It's not your imagination. Novels are getting weirder

washingtonpost.com

5 pointshoppyhoppy25 comments

tl;dr. It's a book review for an anthology of weird literature: Kate Marshall’s “Novels by Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century"

Getting weirder? The novel has been weird for a long time: Gabriel García Márquez's magical realism, Kafka's pseudo-referential discombobulations, Murakami's Kafkaesque dreamscape-stitching, and even (Stephen) King, who's flogged the deus ex machina drum into a revenue-inflating catapult for half his life.

No, weird isn't new. It's been frustrating readers for a very long time, claiming undue renown where there should rather be none (Marquez excepted).

In fact, if you read the bible or the iliad, you'll notice writing has been weird for quite some time indeed.

Indeed. I jumped the gun with that bitter comment, having just spent two weeks trudging through 700 pages of Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which was far too weird for my liking.

Going throught iq84 right now, but apprently it's one of the easiest.

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