A Theory-Fiction Reading List

Poetic Theory (Theory which foregrounds its artifice)
Søren Kierkegaard — Fear and Trembling (1843)
Georges Bataille — Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (1985)
Theodor Adorno — Minima Moralia (1951)
Paul Virilio — Speed and Politics (1977)
Maurice Blanchot — The Writing of the Disaster (1980)
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari — A Thousand Plateaus (1980)
Jacques Derrida — The Post Card (1980)
Simone Weil — An Anthology (1986)
Jean Baudrillard — The Ecstasy of Communication (1987)
Lawrence Rainey, et al. — Futurism: An Anthology (2009)
Thomas Ligotti — The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (2010)
Villem Flusser & Louis Bec — Vampyroteuthis Infernalis (2012)
Claudia Rankine — Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)
Dawn Ades, et al. — The Surrealism Reader (2015)
Donna Haraway — Manifestly Haraway (2016)

Narrative Theory (Theory told through narrative form)
Lucretius — On The Nature of the Universe (55 BC)
Kamo no Chōmei — An Account of My Hut (1212)
Moses de León — The Zohar (1305)
Friedrich Nietzsche — Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1891)
Pierre Klossowski — Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (1969)
Walter Benjamin — One-Way Street and Other Writings (1970)
Hélène Cixous — The Third Body (1970)
Klaus Theweleit — Male Fantasies (1977)
Luce Irigaray — Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (1980)
Manuel De Landa — A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997)
Catherine Keller — The Face of the Deep (2003)
Michel Serres — Biogea (2012)
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing — The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015)

Cybernetic Theory-Fiction (Theory-fiction as cultural hype)
J D Bernal — The World, The Flesh, and The Devil (1929)
Stanisław Lem — Summa Technologiae (1964)
Nick Land —Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 (2011)
Arthur Kroker — SPASM (1993)
Orphan Drift — Cyberpositive (1995)
CCRU — Writings 1997-2003 (2015)
Kodwo Eshun — More Brilliant Than The Sun (1998)
Sadie Plant — Zeros + Ones (1998)
Mark Fisher — Flatline Constructs (1999)
Reza Negarestani — Cyclonopedia (2008)
Edward Keller, et al. — Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium (2012)
Robin Mackay & Armen Avanessian — #ACCELERATE (2014)
Baylee Brits, et al. — Aesthetics After Finitude (2016)
Benjamin H Bratton — Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution (2016)
Cergat — Earthmare (2017)
Nicola Masciandaro — Sacer (2017)
Elizabeth Sandifer — Neoreaction: A Basilisk (2017)

Sci-Phi (Low fiction, high theory)
Ueda Akinari — Tales of Moonlight and Rain (1776)
William Burroughs — The Soft Machine (1961)
Arkady & Boris Strugatsky — Hard to Be a God (1964)
Ursula K Le Guin — The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
Monique Wittig — Les Guérillères (1969)
J G Ballard — The Atrocity Exhibition (1970)
Angela Carter — The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972)
Thomas Pynchon — Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
Samuel R Delany — Triton (1976)
Giorgio De Maria — The Twenty Days of Turin (1977)
Philip K Dick — VALIS (1981)
William Gibson — Neuromancer (1984)
Kathy Acker — Empire of the Senseless (1988)
Umberto Eco — Foucault’s Pendulum (1988)
Octavia Butler — Xenogenesis (1989)
Christine Brooke-Rose — Amalgamemnon (1994)
Alexis Pauline Gumbs — M-Archive: After the End of the World (2018)

Theoretical Fiction (1: Fiction as theory)
Margaret Cavendish — The Blazing World (1666)
Laurence Sterne — The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1767)
Denis Diderot — Jacques the Fatalist (1796)
Thomas Carlyle — Sartor Resartus (1836)
Samuel Butler — Erewhon (1872)
Alfred Jarry — Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician (1911)
Franz Kafka —The Great Wall of China (1931)
Virginia Woolf — The Waves (1931)
James Joyce — Finnegan’s Wake (1939)
Robert Musil — The Man Without Qualities (1943)
Samuel Beckett — The Unnamable (1953)
Jorge Luis Borges — Labyrinths (1962)
Italo Calvino — Invisible Cities (1972)
Eva Figes — Light (1983)
William Gaddis — Agapē Agape (2002)
Olga Tokarczuk — Flights (2007)
Eimear McBride — A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (2013)
Laurent Binet — The 7th Function of Language (2015)
Anne Garreta — Sphinx (2015)
Joanna Walsh — Worlds from the Word’s End (2017)

Theoretical Fiction (2: Self-writing as theory)
Augustine — Confessions (400)
Michel de Montaigne — Essays (1580)
Clarice Lispector — Agua Viva (1973)
Georges Perec — W, or the Memory of Childhood (1975)
Roland Barthes — A Lover’s Discourse (1977)
Fernando Pessoa — Book of Disquiet (1982)
W G Sebald — The Rings of Saturn (1995)
Svetlana Alexievich — Voices from Chernobyl (1997)
Chris Kraus — I Love Dick (1997)
Sara Ahmed — Queer Phenomenology (2006)
Virginie Despentes — King Kong Theory (2006)
Paul B Preciado — Testo Junkie (2008)
Laura Oldfield Ford — Savage Messiah (2011)
Maggie Nelson — The Argonauts (2015)
Simon Sellars — Applied Ballardianism (2018)

Theoretical Fiction (3: Poetry & plays as theory)
William Blake — The Book of Urizen (1794)
Sarah Kane — Complete Plays (2001)
Jena Osman — The Network (2010)
Keston Sutherland — The Odes to TL61P (2013)