He experimented with style after this, but never content; the basic idea here is that people exist outside of the nice format of equal, and instead are these little trails of experience through a world with not only uneven but infinitely varied topography where animal ideals of self-interest and intellectual abstractions like self-image prevail over practical concerns, mainly because those are out of the control of the everyday person anyway. Filled with characterizations both compassionate and cruel at the same time, this book shows us humanity trying to leave behind mass conformity and find its soul in individual experience.

Postmodernism peaked with this, a book that demonstrated the predominance of reality through many fractal views that converged on a thermodynamic reality, namely that all things seek a perpetuation of energy but the sad tired controlling human mind wishes to monopolize that possibility. A cry for the liberation of the human species, this book shows us horrors in order to paint in negative space the opposite potential, and in doing so, reveals to us the chains and the cave so that we might leave. Other than Jane Austen, the most influential author in my experience.

Internet hipsters will tell you to read V or Gravity’s Rainbow, knowing that the chances you will wade through seven hundred pages of dense text in order to punch them out are slim, but this book contains all of Pynchonian theory and technique in a short and hilarious volume that contains a melancholic Romantic longing unmatched in the rest of his work. Expect to look into the modern soul and find the abyss of meaning created by human projection, plus intimations of a metaphysics of order that encloses and manipulates physical reality. It helps us escape modernity in order to see what it might have meant all along.

Alex Jones thinks he knows paranoia, but this book shows us the tragicomedic nature of living in modern society where paranoia is the norm because every person acts in self-interest without much knowledge beyond their material desires within the next pay period. This book shows us what the Misfits and postmodern literature wanted us to see, which is that beneath the chrome and good wishes, modern society is comprised of subtexts formed of stultified desires and suppressed naturalism. We are prisoners in a gilded cage because reality must be denied for the human individual to become our new god.

Building on a tradition that even predates Mary Shelley and Aldous Huxley, The Possibility of an Island shows us human existence taken as a reduction to extremes: what if we truly were free, independent, and accountable to nothing? The bleak existential crisis that confronts us when we get everything that we want reveals the emptiness of our wants, and shows us where there may be more hope of finding something interesting to do. Even more, it captures the hollow solipsism we impose on ourselves by mutual individualism, which makes the human more important than nature, logic, history, culture, or eternity.

Gibson broke into the scene with Neuromancer, but that was really a visual gloss on the themes he wanted to expand upon from Pynchon and Burroughs, namely the hidden order invisible beneath all events that might be both divine and scientific. In this book, a mystery encoded in everyday events, characters must confront the lack of meaning in their lives in order to discover inner heroism and through it, grow up to be able to see reality as something like what it is.

“Magical realism” may not technically (“eckshyually”) be postmodernism, but it uses the same device, namely the elevation of individual perspective above universal perspective in order to affirm a reality alien to both. In this case, we move steadily into the metaphorical framework of individual minds as they try to adapt to events beyond their comprehension, in the process revealing a poetry, rhythm, and order to reality.

Faulkner, a Romantic with the heavy heart that study of history brings, read Joyce and realized he could expand this by reducing the sympathetic fallacy to simple synchronization, and so you get this magical world where the trees bend to the wind which weaves with the twists of the tale, a story based on the restoration of order in a time of inversion where insanity is so popular that people routinely drive themselves insane just to fit in.

Absolutely no one will like this, but meso-Romantic author William Blake invented postmodernism: the telling of a centralized story from decentralized fragments. Each character, like a subroutine, has its own memory, limits, and imperatives, and when they come together, we see a richer world underneath the smoothing-over (like concrete) that civilization does by treating us as a fungible horde of equal individuals. Instead, through Blake, nature blooms in all of its ambiguity and infinite potential.