Fiction - Absurdist

Being a teenager is awkward. Being a teenager when you're attracted to your aunt is even more awkward. Being a teenager when you're attracted to your aunt who happens to be a seventies pin-up poster hanging in your uncle's bathroom is almost unbearable. Aunt...

The only acting credit on the back of Stan Pavlov's headshot is "appeared in court". But one day, his life takes an unexpected change - for the worse - when his beloved Dog inadvertently gets cast in the commercial Stan was auditioning for. Pavlov's...

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book in Translation of 2019Zs fia Ban's Night School: A Reader for Adults uses a textbook format to build an encyclopedia of life--subject by subject, from self-help to geography to chemistry to French. With subtle irony, Ban's collection of "lectures"...

"I'm a connoisseur of the unwanted; a sommelier of deformity; a coveter of the unloved. I am forever chased by the shadow of my ugliness. In darkness, no shadow remains, and it's all diamonds." Buddy Hayes is an ugly, defiant little man, a would-be...

"[A] dystopian novel too close to today's political world..." -Lea Wait, USA Today Bestselling author2020 International Book Awards Finalist - Humor2019 Best Book Awards Finalist - HumorLife on Mars takes a satirical look at evolution vs. Intelligent Design - a sort of feint by...

Theres no business like show business, and Arturo Hammer knows that firsthand. From the hard-drinking fields of Northern California, to the soft entertainment fields of Hollywood, and from the orchards of the Big Apple to the jungles of Indochina, Hammer goes on a drug-fueled,...

"An incredibly interesting work." --Jane Smiley "A straight up masterwork." --Sarah Silverman "Blisteringly funny." --Corey Seymour "A transcendent apocalyptic satire." --Michael Silverblatt "Crackling with life." --Paul Theroux "Great fun." --Salman Rushdie "A provocative debut." --Kirkus Reviews From legendary actor and activist Sean Penn comes...

Summer is winding down and strange days have hit the town of Needles, Massachusetts. Barry Drinkwater, a pool-boy for his parents, is unsure how to proceed when cryptic messages land in his lap while floating in the backyard. Whenever Barry thinks he is alone,...

Two patrons appear in a dim cafe one day. How they've arrived, where they've come from, and why they're there at all, they have no idea. What they do know is that they hate one another.So they smoke. They tinker. They talk about art....

The debut novel from PEN/Faulkner award-winning author of Call Me Zebra and Savage Tongues is a comic psychological thriller, an absurdist journey into the heart of darkness. A man purchases a house, the house of Fra Keeler, moves in, and begins investigating the circumstances...

Twenty-six weird tales from the underground, ranging from one-page microbursts of energetic prose to longer.Author: Jon LonghiISBN-10: 0916397122ISBN-13: 9780916397128Publisher: Manic D PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 02/01/1991Pages: 128Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.35lbsSize: 8.50h x 5.53w x 0.30d

In this fiendishly original new novel, Mark Leyner is a leather-blazer-wearing, Piranha 793-driving, narcotic-guzzling monster who has potential rivals eliminated by his bionically enhanced bodyguards, has his internal organs tattooed, and eavesdrops on the erotic fantasies of Victoria's Secret models -- which naturally revolve...

AN EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY HARDCOVER CLASSIC. Ivan Goncharov's 1859 masterpiece--a magnificent farce about a gentleman who spends the better part of his life in bed--brilliantly employs humor to explore the absurdities and injustices of an outmoded social order. Ilya Ilyich Oblomov is a good-hearted nobleman...

GET SHORTY MEETS THE BIG LEBOWSKI IN THIS ROLLICKING MODERN COMEDY BY A CLEVER AND HILARIOUS NEWCOMER. Meet Wally Moscowitz. His day job is top secret. As ghostwriter for Oral B, the most famous gangsta rapper in the world, Wally is the real mastermind...

Philip Horkman is a happy man, the owner of a pet store called The Wine Shop, and on Sundays a referee for a local kids' soccer league. Jeffrey Peckerman is the proud and loving father of a star athlete in the girls' ten-and-under soccer...

