List: 2023 Reading Challenge: Unusual Storytelling
The Walmart Book of the Dead
The Walmart Book of the Dead was inspired by the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, funerary texts with accompanying illustrations containing spells to preserve the spirit of the deceased in the afterlife. Shoplifters, grifters, drifters, and hustlers, desirous children, greeters, would-be Marxists, wolves, and circuit court judges, wander Walmart unknowingly consigned to their afterlives.
Checking status…
Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry
The story of a romantic relationship is told in the form of a catalog from the auction of objects previously owned by the fictional couple.
Checking status…
Acts of Violet : a novel / Margarita Montimore.
Acts of Violet is a dazzling and twisty new novel about a famous magician who disappears, leaving her sister to figure out what really happened. Nearly a decade ago, iconic magician Violet Volk performed her greatest trick yet: vanishing mid-act. Though she hasn't been seen since, her hold on the public imagination is stronger than ever. While Violet sought out the spotlight, her sister Sasha always had to be the responsible one, taking over their mother's hair salon and building a quiet life for her beloved daughter, Quinn. But Sasha can never seem to escape her sister's orbit or her memories of their unresolved, tumultuous relationship. Then there's Cameron Frank, tapped to host a podcast devoted to all things Violet, who is determined to finally get his big break--even if he promised to land an exclusive interview with Sasha, the one person who definitely doesn't want to talk to him. As the ten-year anniversary approaches, the podcast picks up steam, and Cameron's pursuit of Sasha becomes increasingly intrusive. He isn't the only one wondering what secrets she might be keeping: Quinn, loyal to the aunt she always idolized, is doing her own investigating. Meanwhile, Sasha begins to experience an unsettling series of sleepwalking episodes and coincidences, which all seem to lead back to Violet. Pushed to her emotional limits, Sasha must finally confront the most painful truths about her sister, and herself, even at the risk of losing
Checking status…
Building Stories
Building Stories imagines the inhabitants of a three-story Chicago apartment building: a 30-something woman who has yet to find someone with whom to spend the rest of her life; a couple, possibly married, who wonder if they can bear each other's company another minute; and the building's landlady, an elderly woman who has lived alone for decades. Taking advantage of the absolute latest advances in wood pulp technology, Building Stories is a book with no deliberate beginning nor end, the scope, ambition, artistry and emotional prevarication beyond anything yet seen from this artist or in this medium, probably for good reason
Checking status…
Ella Minnow Pea: A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable
Recounts what happens when the citizens of an island must rely on all their ingenuity to communicate in an increasingly limited language when the government progressively bans letters from the alphabet.
Checking status…
Keyhole Factory
A tale set in an alternate universe that is being decimated by a super-virus is told from the viewpoints of four survivors, including a poet-astronaut, a sports car-driving murderer, a biological weapons designer, and a pirate radio disc jockey.
Checking status…
Heads You Lose
Pot-growing siblings Paul and Lacey Hansen must investigate why the headless corpse of Lacey's ex-fiance turned up on their property, in a metafictional mystery where the authors disagree as to how the story should progress, a contention that causes a higher body count, a host of quirky characters and more insanity than the Hansens can handle.
Checking status…
Rubik
The dead aren't really gone, they persist as phone numbers, social media accounts, newsletter recipients, and as members of fan-fiction forums. Digital ghosts move and connect us: we feel we know people we have only seen online just as corporations masquerade as familiar friends.
Checking status…
The Strange Library
In a fantastical illustrated short novel, three people imprisoned in a nightmarish library plot their escape.
Checking status…
Fever Dream
Follows the nightmarish experiences of a dying woman and a boy beside her hospital bed, who explore the dynamics of broken souls, toxic relationships and the power and desperation of family.
Checking status…
S.
A work from famed director J.J. Abrams and noted novelist Doug Dorst combines a traditional narrative with a second story in the form of notes scribbled in the margins by two readers of the main narrative, in a story that also features clues online and in real life.
Checking status…
Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography
The Emmy Award-winning star of How I Met Your Mother shares his experiences as a child star, Broadway performer and father in an over-the-top, humorous account creatively designed in the style of the popular interactive adventure series.
Checking status…
The Thorn and the Blossom: A Two-Sided Love Story
Evelyn Morgan and Brendan Thorne are a couple whose mysterious and unique love story can be read from two different perspectives, Evelyn's story reads from front to back, while Brendan's story is told from the back of the book towards the front.
Checking status…
Multiple Choice
Written in the form of a standardized test, Multiple Choice invites the reader to complete virtuoso language exercises and engage with short narrative passages via multiple-choice questions that are thought-provoking, usually unanswerable, and often absurd. It offers a new kind of reading experience, one where the reader participates directly in the creation of meaning.
Checking status…
House of Leaves
A family relocates to a small house on Ash Tree Lane and discovers that the inside of their new home seems to be without boundaries.
Checking status…
Fox 8
Idealistic Fox 8's ability to communicate in "Yuman" cannot save his pack when their den and food supply are destroyed to build a mall, so he writes a letter asking for an explanation of human's cruelty.
Checking status…
Here
Here is the story of a corner of a room and of the events that have occurred in that space over the course of hundreds of thousands of years.
Checking status…