In what follows I discuss unreadability and its relation to reading and interpretation of experimental literature. What precisely does unread-ability mean? Where can it be located? How far does it impede reading and can it be overcome? I want to address these questions within the frameworks of narratology and literary pragmatics, and suggest that in some cases, if not most, unreadability is a productive textual quality: it forces the reader to look for new reading strategies. Located in the text and in the reader, unreadability may be described as a reading difficulty as well as its effect. It is produced by complications on the levels of textual comprehension and interpretation. In other words, the reader, if encoun-tering a text that resists sense- making or meaning- making, is faced with a problem of finding reading strategies that would ‘fit’ the given text and help uncover its meaning.I discuss the unreadable in relation to comprehension and inter-pretation, which – inevitably, it seems – will draw on examples from what is considered experimental fiction. I start by looking into the phe-nomena of readability and unreadability, their effects and connotations. To understand the causes of reading difficulties, I then adopt Nils Erik Enkvist’s pragmatic approach towards understanding literature and test it on the examples from Futurist poetry by Mykhajl' Semenko and from Gertrude Stein; these texts are typically considered ‘unreadable’.1Dealing with these texts leads me, in the final part of the chapter, to dis-cuss reading strategies that are at play before, during and after reading unconventional fiction. Some of these strategies, such as naturalization, have already been described in detail but nevertheless need revisiting, and some that have been observed just recently, such as ‘Zen reading’, need closer scrutiny. Essentially, ‘unreadable’ simply means ‘incapable of being read’. This happens, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), because the text is ‘1. Illegible through ill- formed or indistinct characters’, or ‘2. Not interesting, enjoyable, or engaging enough for the reader to continue reading’, or ‘3. Physically inaccessible to a reader’ (OED s.v. ‘unreadable’).2 In literary critical language, however, this qualifier encompasses questions as to why certain texts are more difficult than others to understand and whether these reading difficulties can be overcome, leaving physical illegibility aside. Often used as a synonym for ‘uninterpretable’, ‘unreadable’ also frequently refers to ‘experimen-tal’ (see Federman 24; Orr 131).3 But all three qualifiers escape a more precise description.In search for more precision let me start from the opposite pos-ition: what does it mean if one says that a book is ‘readable’? Readability has many connotations as well: from legibility, comprehensibility, clar-ity, to more subjective judgements of being ‘easy, enjoyable, or interest-ing to read; written in a lively or attractive style’ (OED s.v. ‘readable’). As Raymond Federman, a writer of experimental fiction himself, puts it, readability is ‘what reassures us in a text ... of what we already know, what comforts us because we easily and pleasurably recognize the world (at a glance) and ourselves in the world (at another glance) in what we read’ (26). The pleasure of recognition and familiarity seems to be crucial here. Federman’s formulation of readability reminds us of Jonathan Culler’s description of reading as a process of naturalization.