing
"I keep four notebooks," writer Anna Wulf tells herself, each for
a different facet of her life.
To read more, click here
31 Wittgenstein's Mistress
David Markson
Markson constructs a novel out of isolated statements
in a manner reminiscent of Wittgenstein's Tractatus.
To read more, click here
32 Atonement
Ian McEwan
Can you squeeze a romance, war story, medical drama
and alt-reality fiction into a single novel?
To read more click, here
33 Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell
Mitchell offer six sharply contrasting stories that only
offer their full meaning in the context of his bold novel.
To read more, click here
34 Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov
Pale Fire is ostensibly the text of a poem with introduction,
commentary and supplementary index.
To read more click here
35 The Time Traveler's Wife
Audrey Niffenegger
The readers are also time travelers, jumping back and forth
in the convoluted chronology of Niffenegger's tale.
To read more click here
36 At Swim Two-Birds
Flann O'Brien
There are no chapter headings here, just different
stories battling for supremacy and control of the book.
To read more click here
37 The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien
Instead of following the War and Peace blueprint, O'Brien
delivers a military novel that operates on a micro scale.
To read more, click here
38 Coming Through Slaughter
Michael Ondaatje
Ondaatje's book, made up of juxtaposed pieces of text,
often veers closer to poetry than prose.
To read more, click here
39 The English Patient
Michael Ondaatje
Ondaatje flaunts the accepted rituals of narrative flow,
constructing a story that slowly circles in on itself
To read more, click here
40 Dictionary of the Khazars
Milorad Pavić
Can a novel be written in the form of a dictionary? Or,
in this instance, three conflicting dictionaries?
To read more, click here
41 Life: A User's Manual
Georges Perec
Perec tells the story of an apartment block in 99 chapters,
each one focused on a different location in the building.
To read more, click here
42 Exercises in Style
Raymond Queneau
Queneau tells the same story over and over again. The facts
stay the same, only the style changes.
To read more click here
43 Gargantua and Pantagruel
François Rabelais
Rabelais's novel is long and long-winded, crossing
conventional boundaries of style, genre and subject.
To read more click here
44 The Imperfectionists
Tom Rachman
Rachman tells the story of a newspaper via ten
chapters, each capable to standing alone a short story.
To read more click here
45 Mumbo Jumbo
Ishmael Reed
Fact and footnotes merge with fiction and fantasy in
this discursive novel by Ishmael Reed
To read more, click here
46 NW
Zadie Smith
During a 150-page section called “Host,” Smith splinters
her story into 185 fragments, each with its own title heading.
To read more, click here
47 Mulligan Stew
Gilbert Sorrentino
Sorrentino offers a crazy quilt of meta-narratives, as well
as a few meta-narratives within meta-narratives.
To read more, click here
48 Tristram Shandy
Laurence Sterne
Other authors deal in deferred gratification, but
deferment is the gratification in these pages.
To read more, click here
49 Olive Kitteridge
Elizabeth Strout
Strout exposes the hypocrisies of small town life in a novel
constructed out of loosely connected stories.
To read more, click here
50 The White Hotel
D.M. Thomas
Thomas mixes a Freudian case study with a hallucinatory
historical novel.
To read more click here
51 The Mixed Men
A.E. van Vogt
A.E. van Vogt invented the term "fix-up" to describe a novel
made out of previously published shorter works of fiction.
To read more, click here
52 The Voyage of the Space Beagle
A.E. van Vogt
A host of sci-fi successes, from Star Trek to
Alien, borrowed from this famous van Vogt 'fix-up'.
To read more, click here
53 Cat's Cradle
Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut presents his story over the course of 127
chapters, many of them consisting of only a few paragraphs.
To read more, click here
54 Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut
Billy Pilgrim is unstuck in time, and re-experiences
his life (and World War II) in discontinuous interludes.
To read more, click here
55 The Pale King
David Foster Wallace
Even if DFW had finished The Pale King it would
have retained his fragmented, elusive quality.
To read more, click here
56 Vile Bodies
Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh creates the prototype for the
gossip novel in this sprightly 1930 comic novel.
To read more, click here
57 Trainspotting
Irvine Welsh
Imagine the youths in The Lord of Flies moving
to a big city and getting hooked on heroin.
To read more, click here
Sherwood Anderson
Anderson's 1919 book blurred the boundaries
between the short story collection and the novel.
To read more, click here
2 The Golden Ass
Apuleius
Apuleius set the blueprint for the discursive,
disjointed novel back in the 2th century AD.
