Fantastic fiction 
The 20 (or so) books I most wish I'd written: what higher compliment could I pay? If you like my fiction, maybe you'll like these too.
What I value about these works is the tension between reality and unreality: you never quite know what to expect. I've grouped them into the Tantalizing, the Gothic, Inspired Lunacy, and the Pellucid. It's arbitrary, I know, and my uttermost favourites fall into all of these groups. Mentally reshuffle them, if you like.
The Tantalizing
Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, by E T A Hoffmann. A vain cat writes his autobiography, whose pages get mixed up with the biography of a musician who's a friend of his master's. The whole book's a tease, and scholars can't even decide if there was going to be a third volume, as the author sort of promised back in 1820. Newly translated and republished by Penguin Books in 1999.
E T A Hoffmann also wrote Tales of Hoffmann, made famous by Offenbach's operetta. Some of these Tales were published in a Penguin Book of this title, about 5 years ago.
Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne. (Where do you think Tomcat Murr copied his title from?) When I first read this book I was 16, and impatient. After wading through several hundred pages of this fictional autobiography, and the narrator hadn't even been born, I gave up in disgust. On my second attempt, a few years later, I realized how funny it was. The joke had been on me, expecting something to actually happen. Sterne, an 18th century English clergyman, also wrote A Sentimental Journey, a sort of anti-travel book about a visit to France.
The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov - set in Russia in the early communist days. The only thing I could tell you about this book that you'd believe is that Margarita was a cat.
By the way, why are you reading about all these books about animals? What are you, some sort of pervert? After reading too many books narrated by animals, I thought I'd write one (Dromeworld) narrated by a human - but in a world where humans are the animals. Oddly, nobody seems to have written such a book before - except perhaps Planet of the Apes, which took a different angle.
Anything by James Joyce. I've been trying to read Finnegans Wake for years. You can get A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, which unlocks it a bit. Reading it aloud helps more, specially when you've drunk many, many glasses of Irish whiskey.
Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon - in the same high-density league as Finnegans Wake. Don't expect to understand it fully the first time you read it.
Just about anything by Italo Calvino - specially Our Ancestors - a collection of three short novels. Also Once on a Winter's Night a Traveller, a tour de force of not-quite-storytelling.
The Magus by John Fowles. Some kind people have compared my >Gone: No Address favourably with this. If you liked either book, try the other.
Another teasing book is A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters by Julian Barnes.
The Pellucid
Some writers have such a beautiful style of putting words together that it makes me want to weep, to see my own clumsy efforts. These are the types of book you keep wanting to read aloud to other people. You know they don't really want to listen - finally they put their hands over their ears so you'll get the hint. But you keep reading aloud to them anyway, because the words lie together so perfectly.
There's a charming book by an American writer, published around 1985. I can't remember the name of the novel or the author, but I remember the book vividly, 10 years later. It was about people living on an island in the Venetian lagoon when the Plague arrived: one of the most lyrically written books I've ever read. At least, that's my memory of it. Sometimes, you go back to a work years later, and wonder how you got it so wrong. If this book is so great, why isn't it famous? Maybe I'll hold onto my memory of it, and avoid tracking it down, in case I'm disappointed on a second reading.
If you happen to know the title or author, please email me and put me out of my misery! I think the author's name was something like David Mitchell - but there are dozens of those. (See my sad little Japanese poems in Falling Off Chairs - the David Michimaki one is a result of a conversation I had with my friend David Young, about whether there were more David Mitchells or David Youngs in the world. To avoid being sued by the loser, I changed Young to Yanagawa and Mitchell to Michimaki, and the setting from New Zealand to Tokyo.)
Anything by Tanith Lee - e.g. Elephantasm - a lyrical style of horror.
Since I live in Australia at the moment, I should include at least one Australian book in this list. My choice is Cosmo Cosmolino by Helen Garner, a short novel that begins realistically, then soars. The style is so spare and beautiful it could make you weep. Even more than my Midnight Deli, Helen Garner's work is steeped in the Melbournian way of thought. She's a lot more sympathetic to Melbournism than I am, though.
