Fiction - Absurdist

Boris Leonidovich, a North American professor who specializes in the history of prison architecture, has been invited to Buenos Aires for an academic conference. He's planning to present a paper on Moscow's feared Butyrka prison, but most of all he's looking forward to seeing...

From the creator of the HBO series Bored to Death, the story of a young alcoholic writer and his personal valet, a hilarious homage to the Bertie and Jeeves novels of P.G. Wodehouse. Alan Blair, the hero of Wake Up, Sir , is a...

Excerpts from Russell Edson's first novel, Gulping's Recital, appeared in The Moderns: An Anthology of New World Writing, edited by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones at the time) and published by Corinth Books in 1963. That was a year prior to the New Directions publication...

Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.From the bestselling author of The Hundred-Year Flood comes an incredibly entertaining and profoundly affecting tour de force about a Korean American man's strange and ordinary attempts to exist.Matt Kim is always tired. He keeps passing out. His...

'A seductive blend of Samuel Beckett, Pauline R饌ge and pure madness.' Stewart HomeFrom mid-century working-class experimentalist Ann Quin, author of Berg, comes this poetic, erotic and psychologically charged mystery.Author: Ann QuinISBN-10: 1911508938ISBN-13: 9781911508939Publisher: And Other StoriesLanguage: EnglishPublished: 02/02/2021Pages: 160Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.35lbsSize: 7.70h x 5.00w...

Part revenge tale, part fairytale, The Harpy is an electrifying story of marriage, infidelity and power by the author of the #1 Indie Next Pick, The End We Start From, Megan Hunter Lucy and Jake live in a house by a field where the...

In the words of the late Walker Percy, William Gass is a "totally committed, totally uncompromising, and extraordinarily gifted writer." His latest work is a suite of four novellas that explore Mind, Matter, and God. In the title story, God is a writer in...

Ideas are dangerous . . .James Appleby's career as a social historian is drifting into mediocrity until the phone call that changes his life forever.Appleby uncovers a dangerous secret hidden deep in a chest of 400-year-old documents. To his horror, its discovery ignites a...

The Flaneur is a collection of short stories that take place at a cafe; each story is a conversation overheard from the perspective of the narrator (The Flaneur), ranging from the mundane day-to-day to the downright absurd. The characters in each story search for...

The beloved author of The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared returns with an enchanting adventure that skewers the greed and hypocrisy that dominates our time and holds lessons about what's truly important in life.Meet Ole Mbatian Jr., a Maasai...

He fantasizes about saving damsels in distress and battling beasts. He'd better be careful what he wishes for... Will Kirby has hit his mid-life crisis at full speed. Once a rugged outdoorsman, he's now soft around the middle and trapped in the banality of...

You can read this novel for its silliness & absurdity. Its author uses every trick in the book - and a few uniquely his own-to keep the laughs coming. You don't have to take this novel seriously. You may enjoy merely for the fun...

From the internationally bestselling author of Disquiet, a brilliant political allegory that vividly illustrates how capitalism and authoritarianism harm us and the environment. Having failed to hold onto power after an ironfisted first term, the former President moves to a secluded island and decides...

A Man in the Zoo (1924) is a novel by David Garnett. Published several years after Garnett was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Hawthornden Prize for Lady into Fox (1922), his third novel explores themes of race and empire while...

2022 QUILL & QUIRE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEARSHORTLISTED FOR THE 30TH ANNUAL HAMILTON LITERARY FICTION AWARDA bold and absurd new take on the dystopian plague novel, where people are treated like IKEA furniture Distraught and hopeless, an eighteen-year-old distance runner, Regan, decides to...

The Dying Fetus that started it all is back with a vengeance!True Fiction is an ongoing collection of short fiction and novellas. Volume One consists of three novellas that make up one crazy story. It begins with "Dying Fetus," a simple tale of a...

Didier Rain is broke, lovesick, and just off a three-day whiskey binge. And yet, The Church of the Restructured Truth has been told in a vision that he's the man to fulfill their Holy Prophecy. He must deliver Virtue - a blue-eyed infant -...

"Joanna Ruocco's Dan is a tiny novel that packs a massive punch." --Bustle Melba Zuzzo, erstwhile innocent of the male-heavy hamlet of Dan, a town located in the foothills of ... somewhere? ... finds herself in a rut. In fact she was probably born...

