Perhaps as a neighbor for Christopher Higgs’s “What Is Experimental Literature” series, we should compile a list of neat, uh, experiments. I’m thinking: What are your favorite tricks in literature? Let’s make a list. Here, I’ll scratch the meta surface. The comment box is “there” as a repository for your additions and complaints, as usual.

• Vonnegut writes himself into Breakfast of Champions in order to free Kilgore Trout. Later, Kilgore Trout books are published (though not by Vonnegut).
• Tristram Shandy (perhaps this could be a subheading)
• The narratives of David Markson, created from seemingly unconnected notes
• Evan Lavender-Smith’s brilliant novel ideas in From Old Notebooks, some of which I actually wish were the book instead
• Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms referring to each other, disagreeing with each other
• Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments sextupling the length of The Philosophical Fragments — like, “Oops, I forgot to say . . .”
• How the page works in Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions
• The promotional run-up to the publication of The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney, combined with the book
• Moby Dick (perhaps another subheading) and the re-appropriation of distinct genres within the novel
• Melville’s The Confidence Man, specifically the chapter where the narrator breaks down the other chapters
• The tiered question of authority in Shane Jones’s Light Boxes
• The cover of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy says “Don’t Panic!” just like the book says it does
• How the aunts and uncles comment on the action in TS Eliot’s The Family Reunion
• In Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco, Jean and Berenger discuss Ionesco’s plays. Jean says, “There’s one playing right now. You should take advantage of it.”
• The breakdown Robert endures in the Bear Parade version of Zachary German’s Eat When You Feel Sad
• Pale Fire: unreliable narrator, form
• Shakespeare making his characters make plays all the time
• The mind-blowing first issue of Sidebrow, which links the different stories and poems to each other so they complete/play off each other
• Jamie Iredell alphabetizing traditional book elements in The Book of Freaks (e.g. the Index comes in the middle of the book)
• What happened to Ben Marcus’s dictionary in The Age of Wire and String?
• The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce
• Ken Sparling’s book,
• The dilapidation of Quentin’s narration in The Sound and the Fury until it breaks off at his suicide
• Chronology in Catch-22
• The beginning of Frankenstein
• The interaction between the old traditional novelist and the young-buck experimental writer in James Michener’s indispensable novel, The Novel
• Great Expectations in Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations
• Borges, geez, in particular ”Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote”
• Borges, geez, in particular “The Library of Babel”
• Rachel Glaser’s repurposed text from Little Women in the story “The Magic Umbrella”
• Lucky’s speech in Waiting for Godot
• Clov turning the binoculars on the audience and saying, “I see a multitude, in transports of joy”
• The part in Toby Olson’s otherwise conventional novel, Seaview, when the protagonist crawls inside his golf bag
• The way Michael Kimball tells the way the family gets away in The Way the Family Got Away
• (Spoiler) In I Am the Cheese, the kid was institutionalized the whole time.
• The characters’ vernacular in Tortilla Flat
• Blake Butler’s Copy Family
• Douglas Rushkoff’s open-source novel, Exit Strategy, which includes footnotes written by readers online
• The margins of Douglas Coupland’s novel, Generation X
• Kerouac’s breakdown at the end of Big Sur
• Master and Margarita, specifically the Grand Inquisitor part
• Dorothea Lasky’s poem, “It’s a Lonely World,” which begins, “It’s a lonely world/Hi everybody/It’s Dorothea, Dorothea Lasky”
• Lu Xun’s story “A Madman’s Diary” and its unbelievably believable ambiguity
• Borges, geez, in particular “The Garden of Forking Paths”
• In Jude the Obscure, their eldest son’s name is “Little Father Time.” WTF?”
• The word “exalted” vs. “exulted” in Hemingway’s story “Indian Camp”
• Donald Westlake’s story, “No Story,” which presents only the frame for how a story was discovered
• “Do you see? Good is dead” on the (literal) side of the page in Chip Kidd’s The Cheese Monkeys
• and that issue of McSweeney’s that has the David Foster Wallace story on the spine
• The alphabetized stories and novel of Andy Devine
• The Beauty of the Husband, by Anne Carson, being a poem while being an essay while telling the story of a marriage

Work tirelessly, at a feverish pace.

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