To read more, click here
3 The Atrocity Exhbition
J.G. Ballard
Ballard tells readers they don't need to read these
fragments sequentially, and can even skip passages.
To read more, click here
4 2666
Roberto Bolaño
Originally envisioned as 5 separate books, 2666
was published a single novel by Bolaño's estate.
To read more, click here
5 When the Killing's Done
T.C. Boyle
Boyle is a master of intersecting stories where history,
biography and sheer imagination mix effortlessly.
To read more, click here
6 The Martian Chronicles
Ray Bradbury
Imagine traveling to Mars, but instead of aliens you
discover the equivalent of Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio.
To read more click here
7 The Illustrated Man
Ray Bradbury
Bradbury draws on 'cinematic tattoos' to develop
many of his pet themes of the era.
To read more click here
8 People of the Book
Geraldine Brooks
Brooks covers 700 years of history in this
page turner about, yes, turning pages.
To read more click here
9 Stand on Zanzibar
John Brunner
John Brunner draws on the techniques of John Dos
Passos in crafting this prescient New Wave sci-fi novel.
To read more, click here
10 The Master and the Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
Ancient Rome and the 20th century Soviet Union
intersect in this multilayered novel by Mikhail Bulgakov.
To read more, click here
11 The Soft Machine
William Burroughs
Long before Microsoft Word taught us about cut-and-
paste, William Burroughs applied it to his fiction.
To read more, click here
12 Possession
A.S. Byatt
Byatt integrates diary entries, letters and poetry in
this Victorian and modern fiction mash-up
To read more, click here
13 If On a Winter's Night a Traveler
Italo Calvino
Calvino offers his readers a glimpse of ten separate
unfinished novels in this classic of lectio interruptus.
To read more, click here
14 Answered Prayers
Truman Capote
Capote promised a grand Proustian gossip novel, but
only a few disconnected chapters were ever written.
To read more, click here
15 The House on Mango Street
Sandra Cisneros
Cisneros proved that the fragmented novel could also
serve as entry-level fiction for student readers.
To read more, click here
16 Hopscotch
Julio Cortázar
Why would you start reading a novel at chapter 73? Only
Julio Cortázar knows for sure.
To read more, click here
17 House of Leaves
Mark Z. Danielewski
You can read it as a verbal equivalent of a cabinet of horrors,
or as some sort of a Borgesian nightmare brought to life.
To read more, click here
18 The Fifty Year Sword
Mark Z. Danielewski
Danielewski's novels are a cross between a typographer's
nightmare and regurgitated alphabet soup.
To read more, click here
19 Only Revolutions
Mark Z. Danielewski
The reader is advised to turn the book upside down
every 8 pages and read it in the opposite direction.
To read more, click here
20 Underworld
Don DeLillo
DeLilllo jumps freely, without warning, from vignette to
vignette, character to character, decade to decade.
To read more, click here
21 VALIS
Philip K. Dick
Dick drew on a 8,000 page journal, which he called Exegisis,
in creating the strangest sci-fi novel of its day.
To read more, click here
22 Manhattan Transfer
John Dos Passos
Dos Passos jotted down dialogue, facts, slogans, a textual
collage waiting to be assembled into something larger.
To read more, click here
23 USA Trilogy
John Dos Passos
Dos Passos draws on everything from headlines to song
lyrics in constructing a novel that resembles a scrapbook.
To read more, click here
24 A Visit from the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan
One story begets another, and on and on. But what goes
around eventually comes around in Egan's rich novel.
To read more, click here
25 The Serialist
David Gordon
Gordon mixes in trashy sci-fi, hard-boiled detective fiction
and a vampire story into this mash-up of genre styles.
To read more, click here
26 The Red House
Mark Haddon
Haddon's novel imitates cinematic techniques with its
frequent scene shifts and changing angles of perspective.
To read more, click here
27 Demon Box
Ken Kesey
It's the middle of the Reagan administration, and Ken Kesey
starts talking about writing a novel-in-a-box
To read more, click here
28 Gods Without Men
Hari Kunzru
Kunzru's century-hopping novel is, in many ways,
emblematic of the new style of fragmented fiction.
To read more, click here
29 The Wanderer
Fritz Leiber
In this Hugo-winning novel, Leiber juggles 15 separate
plots, changing scene and characters every few paragraphs.
To read more, click here
30 The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing
"I keep four notebooks," writer Anna Wulf tells herself, each for
a different facet of her life.
To read more, click here
31 Wittgenstein's Mistress
David Markson
Markson constructs a novel out of isolated statements
in a manner reminiscent of Wittgenstein's Tractatus.
