It’s hard to go wrong with Jeremy C. Shipp. I loved Vacation but it’s hard to get ahold of at the moment. Their most recent work is The Merry Dredgers which I haven’t read yet but looks fantastic.

I haven’t seen it mentioned yet so I’ll throw in my rec: the spear cuts through water. You know how they say you need to know the rules to break the rules? This book is a masterclass in that. It does so many things that novels simply aren’t supposed to… And the execution is flawless. The story is compelling, but I was most engaged with the way it was written. It felt like nothing else I’ve ever encountered - not because the ideas were new (nesting narratives, shifts in perspective, genre twists, etc) but because I’ve never seen so much of it executed so well together.

My all-time favorite novel is Blindness by Jose Saramago. I have only read it in English, but it was originally published in Portuguese as “Ensaio sobre a cegueira”.

From Wikipedia: “It centers on an unexplained mass epidemic of blindness afflicting nearly everyone in a nonspecific city, and follows multiple unnamed characters as they navigate the social breakdown that swiftly follows.”

The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley

Super weird and fucked up SciFi and really good

Ever read Blindsight by Peter Watts?

House of leaves is my all time favourite mindfuck horror literature. I just recommend going hard copy over ebook as the formatting is super important. I can’t really describe it except to say I can see how Backrooms could be inspired by it.

i read a few from Carlton Mellick III, they’re pretty weird. some are translated to spanish: https://carltonmellick.com/books/

other bizzaro fiction in english: https://www.bizarrocentral.com/bizarro-books/

for weird horror, my favourite that might just be weird enough for the question is The Seven Days of Peter Crumb by Jonny Glynn

I’d give “Still Lost: Tales from 2080” by Sam Miller a shot. It’s not too incredibly weird but is just off beat enough to be outside the norm and utterly delightful

I think this is a rather cliche answer but since no one’s mentioned him yet I’ll put in a plug for Phillip K. Dick. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered weirdness done as well as he does it. My favorites are Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? but he has a lot of books and as far as I can tell, they’re all weird af.

• Self-Reference Engine by Toh Enjoe - this one stretches the limits of what a novel even is, it’s not like anything else I’ve ever read

• The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts - the inhabitants of a generation ship rebel against the controlling computer to take charge of their lives

• Transfinite Man by Colin Kapp - starts like a cloak-and-dagger detective novel, almost tropey, then goes off the rails into speculative science fiction

• Ubik by Philip K. Dick - a classic of surrealism, often referenced directly and indirectly by other works

• Permutation City by Greg Egan - ultimately an exploration of self-determination and personal trauma in a digital world - who do we become, if we have the freedom to be and do anything?

• The Emperor’s Soul by Brandon Sanderson - in my opinion the most compelling of Sanderson’s work

• Einstein’s Bridge - a fictional exploration of the Einstein-Rosen bridge set in a timeline where the Superconducting Super Collider was not cancelled

• Unflattening by Nick Sousanis - philosophy in a graphic novel, an exploration of identity and self-knowledge

Asking around gave me this shortlist of suggestions:

• Agustina Bazterrica (in Spanish)
• Suzan Palumbo’s short fiction collection Skin Thief
• Saoirse Ní Chiaragáin’s Wax & Wane
• Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad
• Kev Lambert’s You Will Love What You Have Killed

or Spanish

Borges, if you haven’t read any of his works yet.

It’s well-known and well-studied, but also infamous as a book few people ever actually finish because it is so weird: Gravity’s Rainbow.

I finished it. I’m not sure what I gained by reading it, outside of having a better understanding of what an acid trip might feel like. Very weird.

Other mainstream but weird recommendations: Mexican Gothic (highly recommend this) and A Night in the Lonesome October

Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson.

The story follows Hiro Protagonist—a pizza delivery driver in a fractured, hyper-capitalized future reality and an elite hacker/swordfighter in the virtual “Metaverse”.

If you like that, his other books are fantastic, especially Cryptonomicon, Anathem, and Diamond Age.

Kelly Link’s short stories are weird

• Magic for Beginners
• Get in Trouble

The first story is often not that weird, but she is fantastic at magical realism. They aren’t scary though. I recall for instance one story being about a cannon.