Fiction - Absurdist

A punky, raw novel of millenial disaffection, trauma and 1960s cinemaMargot is the child of renowned musicians and the product of a particularly punky upbringing. Burnt-out from the burden of expectation and the bad end of the worst relationship yet, she leaves New York...

"A story of madness, art, alcohol and creativity...elegantly translated...vivid." --New York Times An exasperated writer obsessed with American cinema embarks on an increasingly bizarre journey in this heady, engrossing novel. A man writes an enormous screenplay on the life of Herman Melville. Not a...

Literary Latin American FLATLINERS: a smart, engrossing, and darkly funny novel experimenting with where life and love begin and end.Author: Roque LarraquyISBN-10: 1566895154ISBN-13: 9781566895156Publisher: Coffee House PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 07/10/2018Pages: 152Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.30lbsSize: 7.80h x 5.10w x 0.90dReview Citation(s): Publishers Weekly 04/16/2018

Winner of the 2020 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation PrizeThe Fox and Dr. Shimamura toothsomely encompasses East and West, memory and reality, fox-possession myths, and psychiatric mythmaking. As an outstanding young Japanese medical student at the end of the nineteenth century, Dr. Shimamura is...

Originally published in 1969 and now back in print after over a decade, Robert Coover's first novel instantly established his mastery. A coal-mine explosion in a small mid-American town claims ninety-seven lives. The only survivor, a lapsed Catholic given to mysterious visions, is adopted...

"The President Shop is a marvelous, timeless book that sweeps between the personal and the panoramic as it asks, Does every family, or country, contain an axis, around which the rest of it spins? Can you hear the voice of a stone? How clearly...

"Show Them a Good Time is a master class in the short story-bold, irreverent and agonizingly funny." Sally Rooney, Author of Normal People and Conversations with FriendsNamed A Most Anticipated Novel of 2020 byEntertainment Weekly * Marie Claire * Wall Street Journal * The...

Ken Wilber's latest book is a daring departure from his previous writings--a highly original work of fiction that combines brilliant scholarship with tongue-in-cheek storytelling to present the integral approach to human development that he expounded in more conventional terms in his recent A Theory...

Gulliver's Travels meets The Underground Railroad: a road trip through the countryside - and the psyche - by the author of Fifteen Dogs. Botanist Alfred Homer, ever hopeful and constantly surprised, is invited on a road trip by his parents' friend, Professor Morgan Bruno,...

Bob Honey Sings Jimmy Crack Corn--the madcap follow-up to his debut novel, which was hailed by authors as diverse as Salman Rushdie, Jane Smiley, and Paul Theroux --explores the deepest recesses of American politics and culture. Bob Honey, the disillusioned divorcee with a penchant...

The natural successor to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg collection, Caves of the Rust Belt: Ohio Stories travels to the Heart of It All, where drowned sailors reminisce over a hot meal, and the rules of the yard sale are law. In his stunning debut, Joe...

Fitzgerald's characters in this novel are complex, especially with respect to marriage and intimacy. The work is generally considered to have drawn upon and be based on Fitzgerald's relationship and marriage with his wife Zelda Fitzgerald. The Beautiful and Damned tells the story of...

When we last saw our hero he had taken to his bed in England, his beloved home in Tuscany having inexplicably capsized into a ravine. As Rancid Pansies opens, Samper is recuperating in Sussex at the home of the famous conductor Max Christ when...

The Dark Secrets of Barth and Williams College is a rabbithole into a world where common sense characters are helpless in the face of hyperbolic depravity. Get ready to be transported to the seedy underbelly of Lutheran academia. The journey is no less hilarious...

In the beltline of a run-of-the-mill metropolis, an apartment complex called Cambrian Court has become the focal point of an outlandish unfurling, where even the laws of physics are becoming questioned. Embroiled within this psychic plot are three neighbours who are strangers to one...

"If Kafka got it on with Flannery O' Connor, Pinkies would be their love child." -Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Small Backs of ChildrenIn Shane Hinton's debut story collection, gritty Florida realism collides with the absurd, and fears of fatherhood materialize in surreal scenarios....

