Books and stories that you would never in a million years guess what 
they were about if all you know is the title: 

  LAUGHTER IN THE DARK, by Vladimir Nabokov.  A man falls in love 
  with a pretty but vulgar young woman and marries her.  He is 
  blinded in an accident soon afterward, and his wife and her lover 
  spend the rest of the novel tormenting him in cruelly inventive 
  ways.  

  A PERFECT DAY FOR BANANAFISH, by J.D. Salinger.  The last hours in 
  the life of an eccentric young man before he commits suicide.  

  A ROSE FOR EMILY, by William Faulkner.  One of the most nauseating 
  horror stories ever written.  Faulkner doesn't reveal the ultimate 
  horror until literally the last *word* in the story.  

  THE SECRET MIRACLE, by Jorge Luis Borges.  A playwright condemned 
  to death by firing squad prays to God to be allowed to finish the 
  play he was working on.  God grants his wish by causing time to 
  stop just as the firing squad pull their triggers.  

  ULYSSES, by James Joyce.  A man named Leopold Bloom spends a day 
  wandering around the city of Dublin.  

  WONDERLAND, by Joyce Carol Oates.  If you weren't a vegetarian 
  before reading this book, you will be by the time you're finished.  

  XINGU, by Edith Wharton.  A turn-of-the-century ladies club 
  invites a fashionable authoress to one of their meetings.  The 
  ironies multiply so prolifically that you have to go back and read 
  the story again to catch up with them all.  

Please add your own favorites: 

5 responses total.

(I've read _Wonderland_ and know exactly what you're talking
about.)

  THE NEW TESTAMENT.  The son of the Almighty is sent to earth
  to show mankind the path to redemption from sin. He travels
  around quite a bit teaching and working miracles, managing
  to collect quite a few followers in the process. His activities
  attract the attention of the entrenched civil and religious
  authorities, who regard him as a subversive and have him
  executed. A brief return to life inspires his followers to
  continue to spread his teachings, which they travel far and
  wide to do. The work ends with a positively psychedelic
  description of how things will end up when the Almighty
  calls in the chips.

Most of Poe. The Raven is no ornithological treatise, and The Telltale
Heart is no teen romannce (I hardly have to describe what they are!).

_Invisible_Man_, by Ralph Ellison.  An impressionable young man is recruited
by the Communist Party, serves briefly as a rabble-rouser.  Discovering his
identity in a sweet potato, he ends by finding enlightenment as a hermit
hiding in a basement.

[Re WONDERLAND, I should've said "anorexic" instead of "vegetarian."  
I remember going through a phase while I was reading it where the 
thought of eating anything made me sick.  A very brief phase, 
admittedly.  Where on earth does Oates get her ideas?] 

   THE AMBITIOUS GUEST, by Nathaniel Hawthorne.  A family who live 
   in a house at the bottom of a mountain valley take in a young 
   stranger on a rainy night.  They're talking about their hopes and 
   plans for the future when the avalanche hits.  

   BIRDS OF AMERICA, by Mary McCarthy.  The misadventures of an 
   American student in Paris during the 1968 student riots there.  

   THE COURAGE TO HEAL, by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis.  A book that 
   encourages women who had normal childhoods to imagine that they 
   were sexually abused by their parents, and then to spend the rest 
   of their lives sick with shame and guilt.  

   THE NAME OF THE ROSE, by Umberto Eco.  Sherlock Holmes and Watson 
   as monks solving a multiple-murder case in a medieval Italian 
   monastery.  

   THE VANISHING RED, by Robert Frost.  A miller shoves the last 
   Indian in town down into the mill's wheel pit, where the Indian 
   is ground into mincemeat.  

Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" is a creapy little story.

https://flightline.highline.edu/tkim/Files/Lit100_SS2.pdf

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