Interactive and Unconventionally Structured Novels

Kwan Ann Tan is the author of the interactive story The Waiter, out this week from Union Square & Co. Below, she recommends three more interactive novels. An interactive story or a novel with an unusual structure is a difficult and unwieldy thing to pull off. But when it’s done well, you come away feeling like you’ve experienced something unusual, or the way that you see the text has changed. Here are three books that invite you to interact with the text as a physical object to reframe the narrative, or piece together the full picture yourself through their unconventional structures. Hopscotch by Julio CortázarA book that conjures up smoky jazz in friends’ living rooms and circular conversations of bohemian intellectuals in 1950s Paris, Cortázar’s novel can be read in two ways: linearly, or as a recursive loop, according to the “instructions” that the author prints in the introduction. Depending on how you read it, the story unfolds quite differently, revealing different layers and answers to questions that might have been previously opaque. The Age of Goodbyes by Li Zi Shu, translated by YZ ChinSet in the humid, dialect-slinging environs of Kuala Lumpur, The Age of Goodbyes is...