Modern Avant-Garde Literature

recommendation about a great,smart,funny,and relatively easy avant garde writer from Israel, Yoel Hoffman, one of my personal favourites.
he writes novels combining influenced from Zen,minimalism, and creats a unique world with rules of it's own, that expands the consciousness.

http://www.amazon.com/Bernhardt-Yoel-Hoffmann/dp/0811213897#capbody

Hey thank you, I'll have to check this guy out.

you wont regret it

really interesting. i'd love to hear about more stuff like this. sorry i can't recommend any, i'm always looking for new and interesting books, but i usually just end up reading older stuff that everyone's already read.

I dunno, flarf?

TS Flarf vs. Tlooth

I think you could get on a panel with that topic.

Anyone else care to weigh in on this topic?

The problem is, in part, that the question isn't terribly clear; what's "avant garde" for one person might be pretty traditional for another. There isn't, like, a body that decides this sort of thing, and even if you go by who's calling themselves "avant garde", it still might not give you a terribly accurate sense of where their pratice lies. Plus your question is phrased as if it's "what's avant garde this year, in 2007", which when I read it; when I suggested flarf, in the back of my I was thinking about how flarf seemed to peak about a year ago, and now felt less like an exciting new approach and more like part of the available toolbox.

But I notice that the Yoel Hoffman book linked to above is from 1991, and if that works for you, then the question is maybe broader than I read it, though possibly still too broad to come up with good answers.

So, instead of having us try to list the hundreds or even thousands of writers doing avant garde work over the past twenty years, maybe you could tell us who you've read and enjoyed and what sort of avant garde you're interested in?

http://www.futureofthebook.org/

Mark Z. Danielewski, maybe?

I just finished a book called Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, by Wayne Koesterman. His first novel, and the first work of his I've read. I have no idea what we might call avant-garde at this point, or why, but it's a challenging, non-traditional piece of writing that resembles a novel while subverting expectations about what fiction should do. On the other hand, it's modest in its ambitions, hardly earth-shaking.

Still, recommended. Smart, funny, maddening, sad as hell.