The best books to open strange worlds

I can’t name what so destroyed me about this book; it speaks to a level of pain for which there’s no language.

I believe a book’s hidden subject will chase a writer down: a fear, a state of mind. Barnes had to write it in order to survive her experience.

A loose group of outcasts appears in Nightwood: a gay doctor, logorrheic, poetic, desperate, witty, alone. A woman obsessed with another woman whom has left her and whom she’ll never reach, never understand.

Dancers and circus performers all in the baroque shimmer of a prose so fascinating it becomes clear almost by virtue of its density. What comes through is the tragedy of what it is to be alive.

Samuel R. Delaney’s masterpiece, Dhalgren, is set in a city in the Midwest that has been emptied by an unnamed catastrophe.

A sense of freedom, violence and disaster hang everywhere as the hero – Kidd, Kid, or the kid, a man with no memory and of ambiguous race (he remembers his mother was Native American) – gains entry into the subcultures that remain behind: parties, high-rise poetry readings with older white people, gun fights, gangs, graphic sex.

Time and perspective seem fluxive, inconstant, and looping. 

This is beautiful, destabilized world building. Dhalgren answers no questions yet evokes a time, place, and milieu that shifts as you read.

I first found it when I was working as a librarian in a prison out on the plains. I didn’t last in prison.

I stumbled on this book in a free box outside a bookstore when I was a teenager and the family I had moved across the country to be with had collapsed.

My sisters and stepmother moved out of state, my brother moved to California, and my dad, after borrowing my student loan money for truck driving school, went over the road.

Bloodsport was rain-rippled—with a gigantic, dried fly smashed flat in the middle, sliding like a secret toy over the page.

An entire world opened up. I felt no less alone, but the experience changed my understanding of realism, the mythic, and the surreal: a book of immense oddness about a father and son journey up an apocalyptic river, toward Ratnose, the leader of a motorcycle gang.

A good friend of mine with whom I’ve lost contact recommended this book.

The narrator is on a quest to find his palm-wine tapster who is dead in Deads' Town so that the tapster can return and keep tapping the trees that produce palm-wine (a sap that ferments to 4 percent alcohol in two hours).

There are endless quests within quests, rich and mysterious, in landscapes half dream, half real; they stay in the mind: an utterly unique vision, the sound of one voice creating a hybrid world.

I don’t know if I’ll ever find my friend and regain contact, but I will always think of him when I read this book. Sometimes, books are not enough. 

Borges loved this 29-volume “book” and consulted it with near religious fascination.

Through all the volumes flows the colonial mind of the British Empire. Its desire to gather “all knowledge” and present it with an index.

What comes forth now are the fascinating, individual voices of the writers (whose work has been used to build Wikipedia) sounding out of the void.

The thing is, they’re all different. Some are clear and calm, some youthful and manic, others stodgy, snobbish. Maps of the States in 1906 have almost no highways, only topography.

A full-page plate, under “Cats,” where no cats appear, only their skins, showing the different patterns of their stripes.

This is a work of world-building, a terraforming “real” fiction. Repulsive, time-folding, fascinating.