The best genre-defying books to shake things up a bit

This short, engaging book mixes fact and fiction, prose and poetry, documents and photographs, to tell the story of Billy the Kid, from the time Pat Garrett sets out to hunt him down to his killing. At times it is beautifully hallucinatory as it gets inside Billy’s mind, showing his dreams and visions. But it is also very lucid and attentive to detail, vividly depicting how Billy is always protecting and exercising his left hand—the hand he shoots with—as well as showing Billy’s interactions with his fellow outlaws. This is Ondaatje’s earliest and most experimental novel.

Markson had early success writing traditional novels (one was even made into a movie starring Frank Sinatra) but his real body of work came after when he started writing novels that were criticized for not being novels. The first of these, This is Not a Novel, is narrated by a writer who asks whether it is possible to have a novel with no plot, no main character etc. In a form that visually resembles about 150 pages of tweets (but written before Twitter existed), Markson takes a spirited, enjoyable romp through the history of art, literature, and philosophy, with a sharp eye focused on how various creative people lived and loved, but especially on how they died. 

Though recently made into a TV series, the real genius of this book lies in its language. Part prank, part autofiction, part essay, and art criticism, I Love Dick tells the story of the main character, Chris Kraus, and her husband Sylvere, as they join together to write love letters from Chris to an art historian named Dick who she has a crush on but barely knows. It is all based on fact and plays with the blurred line between fact and fiction. It is that rare book that is at once sexy and intellectual. 

When the graphic novel, Maus, was first published it landed on the New York Times best-seller list in the fiction category. After a letter from the author protesting this designation, it was shifted to the non-fiction list. It is also the first graphic novel to have won a Pulitzer Prize. This metafiction includes within its pages depictions of the author interviewing his father, a holocaust survivor, and creating the book’s pages. All the characters are visually depicted as animals, but their speech is deeply human. Meticulously researched, Maus is historically accurate and heartbreakingly vivid as it traces the plight of Spiegelman’s parents during the Nazi era, as well as Art’s own struggles as the child of survivors, and his mother’s suicide years after they escaped and settled in New York City. 

This slim book is a series of numbered sections, all contemplating the color blue. It’s full of interesting facts, some of them quite funny or surprising, as it looks into blue stones, blue movies, blue feelings (sadness), the blues (music), and much more, from self-help books to artists and philosophers. But part of what makes it moving is that it is also a love story of sorts as the speaker charts her struggle to come to terms with being left by her lover. There is another story embedded in the book as well—the story of her close friend who becomes paralyzed after a tragic accident. Lively and spare, it is intimate and beautifully written.