Books like Alasdair Gray

Sophie Fevvers—music-hall celebrity, circus aerialist, and possibly winged woman—recounts her history to an American journalist determined to uncover the fraud. As in Poor Things, storytelling becomes a struggle over who gets to define an extraordinary woman: the skeptical man arranging facts into a respectable narrative, or the heroine joyfully inventing herself beyond his categories.

Carter matches Gray’s appetite for grotesque comedy, sexual candor, political argument, and luxuriant period pastiche. Her prose is sensuous and excessive by design, turning feminist ideas into spectacle rather than sermon. Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and widely regarded as Carter’s masterpiece, this is the closest thing to Poor Things’ ideal companion—equally clever, but too alive to be merely clever.

Gray’s fake documents, argumentative footnotes, typographical jokes, and narrators who cannot control their own book all belong to a tradition Sterne detonated in the eighteenth century. Tristram attempts to tell his life story, only to discover that digressions, family anecdotes, theories, and the physical page itself keep defeating chronology.

The result is not a dusty ancestor of experimental fiction but one of literature’s great comic performances: intimate, mischievous, indecent, and perpetually surprised by its own form. Its black page, marbled page, missing chapter, and wayward punctuation influenced generations of novelists, yet remain funnier and stranger than most later imitations. Anyone who loved Gray’s delight in showing how a novel is manufactured should meet the writer who made that manufacture into an inexhaustible joke.

Ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby receives a hearing trumpet and promptly learns that her family intends to place her in an institution. From that wonderfully dry beginning, Carrington unleashes an anarchic vision of old age, female friendship, occult conspiracy, institutional cruelty, and reality coming loose at the hinges.

What it shares with Poor Things is a liberating refusal of good behavior. Both novels place a supposedly dependent woman inside systems built to explain and manage her, then let her prove far stranger, funnier, and freer than those systems can tolerate. Carrington—one of surrealism’s major painters—writes with a dream’s serene conviction and a satirist’s sharpness. Long cherished as a cult classic, The Hearing Trumpet offers the rare thrill of a book that seems to obey no inherited rules at all.

A nameless young man enters Bellona, an American city where ordinary chronology and social order have broken down. Like Gray, Delany makes the city both solidly inhabited and impossible: streets, communes and damaged buildings coexist with inexplicable phenomena, while the protagonist’s troubled identity becomes entangled with the book’s unstable form.

Dhalgren also shares Lanark’s conviction that art, sex, illness and civic collapse cannot be neatly separated. Its loops and textual fractures demand active reading, yet its countercultural communities have a lived-in warmth absent from merely cerebral experiments. A million-selling landmark with passionately divided readers, it is one of American fiction’s great beautiful monsters—and anyone exhilarated by Lanark’s scale should experience it.

O’Brien begins with a murder confession, then calmly walks his narrator into a countryside governed by homicidal logic, eccentric policemen and an alarming metaphysics of bicycles. The comedy is delivered with perfect bureaucratic solemnity: impossibility is not a rupture in reality but another regulation to be explained by an official.

A Lanark reader will recognize the peculiar pleasure of watching institutions turn metaphysical terror into administrative procedure. Footnotes about the preposterous philosopher de Selby create a rival book beneath the book, while verbal jokes gradually acquire existential force. Rejected during O’Brien’s lifetime and published posthumously, it became a cult masterpiece whose influence runs through modern comic surrealism. Few novels are simultaneously this funny, this exact and this profoundly unsettling.

Donoso’s masterpiece begins amid a decaying religious institution populated by old women, servants, whispered legends and Mudito, a man whose place in the household is already becoming uncertain. From there, voices and identities fold into one another until the novel seems to be dreaming—and deforming—itself.

Where Lanark turns eczema, mouths and disappearing bodies into a social language, Donoso makes bodily grotesquerie express class terror, shame and the violence of being defined by others. His labyrinth is denser and more feverish than Gray’s, but it has the same refusal to distinguish cleanly between psychological damage and a damaged world. A major achievement of the Latin American Boom, it inspires the special devotion reserved for difficult books that seem inexhaustible. Reading it feels less like following a story than entering a living, mutating structure.