Basil the demon king has come to a crossroads. He has grown tired of life underground and regretful of the atrocities he has committed to maintain his hold on power. Wanderlust leads him to the surface, to live freely among humans. Considering the state...

Mister Posted, the stoic horseman of Famine, and Sharon, the fiery, sharp-tongued Brain Freeze Goddess, are back! One year has elapsed since the events of Mister Posted and the Brain Freeze Goddess, plenty of time to establish a routine. Mister Posted is still traveling...

Phil Ochs has his troubles. His adult son is a failed artist who's targeting him in a terroristic poetry campaign, his wife has developed an addiction to As Seen On TV gadgets, and a professional rival is poaching managers from his seventeen Fry Buddy...

Set in the 1950's, this epic, Warholian novel presents a brilliant and wholly original take on the years leading up to the Kennedy assassination.Where were you when you first heard President Kennedy had been shot? This is a question most people can answer, even...

"Did you know most anything that matters in this city was built by magic before it was built by men? Of course you didn't. This city is different from other cities. The true history of it is unpublished. Lucky for you, I know it...

The Sunday of Life (Le Dimanche de la vie), the late Raymond Queneau's tenth novel, was first published in French by Gallimard in 1951 and is now appearing for the first time in this country, in a translation by Barbara Wright. Critics are universally...

In 1964, with the stories of Gogol's Wife, New Directions introduced English language readers to the indelibly strange Italian master Tommaso Landolfi. Each tale is more astonishing than the next (what with a sacrilegious ape and an inflatable wife), though the stories are all...

An eccentric novelist begins to keep a notebook of handwriting exercises, hoping that if he's able to improve his penmanship, his personal character will also improve. What begins as a mere physical exercise becomes involuntarily colored by humorous reflections and tender anecdotes about living,...

Praise for Sam Savage: "Savage's is a book of the heart as much as the head. Which is itself an accomplishment of no small note: to recognize the arbitrary, degraded thing that is memory, and allow it its loveliness for all of that." --New...

The end of the world is the least of the problems facing Gaspard Boisvert, erstwhile advisor to "the stupidest American president in history," when he discovers that he may share the genes of a certain, infamous Austrian corporal, thanks to a dalliance on the...

Winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize One of BuzzFeed's Fifteen Small Press Books To Kick Off Your 2020 Reading Season A fastidious pet robot with a knack for knitting. A soporific giant pitching camp in the middle of a city. A mysterious mime...

Wholesome but gullible weekend market goers from the city face chaos and trauma at the organic strawberry u-pick farm. A student illegally backpacks through Cuba, attends a Santer a party, and wakes up with a horrible, mysterious illness and paralysis, uncertain of the true...

A uniquely humorous and deeply profound novel from a legendary stand-up comedian that follows the thoughts of a 1960s third grader during a single day at school. Steven Wright is one of the most significant and influential stand-up comedians in history. Rolling Stone ranked...

"Scapellato's blend of existential noir, absurdist humor, literary fiction, and surreal exploration of performance art merges into something special. . . . The Made-Up Man is a rare novel that is simultaneously smart and entertaining." --Gabino Iglesias, NPRStanley had known it was a mistake...

In three comic novellas, three unlikely hero-narrators insist their respective ways into revisionist stories --- imagined or real --- of rescue, resistance and ironic retribution. Darkly funny and politically urgent, their clumsy, self-conscious if sincere attempts answer our absurdly sadistic recent civic despair with...

One of the most remarkably inventive voices of his generation, author Will Self delivers a stunning work of fiction. In Walking to Hollywood, a British writer named Will Self goes on a quest through L.A. freeways and eroding English cliffs, skewering celebrity as he...

Renegade artist Harp Spillman is lower than a bow-legged fire ant. Because of an unhealthy relationship with the bottle, he's ruined his reputation as one of the South's preeminent commissioned metal sculptors. And his desperate turn to ice sculpting nearly led to a posse...

What if zombies and leprechauns inhabited the same universe? What if The Wind in the Willows were faced with the horrors of the Lovecraft Mythos? Worlds Collide endeavors to answer these questions and several more in a collection of short stories containing knights, elves,...

