Sometimes you want to read something a little left of center, but you don’t want main characters who are robots moving unfeelingly through maple syrup (perhaps literally. This doesn’t seem too unlikely for some works coming out these days, really).  Here are four of my favorite off-the-wall novels with sympathetic narrators:

A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole and Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan—

I swear that Shtenyngart’s work is the love child of Kennedy Toole’s, with a little bit of the oil crises in the Middle East to grease everything up. The protagonists in both stories—Ignatius Reilly, an obese, New Orleans PhD in love/hate with his beatnik Jewish girlfriend, and Misha Vainberg, an obese Russian diplomat in love with his newly-college educated NYC African American girlfriend  are completely over-the-top. Both characters are certainly less-than-pleasant at times. Ignatius is quite self-absorbed, and Misha is often consumed with being the son of the 1,238th richest man in Russia. And yet, both narrators are surprisingly sympathetic, increasingly so because of the fact that they are over-the-top. These are characters with eccentricities that are judged harshly by society, but also illustrate how endearing these eccentricities can be.

Wild Nights!  by Joyce Carol Oates--

 Carol Oates is certainly America’s most prolific writer with ten million collections of short stories and novels, spanning hundreds of different topics. This collection is the weirdest. Oates’ collection is unusual in that she takes five famous American authors, including Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, and imagines their deaths, generally moving outside of the way they actually died, and placing them in completely fantastic situations. Despite their absurd situations, Oates makes the reader feel emotions at the authors’ plights—we sympathize with Poe’s heartbreak when the sea monster he loves doesn’t love him back, and we feel for the robotic Emily Dickinson when she is taken advantage of by the man who bought her. Oates creates outlandish situations, but roots them in reality. Oates’ writes, “Where we come from in America no longer signifies. It's where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we are.” In other words, birthplace in America no longer always allows a person to find a sense of place within their hometown or family home.

The Knife Thrower and Other Stories by Steven Millhauser—

This one is probably the weirdest—this seems to be Millhauser’s asthetic. Millhauser, like Oates, is certainly an author with an aesthetic of the absurd, writing about a girl who dies after a laughing too hard and a town obsessed with the characters in an automaton theater. Millhauser says, “There are essentially two ways of presenting the fantastic in a story. By temperament and conviction, I much prefer the first method, the slow elaboration of a quotidian world that veers towards the unquotidian, the improbable, the impossible.” Millhauser seems to believe in the idea of the fantastic buried within the day-to-day and the day-to-day implicit in the fantastic. Millhauser’s stories are often morbid; he implies that true joy cannot be achieved without pain. He explores the mixture of joy and pain in every experience, and examines the ongoing battle for a balance between the two.   

Next time you go to the bookstore, at least read the back cover of a couple of these books.  They certainly will get you out of the everyday in your reading and, despite being outside of what we probably will ever experience, they might make you stop and think a little bit about living, too.