Books, Film, and TV to Inspire Surrealist Writing

In my essay, “On Magic,” published today on Electric Literature, I mentioned not being able to find much in the way of resources for work that fell outside of realism during my MFA. Below are some of the works that help me figure out how to write in the surrealist vein. It is meant to be a guide for anyone interested in beginning or enhancing their understanding of the uncanny. Like all lists, it is woefully incomplete, but is meant to be a loose guide to continue reading on the subject.

[Ed. Note: We also invite you to watch Marie-Helene Bertino’s master class on “Disrupting Realism,” with special guests Mira Jacob,  Mitchell S. Jackson,  Kristiana Kahakauwila, Tracy O’Neill, and Helen Phillips. The event is free, and we encourage donations to support Electric Literature’s mission to make literature more relevant, exciting, and inclusive, and to support future programming and articles like this one.]

Film/Television:

• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (For a few years I taught a class based on this film, one of the most successful reinventions of conventional love stories)
• Cleo from 5 to 7
• Reservation Dogs
• What We Do in the Shadows
• Russian Doll (Netflix)
• La Dolce Vita 
• A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
• Let the Right One In (both versions)
• Paris is Burning
• The Love Witch
• Parasite
• The Host
• Beginners (collapsed time)
• Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone, Season One, Episode One, “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet”

Books:

Prerequisites: Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel and
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

• Yoko Ogawa, all of her, but start with Revenge and The Memory Police
• Claire Louise Bennet, Pond (the diminishing and expansion of time)
• Lesley Nneka Arimah, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky
• Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
• Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
• Manuel Gonzales, The Miniature Wife
• Ramona Ausubel, A Guide to Being Born
• N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn
• Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (Read an excerpt in Recommended Reading)
• Aimee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
• George Saunders, Pastoralia
• Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine, The Round House, LaRose
• Debra Magpie Earling, Permared
• Haruki Murakami, The Wine-Up Bird Chronicle
• Jordy Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox (Read our interview with Jordy Rosenberg)
• Stephen Graham Jones, all, The Last Final Girl, The Only Good Indians, Mongrels 
• Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories (Read our interview with Amy Hempel)
• Laura van den Berg, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears (Read the first story, “Last Night,” in Recommended Reading)
• Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners
• Italo Calvino, If on a winter‘s night a traveler
• Jim Shepard, Like You’d Understand, Anyway
• J. Robert Lennon, Pieces for the Left Hand
• Yasunari Kawabata, Palm-Of-The-Hand Stories
• Yukiko Motoya, The Lonesome Bodybuilder (Read an excerpt in Recommended Reading)
• Kono Taeko, Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories (warning: extreme S&M)
• Deb Olin Unferth, Minor Robberies
• Helen Phillips, The Beautiful Bureaucrat (Read an excerpt in Recommended Reading)
• Anne Carson, Short Talks and Autobiography of Red and her Lecture on the History of Skywriting 
• Tommy Orange, There There (Read our interview with Tommy Orange)
• Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
• Edward P. Jones, Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children
• Amber Sparks, The Unfinished World: And Other Stories
• Thomas Morris, We Don’t know What We’re Doing (How humor exacts emotional resonance)

Stories:

• Kazuo Ishiguro, “A Village After Dark”
• João Guimarães Rosa, “The Third Bank of the River”
• L. Annette Binder, “Nephilim”
• Toni Morrison, “Recitatif”
• Jim Shepard, “Proto-Scorpions of the Silurian“
• Raymond Carver, “Viewfinder,” “Why Don’t You Dance”
• Kelly Link, “Stone Animals“
• Kristiana Kahakauwila, “Thirty-Nine Rules for Making a Hawaiian Funeral into a Drinking Game” 
• William Gass, “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country”
• Lorrie Moore, “How to Talk to Your Mother”
• Aimee Bender, “Loser”
• James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”

Non-Fiction:

• Rochelle Spencer, AfroSurrealism: The African Diaspora’s Surrealist Fiction
• Elissa Washuta, White Magic (upending expectation of non-fiction) (Watch Marie-Helene Bertino and Elissa Washuta in conversation in EL’s “Magical Feminism” salon.)
• Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Freezer Door (vignettes)
• Denise Riley, Time Lived, Without Its Flow (collapsed time)
  
  I also keep an updated list of things that inspire me right here in my little online locker.