Dense, difficult, convoluted, experimental books

Looking for more recommendations for books which are heavily experimental or have some premise/presentation that plays with literary conventions and expectations. This is often accompanied by highly symbolic language, dense but beautiful prose, strange or varying prose styles, self- and meta-references, etc.

Books you can really dive into for ages, that ideally will take more than one reading to begin to unlock its secrets. Below I have a list of all the books I've read or already been recommended that fit this niche for me, just to give an idea of what I'm talking about.

• S. (aka Ship of Theseus) by Doug Dorst – a book within a book, where the annotations in the margin tell their own story that has to be figured out.
• In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan – a strange and detached first-person narrative about a psychedelic future where everything is made of watermelon sugar.
• If on a winter’s night a traveller by Italo Calvino – a book about you, the reader, trying to read If on a winter’s night a traveller by Italo Calvino but every copy you buy has a different, unrelated novel inside.
• Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar – a narrative set in Paris, told in 155 chapters which the author himself suggests reading in various different orders in order to experience the narrative in a myriad ways.
• House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski – a story about a depressed man named Johnny Truant told in the footnotes to an academic work by a blind man named Zampanò about a film by a man called Will Navidson which documents the exploration of a geometrically impossible house.
• Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn – a book about a society which progressively outlaws each letter of the alphabet, with the book itself losing those letters as the story goes on.
• Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann – a stream of consciousness consisting of a single sentence concering the thoughts of a single anxious middle-aged American housewife.
• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner – a story of a single family told in four chapters of stream-of-consciousness narrative, each covering a single day, with varying degrees of intelligibility.
• J R by William Gaddis – a novel told entirely in dialogue with little indication as to who is speaking, often jumping spontaneously from one speaker to another.
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter – an exploration of cognitive emergence by comparing the lives of the titular figures. The only nonfiction book I have here, but the way it illustrates its points, using narrative, linguistic word-play, and mind-blowingly creative style is hypnotising (if anyone has any other nonfiction suggestions that are written like this, let me know!).
• Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Bohumil Hrabal – one old man’s account of his life, told in one long rambling sentence.
• Ulysses by James Joyce – the story of one day in the life of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, and their interactions with the people and places of Dublin, loosely inspired by Homer’s Odyssey and with each chapter being written in a different literary style.
• Finnegans Wake by James Joyce – the story of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker and his family as they sleep, told in a near-impenetrable linguistic code of Joyce’s own invention.
• The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector – a wealthy woman in Rio de Janeiro kills a cockroach, which triggers an existential crisis, told in a mysterious, repetitive linguistic style.
• Solar Bones by Mike McCormack – the inner monologue of a middle-aged Irish civil engineer as he stands in his kitchen and thinks back on his life, told in one unbroken sentence with zero punctuation.
• Women and Men by Joseph McElroy – a story about two people, a man and a woman, who live in the same apartment building, whose lives are intimately connected by the people they know, but who have never actually met. Told in short story-like chapters about the various people connected to the main protagonists’ lives.
• Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov – an analysis of the poem 'Pale Fire' by fictional poet John Shade by his executor and alleged friend, Charles Kinbote. What seems like a normal academic analysis becomes an entirely different story, with the narrative told mainly through the foreword and Kinbote's commentary on the poem, which slowly reveals the character of Kinbote, his association with Shade, and the truth behind the poet's recent death.
• At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O’Neill – a love story between two Irish boys set around the time of the 1916 Easter Rising, told in a stream of consciousness. Inspired by the works of Joyce and the classic novel At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien.
• Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec – a novel about the various inhabitants of a single apartment block in Paris, taking place over a single second in time.
• The Overstory by Richard Power – a non-linear, interwoven narrative of nine people whose lives are influenced by or heavily connected to trees.
• In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust – a slow-moving, expansive coming-of-age story about a man growing up and living in France around the end of the nineteenth century.
• Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon – a story ostensibly about a secret Nazi weapon used in rockets during World War II, and the connection between where those rockets strike and the sexual encounters of one of the main characters, filled with references, allusions, humour, and a dizzying amount of characters and intertwining narratives.
• The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald – one man’s meditations on history and literature, told as he goes on a long walking tour of Suffolk in England, heavily inspired by the author's own travels.
• Ha! by Gordon Sheppard – a multimedia book which follows a man trying to figure out why his friend has recently committed suicide, told in traditional narrative, photographs, documents and so on.
• VAS: An Opera in Flatland by Steve Tomasula – Not sure how to describe this one myself so I'll just quote Wikipedia which seems to have a good grasp on the premise:

Set at the start of the 21st century when technologies like cloning, transplants, and other body modifications were becoming common, VAS employs a wide range of historical representations of the body from family trees and eugenic charts to visual representations of genetic sequencing. Bound in a cover that resembles human skin, the novel is printed in two colors, one that resembles flesh and one that resembles blood. It explores how definitions of the body and the self both emerge from differing narratives, and tells the story of people searching for a sense of identity in a dawning post-biological future.

• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace – a story of stories, containing various densely-interconnected narratives linked by a film called Infinite Jest, which is so good it causes people to watch it obsessively until they waste away and die, all of which are accompanied by hundreds of endnotes which digress into many more footnotes.
• Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf – a stream of consciousness about the titular woman, a wealthy socialite, and her thoughts on her life and her decisions as she prepares for a party that evening.
• Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young – the scarily long narrative of a woman as she takes a single, long bus ride in search of her childhood nanny, the titular Miss MacIntosh.