Fiction - Absurdist

He hates clich駸. It's apparent in every dust-filled corner of his life.While he's pouring one too many drinks, hovering in the airless loop of his apartment to savor every bit of his misery, and pinching his bruised heart whenever memories flood forward, he's chronically...

Set in contemporary times, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming tells the story of a Prince Myshkin-like figure, Baron Béla Wenckheim, who returns at the end of his life to his provincial Hungarian hometown. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was...

Sometimes life throws you curveballs. Jen Guidry thrives in the big city, but her husband Mike finds the bright lights blinding. He moves their family back to the tiny town in Louisiana where he grew up, a place that doesn't even have a coffee...

"A subtly existential collection in which each story defracts, complicates, compliments, and magnifies the others. Intense and satisfying, and very painfully human" -Brian Evenson, author of The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell and Song for the Unraveling of the World"Short-titled and tightly tense, each...

This follows on from Stoned In The Afterlife: A Possible Journey, Part One.Joe continues to question the reality and all that he's experiencing. He maintains that the only way to be sure is to find his wife, and as long as he can't find...

When fourteen seniors from Heaven's Ridge Retirement Home sign up for a weeklong getaway at Mystic Senior Camp, they have no idea what they're in for! They may be wise in years, but these seniors still have a thing or two to learn about...

Combining burlesque absurdism and lofty references to classical literature with a tongue-in-cheek plot about an industrializing rural proletariat, Beyond Tula--subtitled "a Soviet pastoral"-actually appeared in the official Soviet press in 1931. This novel offers an uproarious romp through the earnestly boring and unintentionally campy...

New York Times reporter Harold Carlyle has been on a rocket ride of success. Since publishing an explosive book on the Trump administration's collusion with Russia, he has become a fixture of primetime cable news. But he soon finds that fame has its challenges....

Alexander Haralson, the deranged star of Leonard Borman's eccentric debut novel Our Jewish Robot Future, returns--only slightly more sane-in his new effort, Fix the Roads, as a retired accountant who wants to start a new career as a stand-up comedian. His ambition is to...

The annual magazine of Gateway Literary Press is here, packed full of magically weird fiction and poetry!Author: Joe BaumannISBN-10: 1365360059ISBN-13: 9781365360053Publisher: Lulu.comLanguage: EnglishPublished: 01/31/2023Pages: 98Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.31lbsSize: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.20d

A harrowing adventure of love, horror, comedy, and schmaltzy melodrama... featuring a cast of lovable rabbits and an entourage of crazy characters.Deep in the woods, a warren is preyed upon by a beast known as Jack. As the rabbits struggle to combat their newest...

Phil Bowers was a comedian and jazz trombone player par excellence! He also compiled jokes to use in any and all situations over his 97 years of life as a husband to wife Carolyn, a singer, and the mother of their eight children. (And...

In a future where everyone in the world has been drafted into the military, there is only one enemy left to fight . . . ourselves. Five exhausted soldiers are sitting in the middle of a frozen Arctic wasteland, waiting for something to happen....

Peter travels the world with his guitar and harmonica, searching for a sense of belonging in a remote and mysterious place called Belonging Sun. Along the way, he encounters obstacles that test his determination and resourcefulness. But he remains determined to fulfil his principle:...

A fantastical coming-of-age meets the existential detective novel.A young boy grapples with the fact his best friend has vanished from existence while a homeless man stalks and constructs a delusional dime-store fiction around the child.Yan, a teenager living in Bangkok, wakes to a changed...

In April 2020, at the height of the pandemic in New York City, Andrew, the assistant director of a funeral home one mile from Elmhurst Hospital, the "epicenter of the epicenter," meets a legendary Coney Island witch doctor (Lelya Dorche), who makes him an...

A real journal, a surreal book. Hidden for years - until now.This mind-bending, rule-breaking story is a real diary.The walker's incredible journey is filled with fears and failures, hopes and joys, colour and darkness. A young man faces everything from unwanted thoughts, to unrequited...

