Stories with good unorthodox structure

Annie Hall opens with Alvy telling us that he and Annie just broke up, just get that out of the way right there, and he’s sifting through the pieces of it, trying to figure things out, I mean just a year ago we were in love

…and so he starts telling the story of their relationship at a point where they’re already together, where they soon start reminiscing about their past relationships, and those flashbacks-within-a-flashback set up the story of how they first met and started dating, but the story doesn’t then unfold in order because like a rambling narrator he keeps breaking off to elaborate with a scene from back in time…

…and the whole thing builds to a montage of flashbacks, showing up in neither the order they happened nor the order we saw 'em, because, hey, why start now?

(He also muddies the waters by tossing in imagined conversations, sometimes not revealing for a while that, no, this part never actually happened.)

The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern. Chronological order is beautifully disrupted in the telling, and quite satisfying.

Cool; I get to be the first to mention Robert Silverberg’s The Book of Skulls. Tells a story with each chapter being a 1st person narrative from one of the 4 protagonists.

That’s not how I remember it.

I recently bought S. S. (Dorst novel) - Wikipedia and I’m waiting for a quiet time to start it. I’ve been intrigued by the idea of a story told by marginalia. I also love Possession by AS Byatt, the story of a grad student who finds something that changes the history of a pair of famous poets, complete with poetry written by both. I’m also fond of epistolary novels like Dracula.

*How to be Both * by Ali Smith is a novel about art and artists, with two thematically connected stories, one taking place in the renaissance, and the other in the present day. The books were printed so that some copies have the renaissance stuff coming first, and others have the modern day story first.

Musicals -
“The Last Five Years” - Two person musical, he moves from the beginning to the end of their relationship, she moves from the end to the beginning, they cross in the middle.
“Merrily We Roll Along” - told in reverse chronological order

Taken straight from 1001 Nights, but simplified.

This far into the thread and no one’s seen fit to mention Tim O’Brien’s Going after Cacciato?!? :eek: :dubious: :smack:

With respect to cold openings, they don’t get much better than** “It was hell’s season, and the air smelled of burning children."**

From Gone South, by Robert R McCammon, one of my all-time favorite books. If this one doesn’t get to you by the final chapter, nothing will.

Pulp Fiction
Kill Bill I & II

An important aspect is described in this section of the Wikipedia articleon the book. The book can be bewildering as to what is supposed to be real and what is supposed to be a complete put-on. And it forces you into this more flexible view of reality, in a sense.

No, there is no rhyme to the way it switches.

I wonder if you’re thinking of Bob Leman’s “Instructions” Instructions - Tachyon Publications

Terry Bisson wrote a story called “macs” entirely composed of answers of various people to a reporter’s questions - with the questions themselves not given.

In THE ANDERSON TAPES, the gimmick was that this guy is a small-time crook and his phone’s been tapped by local cops; and the diner down the street has been bugged by the Feds, who are out to nab a suspected drug dealer; and so on.

So as you read the book, it’s easy to follow the plot: here’s the address of the building the ex-con has cased, here’s the date and time we’ll pull the heist, here’s a list of what we’ll need, I know a guy who knows a guy.

But each passage is a surveillance tape from an agency that doesn’t share info with the others, so the story told by the format is how The Government technically knew it all, if “The Government” was actually a thing: you see how these officials heard him rave about the ritzy apartment building where his girlfriend lives; and how other officials heard him say something later dawned on him about that building we were talking about yesterday; and how some other other officials heard him describe how you could, hypothetically, clean out an entire apartment building in one night.

As far as the third investigators know, it’s an innocuous conversation about no address in particular; they’d know what “I’m in” means, but they never hear that. The second later heard an “I’m in”, but didn’t know what it meant; other folks hear about a day but not a time – or a time, but not a day – and it’s all spoon-fed to us, but anyone listening in on parts of it just hears nothing worth mentioning.

Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5.

I appreciate the guess but I don’t think that was it.

Another example (whose specifics I can’t remember) was Piers Anthony’s Incarnation book about Time was, as you would imagine, given it was about the living incarnation of Time, not structured linearly.