I recently read Gavin Douglas’s The Palis of Honoure for a class. It’s completely weird – I’m not sure how it was received in its own time, but it’s definitely weird. It reads, in the professor’s phrasing, like “Chaucer on acid” (although you have to have a decent working knowledge of Chaucer’s dream poems for that to make sense).
It also has screaming fish in it. 
One more thing…Per the reccomendation of that earlier poster, I picked up a copy of Patrik Suskind’s PERFUME. A completely incredible book. I read it in one sitting, totally spellbound. This is one of thos books that seems almost ordained: there’s not a single mis-step throughout. It’s relentlessly weird, and Suskind progressively raises the horror quotient until the whole thing reaches an apocalyptic ending. Highly reccomended
If I recall correctly, there’s evidence (especially in the early editions, which contain phrases in both Portugese and English) that Carolino wrote this by using a French-Portugese dictionary written by Jose da Fonseca, and then translating the entire French contents of that book into English.
My advice: Get a copy of the collected works of William MacGonagall, if only to learn how not to write poetry.
I would like to debunk this. In classicists circles, Apuleius’ “The Golden Ass” and Juvenal’s “Satyricon” are considered novels. They were written 1000 years before “The Tale of Genji”. The Greek-speaking world also saw a few novels appear in the first several hundred years after Christ. “The Tale of Genji” might have been the first Tolstoy-big novel with an epic scope, but it is not the “world’s first novel”. I’ve always wondering why it had that epitet. Perhaps because the first Westerners to come across it, such as Arthur Waley, did not have a decent knowledge of ancient history.
UnuMondo
Oops, sorry. “Satyricon” was written by Petronius, not Juvenal.
UnuMondo