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The Best Postmodern Novels
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Top works of postmodern fiction
List of the best postmodern novels from popular postmodern authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo that are reactions against Enlightenment and Modernist literature. Postmodern novels use techniques like fragmentation, paradox and questionable narrators in their writing to be experimental in literature. The purpose of postmodern novels is to take serious subjects from a distance and disconnect and be able to depict the stories with irony and humor.
The list asks the question, “What is the best postmodern novel?” The list is voted on to decide the favorite postmodern novel. If some of the postmodern novels by the best postmodern writers aren't listed, then be sure to add them so that other readers can vote on them.
Some of the best themes and techniques that are used in postmodern novels are irony and black humor, metafiction, non-linear narratives and fragmentations, paranoia, minimalism, or maximalism. Novels that include these features are on the list, such as House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, The Unlimited Dream Company by J.G. Ballard and Lolita by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov. Vote up the best postmodern novels right here.list ordered by
- Gravity's Rainbow is a 1973 novel by American writer Thomas Pynchon. A lengthy, complex novel featuring a large cast of characters, its narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II ...more
- The Crying of Lot 49 is a novella by Thomas Pynchon, first published in 1966. The shortest of Pynchon's novels, it is about a woman, Oedipa Maas, possibly unearthing the centuries-old conflict ...more
- Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death is a satirical novel by Kurt Vonnegut about World War II experiences and journeys through time of a soldier named Billy ...more
- Infinite Jest is a 1996 novel by David Foster Wallace. The lengthy and complex work takes place in a North American dystopia, centering on a junior tennis academy and a nearby substance-abuse ...more
- White Noise is the eighth novel by Don DeLillo, published by Viking Press in 1985. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. White Noise is an example of postmodern literature. It is widely ...more
- If on a winter's night a traveler is a 1979 novel by the Italian postmodernist writer Italo Calvino. The narrative, in the form of a frame story, is about the reader trying to read a book called If ...more
- Catch-22 is a satirical novel by the American author Joseph Heller. He began writing it in 1953; the novel was first published in 1961. It is frequently cited as one of the greatest literary works of ...more
- Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, written in English and published in 1955 in Paris, in 1958 in New York, and in 1959 in London. It was later translated by its Russian-native author into ...more
- 9V. is the debut novel of Thomas Pynchon, published in 1963. It describes the exploits of a discharged U.S. Navy sailor named Benny Profane, his reconnection in New York with a group of ...more
- Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West is a 1985 Western novel by American author Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy's fifth book, it was published by Random House. The majority of the narrative ...more
- Underworld is a novel published in 1997 by Don DeLillo. It was nominated for the National Book Award, was a best-seller, and is one of DeLillo's better-known novels. Underworld continues to receive ...more
- The Recognitions, published in 1955, is American author William Gaddis's first novel. The novel was poorly received initially, but Gaddis's reputation grew, twenty years later, with the publication ...more
- Pale Fire is a postmodern novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is presented as a 999-line poem titled "Pale Fire", written by the fictional John Shade, with a foreword and lengthy commentary by a ...more
- Naked Lunch is a novel by American writer William S. Burroughs, originally published in 1959. The book is structured as a series of loosely connected vignettes. Burroughs stated that the chapters are ...more
- Labyrinths is a collection of short stories and essays by Jorge Luis Borges translated into the English-language. It includes "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", "The Garden of Forking Paths", and "The ...more
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City of Glass
- House of Leaves is the debut novel by American author Mark Z. Danielewski, published in March 2000 by Pantheon Books. A bestseller, it has been translated into a number of languages, and is followed ...more
- Inherent Vice is a novel by Thomas Pynchon, originally published in August 2009.
- A Confederacy of Dunces is a picaresque novel by American novelist John Kennedy Toole which appeared in 1980, eleven years after Toole's suicide. Published through the efforts of writer Walker Percy ...more
- 21Ubik is a 1969 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. It is one of Dick's most acclaimed novels. It was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 greatest novels since 1923. In his ...more
- The Sot-Weed Factor is a 1960 novel by the American writer John Barth. The novel marks the beginning of Barth's literary postmodernism. The Sot-Weed Factor takes its title from the poem The Sotweed ...more
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream is a novel by Hunter S. Thompson, illustrated by Ralph Steadman. The book is a roman à clef, rooted in ...more
- 24Libra is a novel written by Don DeLillo. It focuses on the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and offers a speculative account of the events that shaped the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The ...more
- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a novel published in 1994–1995 by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. The first published translation was by Alfred Birnbaum. The American translation and its British ...more
