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Some experimental stories don’t seem to be stories at all; books listed here include a fictional dictionary and a faux news wire printout, amongst others. Like conventional fiction, these works tell of fictional worlds; however, they do so from a most unconventional perspective.
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![<b><em>Dictionary of the Khazars</em>, Milorad Pavic, 1988 [first published in Serbian in 1984]</b><br />Subtitled "a lexicon novel", this is a fictional dictionary of a real (extinct) race of people. For a fictional reference work, it is certainly comprehensive; the book is split into three sections in order to accommodate Christian, Islamic, and Jewish perspectives on the subject. Each entry tells a story in itself, but cross-referencing between the three sections aids a loose, over-arching narrative.<br /><br /> This story blends truth and fiction not only in content, but also in form. Interestingly, its cross–referencing techniques, familiar in nonfiction, fall under the special category of ‘hypertext’ in fiction; while other books in this exhibition make the ordinary book remarkable, this almost makes the remarkable book ordinary, reminding us that it is merely the label of "fiction" that conditions our notions of what is and isn’t a story.<br /><br />](/fryer/not_books/images/Khazars_0002_600s.png)
items in this series
Informed sources, Willard Bain, 1967
If on a winter’s night a traveller, Italo Calvino, 1979
Dictionary of the Khazars, Milorad Pavic, 1988
253: the print remix, Geoff Ryman, 1998
