 | Maldoror and the Complete Works of the Comte de Lautréamont by Comte de Lautréamont
Buy new: $12.50 / Used from: $10.76 This book is one of the foundations of the Surrealist movement, and believe me it is relevant today, with all the torture flicks that are out there. This is a difficult book, and one that still retains a feeling of "cutting edge" about it.
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 | The Overcoat and Other Short Stories (Dover Thrift Editions) by Nikolai Gogol
Buy new: $3.50 / Used from: $0.01 A soul brother to Edgar Allan Poe, Gogol attracted my attention with "The Nose".
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 | Selected Writings of Henri Michaux by Henri Michaux
Buy new: $11.86 / Used from: $17.45 Michaux was a gifted painter, poet and writer of short fiction, including several pieces that focused on an absurdist character called "Plume".
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 | Kwaidan: Stories And Studies Of Strange Things by Lafcadio Hearn
Buy new: $11.53 / Used from: $7.32 Hearn was a Westerner who adopted Japan as his home. These stories were adapted for use in a classic Japanese film. Hearn has retained an aura of respect among the Japanese.
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 | Sixty Stories (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) by Donald Barthelme
Buy used from: $24.41 The undisputed heavyweight champion of the Postmodernist short story. Barthelme's best volumes ("The Cabinet of Dr. Cagliari", "Unspeakable Acts..", and "City Life") are out of print, but most of the stories are collected here. Bartheme had both the best sense of humor, and the best sense of the poignant of the Postmodernist writers.
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 | Collected Stories (Everyman's Library) by Roald Dahl
Buy new: $19.80 / Used from: $12.00 Roald Dahl is the British master of the whimsical and weird. Known for his children's books, his adult fiction only sharpens his sense of the fascinatingly cruel.
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 | Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
Buy new: $10.08 / Used from: $1.95 Calvino creates a little universe with its own rules. The most fanciful volume of a great writer.
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 | Pricksongs & Descants: Fictions by Robert Coover
Buy new: $10.20 / Used from: $7.89 As a writer of innovative fiction, Coover is nearly the equal of Barthelme, with a particularly ribald and licentious take on the world.
I was raised, and continue to live in the town where Coover was born and raised... and I, too, thought I invented dice baseball.
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 | The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
Buy new: $10.85 / Used from: $5.99 Carrington made her reputation as a Surrealist painter, and one-time wife of Max Ernst... but her fiction is nothing short of a revelation. "Hearing Trumpet" is probably the easiest book to find, but you really should track down "The Stone Door", and "The Oval Lady", which are classics. You really want to read a story about a hyena that steals (and later eats) a woman's face.
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 | The Hashish Club: An Anthology of Drug Literature (v. 1)
Buy used from: $52.00 If you think that people in the 19th century didn't have wild times, check out Theophile Gautier's "Poem of Hashish", a wildly descriptive account of what it's like to use a controlled substance.
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 | Wise Blood: A Novel by Flannery O'Connor
Buy new: $10.08 / Used from: $3.80 Follow the exploits of Hazel Motes, founder of the "Church Without Christ ", as he parrots Nietzsche in the Deep South of the 1950's. Things get really weird when he and his girlfriend set up housekeeping with a mummified baby.
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 | The Aleph and Other Stories (Penguin Classics) by Jorge Luis Borges
Buy new: $10.20 / Used from: $7.10 If I began with Lautreamont, might as well end with Borges. Borges' short stories are like intricate puzzles--as fascinating and complex as the illusionary artworks of M.C.Escher.
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