New short stories from Through the Looking-Glass worlds of Alice Liddell & Charles DobsonAuthor: Caroline WayISBN-10: 1291660151ISBN-13: 9781291660159Publisher: Lulu.comLanguage: EnglishPublished: 07/27/2021Pages: 88Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.25lbsSize: 8.27h x 5.83w x 0.18d

The book we didn't know we needed - hilarious and action-packed, this novel has you laughing and crying well into the night. Read with caution.Joe Vallen is a normal author - our world's JV, anyway. The Joe Vallen of our novel is the most...

Eager to learn the rules of magic, Lucius agrees to participate in a shapeshifting spell that suddenly goes awry, transforming the man into a donkey. His life is abruptly upended as he is attacked, stolen and sold multiple times before finding relief through divine...

It was the end of 1999 and the world was anxiously anticipating a new century while John Hammond was reluctantly celebrating a childhood goal - to live one hundred years.Few people realized that John was the last living member of the legendary Hammond Family....

In a dilapidated trailer park in rural 1990's Pennsylvania, whiskey-soaked Weezal Peterson works hard to forget his past-and largely succeeds. That is until he's targeted by Maisey, a smart and resourceful young woman on a mission to put a lifetime of poverty and domestic...

Eager to learn the rules of magic, Lucius agrees to participate in a shapeshifting spell that suddenly goes awry, transforming the man into a donkey. His life is abruptly upended as he is attacked, stolen and sold multiple times before finding relief through divine...

Elf privilege. Marginalized mermaids. Woke trolls. Pumpkin fairy reparations...Welcome to the chaotic kingdom of Fantasmagoria, where an inquisition for absolute equity rages and the masses combat all forms of social injustice by any means necessary. Elves are burned at the stake for suggesting there...

Elf privilege. Marginalized mermaids. Woke trolls. Pumpkin fairy reparations...Welcome to the chaotic kingdom of Fantasmagoria, where an inquisition for absolute equity rages and the masses combat all forms of social injustice by any means necessary. Elves are burned at the stake for suggesting there...

In What are the Chances? Robert Scotellaro once again secures his place as a solid master of micro-fiction. Each story an adventure with the likes of rogue Uber drivers, breakdancing butchers, and skydiving grandmas. Each story told with the ever-present undertone of Scotellaro wisdom...

Once Upon a Fable is a lively collection of seven compelling and comforting tales with 20/20 vision. There's a solid marriage verging on the rocks; an abandoned baby raven and a family of field mice; a precocious little boy, his strong-willed nanny, and his...

"Andre Duza is one of the most exciting new voices in horror fiction. His prose hits like a fist of razor blades. Get in line early, and enjoy the hell out of the ride." - Brian Keene, author of The RisingWhen the cops were...

Bob Honey Sings Jimmy Crack Corn--the madcap follow-up to his debut novel, which was hailed by authors as diverse as Salman Rushdie, Jane Smiley, and Paul Theroux --explores the deepest recesses of American politics and culture. Bob Honey, the disillusioned divorcee with a penchant...

For fans of China Mieville and Neil Gaiman. A tale of revolution in a Reykjavik fuelled by industrialised magic, populated by humans, dimensional exiles, otherworldly creatures, psychoactive graffiti and demonic familiars. A tale of revolution in a Reykjavik fuelled by industrialised magic, populated by...

An inventor living at the beginning of the Enlightenment keeps journals reflecting on everything from his inventive lovemaking to his discovery of the first binary code, caffeine stimulation, the insanity defense, and the memory of birds.First published in 1996 to international acclaim, Eric Darton's...

A puzzling mystery and the last, unfinished work by Georges Perec--a writer Italo Calvino called, "One of the most singular literary personalities in the world." The narrator, a teacher in a tropical French colony, is trying to track down the famous crime-writer Robert Serval,...

Over 650 Vietnam War novels have been published, mostly dark tales from the war zone. In Wild Blue Yonder, Airman Nathaniel Hawthorne Flowers goes not to Vietnam but Germany, straight into a military Catch-22. His assignment: writing stories for the Stars and Stripes newspaper...