To read more, click here
32 Atonement
Ian McEwan
Can you squeeze a romance, war story, medical drama
and alt-reality fiction into a single novel?
To read more click, here
33 Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell
Mitchell offer six sharply contrasting stories that only
offer their full meaning in the context of his bold novel.
To read more, click here
34 Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov
Pale Fire is ostensibly the text of a poem with introduction,
commentary and supplementary index.
To read more click here
35 The Time Traveler's Wife
Audrey Niffenegger
The readers are also time travelers, jumping back and forth
in the convoluted chronology of Niffenegger's tale.
To read more click here
36 At Swim Two-Birds
Flann O'Brien
There are no chapter headings here, just different
stories battling for supremacy and control of the book.
To read more click here
37 The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien
Instead of following the War and Peace blueprint, O'Brien
delivers a military novel that operates on a micro scale.
To read more, click here
38 Coming Through Slaughter
Michael Ondaatje
Ondaatje's book, made up of juxtaposed pieces of text,
often veers closer to poetry than prose.
To read more, click here
39 The English Patient
Michael Ondaatje
Ondaatje flaunts the accepted rituals of narrative flow,
constructing a story that slowly circles in on itself
To read more, click here
40 Dictionary of the Khazars
Milorad Pavić
Can a novel be written in the form of a dictionary? Or,
in this instance, three conflicting dictionaries?
To read more, click here
41 Life: A User's Manual
Georges Perec
Perec tells the story of an apartment block in 99 chapters,
each one focused on a different location in the building.
To read more, click here
42 Exercises in Style
Raymond Queneau
Queneau tells the same story over and over again. The facts
stay the same, only the style changes.
To read more click here
43 Gargantua and Pantagruel
François Rabelais
Rabelais's novel is long and long-winded, crossing
conventional boundaries of style, genre and subject.
To read more click here
44 The Imperfectionists
Tom Rachman
Rachman tells the story of a newspaper via ten
chapters, each capable to standing alone a short story.
To read more click here
45 Mumbo Jumbo
Ishmael Reed
Fact and footnotes merge with fiction and fantasy in
this discursive novel by Ishmael Reed
To read more, click here
46 NW
Zadie Smith
During a 150-page section called “Host,” Smith splinters
her story into 185 fragments, each with its own title heading.
To read more, click here
47 Mulligan Stew
Gilbert Sorrentino
Sorrentino offers a crazy quilt of meta-narratives, as well
as a few meta-narratives within meta-narratives.
To read more, click here
48 Tristram Shandy
Laurence Sterne
Other authors deal in deferred gratification, but
deferment is the gratification in these pages.
To read more, click here
49 Olive Kitteridge
Elizabeth Strout
Strout exposes the hypocrisies of small town life in a novel
constructed out of loosely connected stories.
To read more, click here
50 The White Hotel
D.M. Thomas
Thomas mixes a Freudian case study with a hallucinatory
historical novel.
To read more click here
51 The Mixed Men
A.E. van Vogt
A.E. van Vogt invented the term "fix-up" to describe a novel
made out of previously published shorter works of fiction.
To read more, click here
52 The Voyage of the Space Beagle
A.E. van Vogt
A host of sci-fi successes, from Star Trek to
Alien, borrowed from this famous van Vogt 'fix-up'.
To read more, click here
53 Cat's Cradle
Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut presents his story over the course of 127
chapters, many of them consisting of only a few paragraphs.
To read more, click here
54 Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut
Billy Pilgrim is unstuck in time, and re-experiences
his life (and World War II) in discontinuous interludes.
To read more, click here
55 The Pale King
David Foster Wallace
Even if DFW had finished The Pale King it would
have retained his fragmented, elusive quality.
To read more, click here
56 Vile Bodies
Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh creates the prototype for the
gossip novel in this sprightly 1930 comic novel.
To read more, click here
57 Trainspotting
Irvine Welsh
Imagine the youths in The Lord of Flies moving
to a big city and getting hooked on heroin.
To read more, click here
This reading list,of 57 books is a companion to Ted Gioia's essay
"The Rise of the Fragmented Novel." It includes recent high-profile
literary novels build on techniques of disjunction, collage and
juxtaposition, as well as important books from the past that
experimented with similar techniques. Each title in the list links to
an essay on the book.
"The Rise of the Fragmented Novel." It includes recent high-profile
literary novels build on techniques of disjunction, collage and
juxtaposition, as well as important books from the past that
experimented with similar techniques. Each title in the list links to
an essay on the book.
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