Welcome to Munks...home to the lost, the lonely, and those in perpetual limbo. A famous nightclub now in decline. New owners with wayward ideas are determined to redeem this place of moral bankruptcy. Amongst the rot, the depravity, the crime, and the hedonism -...

Enter a speculative universe where logic has been put on life-support, traditions have become useless appendages, and every character in these overtly farcical tales lives a hopelessly bewildered existence, carried along by a laughably dysfunctioning self-awareness antithetical to his or her well-being. If this...

Dragons, jetpacks, robots and more! Read as Jay, Parker, Bell and many more students of Booker Academy, build the most creative and outstanding contraptions possible! They only threats are the evil principal and vie principal, who want to keep the kids down and docile,...

Tourist season is over, and the rain won't stop falling. It's time for the vacationing Parisians, Herman and his family included, to abandon their rural getaways in the countryside and return to normal life. But where has Herman's family gone? Concerned, he sets out...

A blog written by a self-proclaimed Time Travel Agent can't possibly be real... can it?Hiding the secret to building a time machine in a clickbait article... genius? Or bogus? One young man's about to find out!Meet Joshua Miller.Josh is a na?e young man living...

Bust the Kingdom's scariest crime boss? There's got to be an easier way for a Fool to win love!A year after the events of Fool's Proof, Malfred Murd is no longer a Fool, royal or otherwise. He's a newly minted nobleman- who can't help...

When math meets aftermath, all Hell will break loose.A near-death experience gives Dalton McGovern an epiphany-through a combination of computer programming and neurotechnology, he will create a virtual afterlife. With support from his unflappable but flighty twin sister and his stoic and secretive ex-boyfriend,...

This is a cryptic allusion to the author's first name, Al. There turn out to be many Al's and many Alice's with stepchildren Allen and Alan as well as Al Jr.Al takes on his personal take of the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions as...

The Misanthrope is a novel that explores what it is to be an individual, the nature of relationships, race, otherness, class and the oppressiveness of small town life. The Misanthrope is an absurdist, coming of age novel set in the late 1990s when the...

A homecoming tale unlike any other, The Imagined Homecoming of Icarus Isakov recounts the fantastical return home of goblin anti-hero and puckish narrator, Icarus Isakov.When Icarus receives a mysterious letter from the long-lost girl next door, he returns to the ghost town of his...

After the politics of his prestigious law firm send Ben out on the street, he finds himself playing piano at a waterfront brothel. In his new life, Ben explores the underbelly of peoples' desires, fears, compulsions, and dreams. As Ben moves throughout this new...

"Even the gods watch reality TV."The producers of the multi-universe hit THE NEXT GREAT DEITY claim that their reality show is filmed in Heaven, but neither of the abducted human contestants on its latest season can bring themselves to believe that. Theodore Flores, a...

Collin Marshall is an ass. But who isn't? He's a college senior, he's flat broke, and he's ready to rock the business world. His last final is Thursday. After that comes a big promotion from sales rep to analyst. Easy as Pi, right?Enter Jess...

Excerpt from AT THE ACADEMY OF MESOZOIC DANCE: AN INTRODUCTION: Welcome to audition and placement examinations for the Academy of Mesozoic Dance, First Year Forms. Applications are open to any dinosaur between two and six years of age, and must be stamped by a...

When a mysterious enemy looms large, the Kingdom's secret weapon is Murd... Malfred Murd!Finding himself still alive is the former jester's first clue that his fate has taken yet another unexpected bounce. Quicker than you can say "Utmost Secret", our unlikely hero is reunited...

When fourteen seniors from Heaven's Ridge Retirement Home sign up for a weeklong getaway at Mystic Senior Camp, they have no idea what they're in for! They may be wise in years, but these seniors still have a thing or two to learn about...

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...

