New Spring is a prequel more than a stand-alone. It's end is 20 years before
Eye of the World. I don't think it'd make much sense reading it and then not reading the rest.
I haven't read those Feist books Cleburne mentions, so I have to assume that while set in the same world, they don't
demand having read any of the others. Although I suspect that you wouldn't read them anyway if you hadn't.
Silmarillion too. (Quite impenetrable.
)
Delany's books tend to be stand-alone.
Dhalgren,
Nova,
Fall of the Towers(?) for example,
The Einstein Intersection for another. (Oh...I see you have Dhalgren there.)
Classics like
Invasion of the Body-Snatchers,
Day of the Triffids, Priest's
Inverted World (I know Danlo loves that one.
) Most anything written in the Golden Age, with the exception maybe of Asimov and Herbert tended toward stand-alones. And they both had plenty of them too, as well as their more famous series. Clifford D Simak's famous
Ring Around The Sun and
All Flesh Is Grass. (I'm just naming stuff randomly here.
)
Hubbard's
Battlefield Earth is a good hard sci-fi standalone, William Gibsons novels...
Virtual Light,
Count Zero.
As for King, with a few exceptions, like the DT series, most of his books can be read as stand-alones. Even though things like
The Stand,
Insomnia and
Salem's Lot are connected, reading all the myriad of connections is not really necessary at all to enjoy the books. Hell, many of them were written before even
he knoew they would be connected.
And even completely stand-alone one's like
Carrie,
Christine, etc. are often mentioned in other books. Many of which afterall took place in the same "district" and even town.
--A