What's out there in quirky fiction?

[Mela]

I'm asking cuz it's not really my genre.

Can anyone suggest titles to read in the area of quirky contemporary fiction? I'd appreciate it.

[CaroGirl]

You could try I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes by Jaclyn Moriarty. It's pretty quirky.

http://www.amazon.ca/Have-Bed-Made-Buttermilk-Pancakes/dp/0887847307

[ORION]

Dorian (my agent) had on her profile at agentquery.com that she liked "quirky" fiction.
One of the books she handled was "Insect Dreams" about if Kafka's cockroach Gregory did NOT die -- that's pretty quirky.
She termed LOTTERY (my book) as quirky as the POV is a man who is mentally challenged.
There's a new book coming out thats called Racing in the Rain and is from the POV of a dog...

[Will Lavender]

Try THE RAW SHARK TEXTS by Steven Hall.

Fantastically weird novel about a memory-eating textshark. Don't even ask.

[rosebud1981]

If quirky is taken to mean different to the norm, then you could call anything by Jose Saramago quirky, although it's literary fiction rather than contemporary.
There are passages written from the perspective of a dog, conversations between the main character and his own common sense and some great internal monologue in many of his novels, which are pretty quirky indeed.
The concepts of the novels - what if you met your exact body-double (identical appearance, voice, even fingerprints) (The Double), what if an entire city turned blind (Blindness), what if everybody cast a blank vote in an election (Seeing), what if people suddenly stopped dying (Death at Intervals) - say it all.
They are all amazing reads if you like a little more philosophy and a little less plot, although Blindness has equal measures of both and is probably the best.

[Liska]

A friend has been trying to get me to read Blindness for at least a year... thank you for the reminder, Rosebud!

I read mostly Russian fiction, where just about every story or book seems crammed with quirky characters and situations. One of Russia's most popular contemporary writers is Liudmila Ulitskaya, who writes fiction with lots of odd characters -- acrobats turn up a lot -- and often focuses more on character than plot. I recently read and loved a couple of existential novellas by Vladimir Makanin; they were futuristic and inconclusive, which was great for me but irritating for one of my friends.

I could go on and on about this stuff, but I'll stop here!

[ReneC]

If you're looking for quirky, I highly recommend the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde. It's particularly entertaining for anyone who is familiar with classical literature.

[JamesBent]

I keep an offbeat fiction short blog called OUTRÉ : http://jamesbent.com/blog

Would it be right to say that "offbeat" is about a wide a term as "literary"!?

[Priene]

Ferenc Karinthy's Metropole (newly translated, though it was written in 1970) is good. A man finds himself in a country where he can't understand the language and no-one understands him.

[Rarri]

Jostein Gaarder?