New Zealand's contribution to this group is Staying Home and Being Rotten, by Shonagh Koea. About a widow beset by problems. Innocently told, but wickedly, devilishly funny.
Emile Zola is an unlikely fit with the other writers here, but his Germinal has an enormous breadth of vision that puts it in the Pellucidity section, despite the pedestrian prose. This is one of the most powerful books I've ever read, in the way it sweeps unstoppably toward a kind of tragedy. Social realism at its best. I've written no fiction at all like this yet, but you could wait for my Floaters novel for Western Australia. It'll be a long wait: I won't let myself start writing it till I've finished several others.
More pellucidity: a lot of Italian novels, and some Eastern European, e.g. Slawomir Mrozek. Some South American, e.g. Octavio Paz, but few North American - they're too earnest - but there's Richard Brautigan, and maybe one or two others. And a few Japanese, specially Murakami.
The Gothic
After being out of print for many years, a lot of these books are becoming available again.
The Monk by M G Lewis. Written around 1790, in a startlingly modern style. This book would make an excellent black-and-white movie, but it's a bit late for that now. Stick with the book - which is more chilling than any movie. Republished by Oxford a few decades ago.
Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin - around 1800. Stories within stories, with an edge of horror.
The Manuscript found at Saragossa by Jan Potocki. Written in French by a Pole. If Maturin has stories within stories, Potocki has stories within stories within stories within... A kind of Arabian Nights of interpolated stories. Recently republished by Penguin.
And The Arabian Nights are definitely worth reading too. The unexpurgated version is far from child's stuff, specially in Richard Burton's translation.
Seven Gothic Tales, by Isak Dinesen. Reading these stories is like looking through cut glass at multiple reflections: a little cruel, but so clear and sharp.
Thomas Love Peacock, in books such as Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey sends up the Gothic novels.
A modern Gothic novel is The Hawkline Monster by Richard Brautigan. Not so scary, but the style makes it a joy to read.
Inspired Lunacy
At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien. A mad, infuriating book, deeply Irish. One of the characters is writing a novel, and makes his unwilling characters stay in a hotel where he can keep an eye on them. When he sleeps, they play up. Cowboys make trouble in the suburbs of Dublin, and Brian Boru gets involved too. Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman is even madder.
Zazie dans le Métro by Raymond Queneau, translated as Zazie. A crazy French book from 1959. Probably out of print for years, but well worth hunting down.
Newsflash, late 2000: This and At Swim-Two-Birds have just been reprinted by Penguin Books in England.
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. The Candide of New Orleans? Flann O'Brien would have been proud of this, with its bizarre logic.
And speaking of bizarre logic, there's the unforgettable Christy Malry's Own Double Entry. I can't remember the author (Norman somebody?) and I'm not certain about the spelling. An English book from the 1970s. The revenge of an accounts clerk who decides to apply the principles of bookkeeping to everyday life.
I was going to restrict this list to novels, but there are plays that cry out to be mentioned: just about anything by Eugene Ionesco (e.g. The Rhinoceros, Amédée or How to get Rid of it, The Bald Prima Donna), Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry, a few plays (whose titles I don't remember) by Norman Frederick Simpson, and just about anything by Dario Fo - for example Death of an Anarchist.
Wooff Wooff or Who Killed Richard Wagner By Stefan Themerson. He was Polish, but wrote in English. Wooff Wooff was first published in 1951 - I haven't seen it for years. March 2004: I bought an old copy of Themerson's Mystery of the Sardine (1986) - not so obviously funny, hardly even bizarre, but it has a plot intricate enough to be the envy of some American crime fiction writers. Maybe even a parody of them.
The Underground Journey of Niels Klim, by Ludvig Holberg. A Danish classic of the 18th century, first written in Latin, and very hard to find in English. It's been out of print for years. I borrowed an ancient copy from a library (the first time it had seen fresh air since 1975) and decided to scan it into a computer file, and put it up on this web site.
That must be at least 20 books. And I haven't mentioned some others I had in mind - but those are by popular authors, and you probably know about them already. I'm thinking of Borges, Kafka, Barthelme, Heller, Nabokov, Kundera, um,
That's enough. I'll stop now.