Asking

[syrenatricksy]

You people are smart and well read; perhaps yous guys might have some suggestions to help me out. I'm trying to come up with novels, short stories, novellas, movies, plays, or poems that deal with the concept of reality. Examples would include The Matrix, Fight Club, Tom Stoppard's play The Real Thing, and Salvador Placencia's novel People of

Comments

[elizawharton]

I would recommend going multi-cultural with the stunningly beautiful book "The Famished Road" by African author, Ben Okri

[syrenatricksy]

Wow. This sounds absolutely beautiful -- I have to read this! Thanks awfully for the suggestion, and for the lovely description, as well!!!

[daggerquill]

Death of a Salesman popped immediately to mind.

So did A Doll's House.

Some excertps from Ulyssees?

Oh, and what about Eliot? "Journey of the Magi" or "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" would be accessible. And The Waste Land, of course.

I'd put The Great Gatsby on the list, too.

And some Morrison. Beloved or Song of Solomon, but that's more recent.

You could go with some Yeats, too. On Baile's Strand from the plays, or most any poem up through the War. "The Second Coming" is always a good choice.

Someone else mentioned Beckett: Endgame is short, Waiting for Gadot is more or less connonical.

And Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" is, of course, a personal favorite, as is "The Fall of Rome."

And a few more random poems to round out the list:
"13 ways of looking at a Blackbird" (Wallace Stevens)
"The hand that signed the paper" (Dylan Thomas)
"Anecdote of the Jar" (Wallace Stevens)
"Richard Cory" (Edward Arlington Robinson"
Anything from Edgar Leee Masters' Spoon River Anthology

[imahobbit2]

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold.... entire story told backwards....

Kurt Vonnegutt Slaughterhouse Five or maybe Cat's Cradle.

Djuna Barnes - Nightwood very femme.

Rachel Ingalls - Mrs. Caliban 1983

what about Kafka baby....

Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (short too!)
I know you asked for earlier stuff... but what about Being John Malkavich and/or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the most recent... Pan's Labyrinth

Laura Esquivel Like Water for Chocolate (book or movie)

Va Woolf -- To the Lighthouse... with its stream of consciousness narrative...

Pirendello -- Six Characters in Search of an Author

O'Neil---- The Great God Brown or The Emporer Jones

If you want something creepy... I am Legend by Richard Matheson is a novella about post-bio-apocalypse human survivor who thinks he is fighing the good fight against vampires only to discover that a new society has been formed and he has been murdering citizens.