Fun and puns mingle with daring make-believe. Larger-than-life characters play out the crucial human questions: How do we live? How do we handle our demons?Author: Stephen DobynsISBN-10: 0393312127ISBN-13: 9780393312126Publisher: W. W. Norton & CompanyLanguage: EnglishPublished: 02/01/1995Pages: 430Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.91lbsSize: 8.27h x 5.45w x 1.08dReview...

Michel Faber's short stories are markedly diverse-the voice of each is so distinct that the book reads like an anthology of different writers. But Faber's radically inventive style fastens all fifteen stories into a compelling collection deserving of the high praise it garnered in...

This is a short story collection. Not just any short story collection but an assortment of odds and ends that I have written in the last few years trying to get published in magazines. A Beautiful Day in a Perfect World - Bob wants...

A New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceA Belletrist Book Club Pick An elegant, razor-sharp debut about women's ambitions and appetites--and the truth about having it all Outside of a childhood nickname she can't shake, Piglet's rather pleased with how her life's turned out....

"A book that belongs on the same shelf as Italo Calvino's "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, " Nabokov's "Pale Fire", and several works by Zoran Zivkovic, Stanislaw Lem and David Markson." -- Michael Dirda, The Washington Post A collection of entrancing literary...

They tell us the journey is the destination. It is not. It's the other way... The destination is where the journey takes place. That destination, it is escape from The White Curtain. In order to live the life we want, we must have the...

They're not exactly the A-Team ...Benjamin was never the sharpest tool in the shed. For as long as he can remember, he's longed for adventure in far-away lands. But every day he wakes up in the same boring suburb, where nothing ever happens. He...

Roger Boylan's first novel, Killoyle, established him as a brilliant successor to such Irish masters as Joyce, Beckett, and J. P. Donleavy. Now his new farce follows the hapless inhabitants of Killoyle, Ireland, through the frenetic week of the Pint-Pulling Olympiad. After local lush...

A bracing satire about the implosion of a Theranos-like company, a collapsing marriage, and a billionaires' "philanthropy summit," for fans of Hari Kunzru and The White Lotus. In 72 hours, a blockbuster exposé will reveal Victoria Stevens's multibillion-dollar startup as a massive fraud. And...

The oft-used adjectives--"rollicking," "uproarious," "zany," etc.--don't half do justice to the world John Andrew Fredrick has created in his The King of Good Intentions trilogy. In this, the final volume of the series, the author's madcap, kaleidoscopic, dazzling take on love (and love triangles)...

NINE STRAY SHOTS In these nine short stories, absurdity undermines the foundations of reality until there is no turning back: A boy gets trapped between the walls of a building. / Five friends establish a new country inside their apartment and set out to...

BOBBY KAYE's life story started and ended with an e-mail and then the monkey dung hit the fan. We're talking blue plague monkeys, tulwar-swinging cab drivers, a ride-on mower caravan of unbridled mass consumption and a moon-infatuated eight-legged story-telling spider god going toe-to-toe-to-toe-toe with...

Telepathic hospice workers... a Danish prince haunted by his immortality... a naked mercenary with the ultimate bioweapon... a ghostly gunslinger in a showdown with the Devil's bandits... a writer losing his dog and his mind... a wormhole with a cure to every human ill...Slippery...

Written in A/B rhyme scheme, The Pallid Express follows a young man on a journey of exploration through the absurdity, the complexity, the lies, and the truth of this reality. Embark on a captivating adventure alongside a young boy named Elbert. Disenchanted with the...

If the part of you that caused self-doubt had a face, would you recognize it? If your tendency to self-destruct had a name, would you know it? Told with humor, empathy and a driving narrative, Mountain Lion Blues is a surreal, dark comedy about...

A gay man and a black woman meet in the woods outside Leadville, Colorado. Well, they don't really meet. They run into each other when the gay man (Quincy) is running from the cult of Tree Tree McForest Face and the black woman (Maya)...

Wickedly dark with a mystical edge, this story of an Italian love affair gone bad captures the irresistible pull of toxic relationships--from the acclaimed author of Carnality. A woman arrives in Florence, overwhelmed by the strange, warm city so different from her home. Amidst...

"White Fuzz is a weird sort of love story between two deeply disturbed individuals, each a product of their isolated environment. It's not an easy read. It's shocking, gross, and horrifying. Manages to check off every trigger! You've been warned." Franklin feels alone in...