"Nails" Robakoski is unraveling after his girlfriend Magda dumps him. A tracksuited slacker who spends most of his time doing little more than searching for his next line of speed and dreaming up conspiracy theories about the Polish economy, Nails ricochets from Magda, a...

Will Self has established himself as one of the most brilliant, daring, and inventive writers of his generation. My Idea of Fun is Will Self's highly acclaimed first novel. The story of a devilishly clever international financier/marketing wizard and his young apprentice, My Idea...

What is there is only a limited amount of sanity in the world and the real reason people go mad is because somebody has to? What if a mysterious tribe in the Amazon rainforest turn out to be the most boring people on earth?...

In this novelistic romp that is by turns hilarious and brilliant, John Barth spoofs his own place in the pantheon of contemporary fiction and the generation of writers who have followed his literary trailblazing. Coming Soon!!! is the tale of two writers: an older,...

A mysterious man appears suspended in the air above a major American city. A foul-mouthed posse of machete-wielding scoundrels wreak havoc on a small-town mayor. A cocaine-addled boxer starts a torrid affair with the wife of the Invisible Man-who just might be watching (and...

Written in 1914, The Trial is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K, an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did...

Sugar Land is the southern story of Nana Dara, a prison cook at the Imperial State Prison Farm for men in 1923, who-with the help of the blues singer Lead Belly-discovers how to break out of her own physical and emotional prison to become...

A Summer/Fall 2018 Indies Introduce Debut Fiction SelectionWhen Samuel Johnson dies, he finds himself in the body of the man who killed him, unable to depart this world but determined, at least, to return to the son he left behind. Moving from body to...

"Verica Gerber writes with a luminous intimacy; her novel is clever, vibrant, moving, profoundly original. Reading it made me feel as if the world had been rebuilt." --Francisco Goldman"From the very beginning, Verica Gerber set out to write a novel that would end up...

A book of mourning told through a coolly evocative series of life (and death) vignettes, from a lauded French writer, now in English for the first time; #34;Six Feet Under" meets Georges PerecAuthor: Val駻ie Mr駛enISBN-10: 1944700900ISBN-13: 9781944700904Publisher: Deep Vellum PublishingLanguage: EnglishPublished: 10/15/2019Pages: 80Format: PaperbackWeight:...

"An intriguing take on crime/noir writing, this collection of 40 very short stories by leading and emerging literary voices . . . investigates crimes both real and imagined. Despite their diminutive size, these tales promise to pack a punch." --Chicago Tribune Forty very short...

The latest work in English by renowned Peruvian-Mexican cult writer Mario Bellatin, a short, allegorical novel that questions truth, art, language, and the split between East and West.Author: Mario BellatinISBN-10: 1646050290ISBN-13: 9781646050291Publisher: Deep Vellum PublishingLanguage: EnglishPublished: 12/22/2020Pages: 112Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.25lbsSize: 6.90h x 4.90w x...

The Little Buddhist Monk is a story of Asian invention gone wild, as a diminutive Korean Buddhist monk acts as a tour guide to an increasingly distraught French couple on a working vacation in the Far East. The Proof brings us quickly back to...

From the brilliant and incisive author of Mislaid--"a writer of extraordinary talent and range" (Jonathan Franzen) whose "capacity for inventions is immense" (BookForum)--comes a new collection of her earliest work: two wildly funny novellas (Sailing Towards the Sunset by Avner Shats and European Story...

A selection of short stories.Library Girl. Departure, Flagrant. Ecstatic. Pretty Vroom. 74.Tantalizing thrills too far. Alluring Macau.Inviting Tiger love wealth death.An Irresistible woman... exotic so far.Devotion, chasing a persuasive mystic fortune. Author: Les CookISBN-10: 1999002342ISBN-13: 9781999002343Publisher: Les CookLanguage: EnglishPublished: 03/18/2022Pages: 142Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.35lbsSize: 8.00h...

In Chicago, a secret L train runs through the mythical East Side of the city. On that train, you'll find a house-cat conductor, an alcoholic elf, a queen of the last city farm, the most curious wind, and an exceptional girl by the name...

Wilkes' debut is a rich and heartfelt yarn that resonates as deeply as his music." --Kirkus ReviewsWith the energy, wit, and singularity of vision that have earned him a reputation as a celebrated and charismatic musician, The Vine That Ate the South announces J.D....

