Brutality hides inside banality—beneath the ironed uniform, under the cassock of the priest, in the starched business decorum of the professional—the monstrous is made even more monstrous because it looks safe, ordinary, appropriate.

"Germany declared war on Russia. Went swimming all afternoon."

• Franz Kafka in his notebooks

This juxtaposition is horrifying precisely because it is banal. It reveals how life goes on as usual in the middle of tragedy, in the space after losing a loved one, in the hollows of genocide and wars, in the sunshine that greets a patient leaving the office where she has been given three months to live. The brutality of the ordinary assures us that life continues like a machine without us.

*

Brutality, banality, the screwiness of what is familair—and how certain writers have used fictional techniques that play into estrangement. I’m teaching a weekend workshop for Bending Genres (you can sign up for the asynchronous here)—and a weekend doesn’t give us adequate time to do more than dabble through excerpts and short readings. This makes me nauseous in some ways—nauseous because these books are formidable and deserve so much more than a dibble or a dabble.

So I created a booklist for writers who want to study the uncanny weirdnesss more closely—to get a deeper glimpse of the extraordinary, duplicitous banality in modern language. All of these books will be touched upon, or licked a bit, in the workshop. I hope that others find time to do more than to lick, which is to properly masticate and devour.

Not an exhaustive, but a tasty start.

The Promise by Silvina Ocampo, translated by Jessica Powell & Suzanne Jill Levine (City Lights Books)

The Voice Imitator: 104 Stories by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Keith Northcott (University of Chicago Press)

The Collected Stories of Diane Williams by Diane Williams (SoHo Press)

Bessarabian Stamps by Oleg Woolf, translated by Boris Dralyuk (Deep Vellum)

Nadirs by Herta Müller, translated by Sieglinde Lug (University of Nebraska Press)

The Encyclopedia of the Dead by Danilo Kiš, translated by Michael Henry Heim (Northwestern University Press)

A School for Fools by Sasha Sokolov, translated by Alexander Boguslawski (NYRB Classics)

On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry by William Gass (NYRB Classics)

The World Goes On by László Krasznahorkai, translated by George Szirtes, Ottilie Mulzet and John Batki (New Directions)

The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington by Leonora Carrington (The Dorothy Project)

Do Everything in the Dark by Gary Indiana (ITNA Press)

Empire of the Senseless by Kathy Acker (Grove Atlantic)

We Others by Steven Millhauser (Knopf Doubleday)

Microscripts by Robert Walser, translated by Susan Bernofsky (New Directions)

The Walk by Robert Walser, translated by Susan Bernofsky and Christopher Middleton (New Directions)