A daring, hilariously neurotic literary debut from the acclaimed actor and comedian Brett Gelman (Stranger Things, Fleabag).Enter the wonderfully weird, always uncomfortable, side-splittingly funny world of The Terrifying Realm of the Possible, where your worst fears of who you are or might become are...

A whirlwind tour of San Francisco's fabled queer bohemia in the waning days of the 20th century, as the city's budget bon vivants work to save their eccentric lifestyles in the face of tech gentrification by LAMBDA award finalist Alvin Orloff.Harris, San Francisco's most...

Mahmoud Shukair's first major publication in English translation enthralls, surprises and shocks as one of the world's most original of storytellers excels in exposing the surreal moments in the ordinary and the mundane, the limits of human frustration and patience, and the intricacies of...

Roy Scranton, controversial and critically-acclaimed, brings us a formally daring road trip into the heart of present-day America. When Suzie is offered the chance to work with a maverick cinematographer on his road-trip movie about Donald Trump's America, she's pretty sure it's a bad...

The debut issue of Ghoulish Tales features stories by Robert Nazar Arjoyan, Barbara Castro-Rojas, Clay McLeod Chapman, Chloe Harper Gold, Rae Knowles, Angela Liu, Nina Maar, and Betty Rocksteady. Also includes articles by Nicholas A. Battaglia and Lor Gislason.Author: Max BoothISBN-10: 1943720916ISBN-13: 9781943720910Publisher: Ghoulish...

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was a prolific German-speaking Bohemian author based in Prague, now widely regarded as one of the principal literary figures of the 20th century. His stories, infused with acute realism and the absurdly fantastic, often feature isolated protagonists facing bizarre, surrealistic predicaments...

To whom do we owe our intended good nature? Where do we scrape the courage to engage others in cynical pursuits? Arnold Esche, the sole possessor of an acclaimed media giant guides his readers and woefully employed into a world that all believe to...

Award-winning stories cast an absurd, fantastical view of the quotidian world, with characters that twist the very fabric of reality.Author: Zach PowersISBN-10: 1942683375ISBN-13: 9781942683377Publisher: BOA EditionsLanguage: EnglishPublished: 05/16/2017Pages: 176Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.48lbsSize: 7.90h x 5.20w x 0.70dReview Citation(s): Publishers Weekly 03/20/2017Kirkus Reviews 03/15/2017 pg. 35

Our English Bull Terrier hero and his master Bud continue their hilarious antics in this latest installment of Spike the Wonder Dog's adventures. This laugh-out-loud novel, with its interwoven and inventive plotlines, could be called Game of Bones. In the midst of being ensnared...

Crater Omen, a madman jilted by cosmic betrayal, sets loose a chain reaction at the center of the galaxy that threatens existence itself, only to find something lurking there that he hadn't bargained for. Meanwhile, his twin brother Oort desperately tries to hold on...

An absurdly dark tragi-comedy of language and literature. Czeslaw Przęśnicki is an Eastern-European immigrant writer who survived the long toilet paper lines of communist Poland, the loss of his lover Ernest Hemingway following a passionate affair, and the beatings of the Antarctic literary community...

The end of the road for Moldenke?The Death of a Character is cult author David Ohle's mordant meditation on the trials of the flesh, of bureaucracy, and tenderness. In the company of and old flame, and the neutrodynes Wheaton and Darleen, Moldenke retires to...

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Loss. Grief. Centipedes. Silence. The word "no." The word "yes." A high school poetry contest that may or may not be linked to the end of the world. The characters in this collection are under attack. A grief-baffled son hopes to save an innocent...

"Leaping, chattering, dancing atop this conundrum [of global migration] comes the hero of Celina Baljeet Basra's debut novel, Happy Singh Soni, his head bursting with ideas, his heart set on gargantuan dreams."--New York Times "Bighearted."--New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice/Staff Pick ★Publishers Weekly...

High on an island hilltop sits a wood and glass fortress. Built for a genius, it once dominated the surrounding population, human and otherwise. Now an object of ridicule, it houses a lonely recluse barricaded in an attic, terrorized by the possibility of contact...

For over 20 years, Carlton Mellick III has been writing some of the strangest and most compelling novels the bizarro fiction genre has to offer. Described as one of the top 40 science-fiction writers under the age of 40 by The Guardian and "one...