A debut story collection of darkly humorous, feminist speculative fiction from the Balkans.Author: Asja BakicISBN-10: 1936932482ISBN-13: 9781936932481Publisher: Feminist PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 03/12/2019Pages: 144Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.45lbsSize: 8.00h x 5.20w x 0.70dReview Citation(s): Kirkus Reviews 01/01/2019Publishers Weekly 02/04/2019Shelf Awareness 03/15/2019

"A postmodern masterwork that outdoes Pynchon in eccentricity--and electricity, with all its dazzling prose." --Kirkus Reviews, Starred ReviewAfter a domestic terrorist unleashes a dirty bomb in Manhattan in 1970, making the borough uninhabitable, FBI agent Uli Sarkisian finds himself in a world that is...

A missing laptop, a petulant critic, a sojourn in communal living--Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love is a bracingly intelligent examination of grief, autonomy, aging, desire, information overload, and the condition of being a thinking and feeling inhabitant of an often...

Spectacular, genre-defying stories, including the reimagining of Lee Harvey Oswald's murder as an attempt to create generation-defining performance art.Author: Robert TrammellISBN-10: 1646050495ISBN-13: 9781646050499Publisher: Deep Vellum PublishingLanguage: EnglishPublished: 12/07/2021Pages: 308Format: PaperbackWeight: 1.05lbsSize: 8.40h x 5.50w x 1.00dReview Citation(s): Publishers Weekly 11/01/2021

Four writers, four different perspectives on the problematic notion of purity. All purity is created by resemblance and disavowal. With this sentence as a starting point, four authors each write a novella considering the concept of purity, all from astonishingly different angles. Jean Marc...

In a parallel or future Estonia, whose language has been outlawed and its native population deported after the invasion by the Russian Tsardom, Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol is resurrected, Christ-like, bringing phantasmagoric mayhem to the sleepy town of Viljandi.By the end of the story, four...

"A singular novel." --Lydia Davis, author of Can't and Won't and Essays One"An exhilarating adventure " --Alberto Manguel, author of The Library at Night and Fabulous Monsters"Extraordinary. . . . Brings to mind the great mushroom scenes of the film Phantom Thread. How not...

An "exceptional" (Los Angeles Times) tale of fate, loyalty, responsibility, and the real meaning of freedom, from the author of the forthcoming 4 3 2 1: A Novel A finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award This "rich and dazzling" (Wall Street Journal) novel follows Jim...

Peter Weiss's first prose work, The Shadow of the Coachman's Body, was unanimously praised as an original and perfect work of art by critics when it appeared in 1960. Here, in poet Rosmarie Waldrop's stunning translation, Weiss arranges a dark, vividly alive comedy of...

The standalone follow up to Shadows of the Short Days is a gritty, dark fantasy novel for fans of China Mieville and Neil Gaiman, that will thrill readers as they explore Hrimland's dark, horrifying depths. CHANGE DOES NOT ALWAYS HAPPEN FOR THE BETTER. War...

This comic novel by renowned Norwegian writer Jens Bj rneboe follows the exploits of a community of expatriates living off-season in a small Italian fishing village: their lives, loves, and interactions with the locals, including involvement in a dispute between the fishermen and the...

This bawdy, high-spirited novel--whose author, Laurence Sterne, was described by Diderot as "the Rabelais of the English"--provoked a literary scandal when its first two volumes were published in 1759. A masterpiece of narrative absurdity, ribald humor, and philosophical playfulness, Tristram Shandy is famously studded...

Set during World War I, this monumental philosophical novel about human despair inspired Albert Camus' own writing and prefigured the greater existential movement. Blood Dark tells the story of a brilliant philosopher trapped in a provincial town and of his spiraling descent into self-destruction....

In this satirical, phantasmagorical novel by a star of contemporary Russian literature, Lipskerov writes about an aging man trying to find his place in modern society despite significant damage to his ego... and his "tool."Author: Dmitry LipskerovISBN-10: 1646050398ISBN-13: 9781646050390Publisher: Deep Vellum PublishingLanguage: EnglishPublished: 01/12/2021Pages:...

Do you like escape? From self-imposed retreat to world venture.Travel with a freethinking man, and a woman free to think. Year 2000. Isolation Spa - Art of Confusion.Damascus - Peshawar - Kashgar.Bratislava - Vancouver - Phnom Penh.And the lot in-between. Author: Les CookISBN-10: 1999002334ISBN-13:...