Thirteen stories from a modern master "Brodsky is a master both of technique and of language, his sentences positively crackling with unexpected insights."--Publishers Weekly "Brodsky possesses a masterly control of diction and rhythm, an often startling metaphoric gift, and a range of effects extending...

An inventive, ranging debut story collection from a writer hailed by Charles Yu as "a stunningly original voice--warm, bleak, dark, ecstatic, full of silences and power and life" Reinventing a great American tradition through an absurdist, discerning eye, Joseph Scapellato uses these twenty-five stories...

With the Spanish flu pandemic on the rise, a former gold rush town-- once the largest city in the Pacific Northwest-- is threatened with extinction via eminent domain should their population fall below 125 citizens. To save their homes, former madam Maude Dollarhyde, her...

"As sharp as broken pottery and as delicate as a peony petal, House of Pungsu is the story my spirit hungered for. K.P. Kulski shifts rice paper doors to reveal the darkest truth."-Lee Murray, USA Today bestselling author and four-time Bram Stoker Award(R) winner.No...

A young couple, a religious man, a gritty rapper, and a sublime videographer get stranded together in the desert. Little do they know, they'll cross paths in a bloody fashion with one another as well as a hippie cult that has a fetish for...

Dr. Camus is a jerk. The whole hospital loathes him. His patients loathe him. And the hospital's CEO really loathes him. The staff want him to just take the blue pill from The Matrix and wake up to reality-or is it the green pill?...

Mortals magically murdered generally is enough to get Filthy Henry, Ireland's first and foremost fairy detective, involved in the case. But when those murders happen on Halloween there is even more reason for him to investigate what is going on. As the walls between...

In this brooding and obsessive novel, Ansgar Allen recounts the story of a nameless man who attends a funerary wake with no other distraction than papers that once belonged to the body on display. The deceased considered the papers to be his magnum opus,...

Will the secret policeman crack the case, or is he, himself, just cracked? D.D. Murphry poses as a homeless man while secretly working for the True Government. With words as his sidekick, he can read the coded messages-instructions from his employer-hidden in almost any...

With an Apatosaurus as a guide, Colin and Emma must dance their way through the Days of the Dinosaur-an island in a psychedelic prehistoric times-to rescue their friend Joe from the Tyrannosaurus Rex. But Colin has another mission: To gain the love of Rose,...

Author: Sean AdamsISBN-10: 0063257750ISBN-13: 9780063257757Publisher: William Morrow & CompanyLanguage: EnglishPublished: 01/03/2023Pages: 288Format: HardcoverWeight: 0.79lbsSize: 8.35h x 5.43w x 1.26dReview Citation(s): Library Journal Prepub Alert 08/01/2022 pg. 5Publishers Weekly 10/24/2022Kirkus Reviews 01/01/2023Booklist 01/01/2023 pg. 28BookPage 01/01/2023

Paulie Galamb is the hapless hero of this story, no matter if he likes it or not. The unattractive, unassuming divorcee was good at his job as a taste-tester of lab-grown meats - until his body turned against him.All Paulie ever wanted was to...

Paulie Galamb is the hapless hero of this story, no matter if he likes it or not. The unattractive, unassuming divorcee was good at his job as a taste-tester of lab-grown meats - until his body turned against him.All Paulie ever wanted was to...

Paulie Galamb is the hapless hero of this story, no matter if he likes it or not. The unattractive, unassuming divorcee was good at his job as a taste-tester of lab-grown meats - until his body turned against him.All Paulie ever wanted was to...

Paulie Galamb is the hapless hero of this story, no matter if he likes it or not. The unattractive, unassuming divorcee was good at his job as a taste-tester of lab-grown meats - until his body turned against him.All Paulie ever wanted was to...

Paulie Galamb is the hapless hero of this story, no matter if he likes it or not. The unattractive, unassuming divorcee was good at his job as a taste-tester of lab-grown meats - until his body turned against him.All Paulie ever wanted was to...