When a Story's Not a Story

What elements do you need to make a story? Most fiction consists of plot, character, and setting, in some combination. The proportions of each always change, but generally all three are present. But what about fiction that doesn't fit the mold, fiction that "colors outside the lines" so to speak?

In general, I'm not a fan of this type of fiction, but to my mind, for these kinds of books to work, they need to compensate for the lack of what's not there with a stronger emphasis on what they do have to offer. No plot or character? Then you'd better have one hell of a setting. No character or setting? Then that had better be some plot you've got to tell.

But what about if you have none of the Big Three? Then I guess all we're left with is language. In which case, your language had better be fucking incredible.

Though I typically prefer fiction that does what fiction's traditionally expected to do, some of my favorite books are ones that don't follow any rules, that make up their own logic as they go along. So here is a list of some of my favorite rulebreakers, in no particular order except alphabetical.

How German Is It?, Walter Abish
Mansfield Park, Jane Austen
The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker
40 Stories, Donald Barthelme
Snow White, Donald Barthelme
An Invisible Sign of My Own, Aimee Bender
Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die!, Mark Binelli
The Decameron, Boccaccio
Stories, Jorge Luis Borges
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter
Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell
Try, Dennis Cooper
Samuel Johnson is Indignant, Lydia Davis
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
The Lover, Marguerite Duras
Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
Loving, Henry Green
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
The Question of Bruno, Alexander Hemon
A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera
Homeland, Sam Lipsyte
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Self-Help, Lorrie Moore
Notable American Women, Ben Marcus
The Captain's Fire, J. S. Marcus
Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
Purple America, Rick Moody
Open Secrets, Alice Munro
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
Martin and John, Dale Peck
The Streets of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz
The Emigrants, W. G. Sebald
The First Hurt, Rachel Sherman
Collected Stories, Jean Stafford
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace
The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead
The Waves, Virginia Woolf
Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar