Fiction - Absurdist

The definitive collection of a twentieth-century master of the short story, whose unforgettable inventions revolutionized the form The short stories of Donald Barthelme, revered by the likes of Thomas Pynchon and George Saunders, are gems of invention and pathos that have dazzled and delighted...

"More Kafka than Kafka, Renee Gladman's achievement ranks alongside many of Borges' in its creation of a fantastical landscape with deep psychological impact." --Jeff VanderMeer A "linguist-traveler" arrives by plane to Ravicka, a city of yellow air in which an undefined crisis is causing...

Winner of the Akutagawa Prize and the Kenzaburo Oe Prize, these eleven surreal tales, set in the offices, zoos, bus stops, boutiques, and homes of contemporary Japan "are reminiscent, at least to this reader, of Joy Williams and Rivka Galchen and George Saunders" (Weike...

Madrid. Unfinished. Man dying. A great painter lies on his deathbed, synapses firing, writhing and reveling in pleasure and pain as a lifetime of chaotic and grotesque sense memories wash over and envelop him. In this bold and brilliant short work of experimental fiction...

Banned in China for its taboo allusions to the Tiananmen Square massacre, Sheng Keyi's Death Fugue is a lyrical and explosive dystopian satire that imagines a world of manufactured existence, the erasure of personal freedom, and the perils of governmental control.One morning a nine-story...

"Nadja, " originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written, a book which defined that movement's attitude toward everyday life. The principal narrative is an account of the author's relationship with a girl in teh city...

From Slapstick's "Turkey Farm" to Slaughterhouse-Five's eternity in a Tralfamadorean zoo cage with Montana Wildhack, the question of the afterlife never left Kurt Vonnegut's mind. In God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, Vonnegut skips back and forth between life and the Afterlife as if the...

Bonnie Lincoln just wants to be left alone. To come home from work, shut out the ghosts of some devastating losses, and unwind in front of the nostalgic, golden glow of her favorite TV show, Three's Company.When Bonnie wins the lottery, a more grandiose...

An empty suit of armor is the hero in this witty novella, a picaresque gem--now available in an independent volume for the first time--that brilliantly parodies medieval knighthood. Set in the time of Charlemagne and narrated by a nun with her own secrets to...

Like Kafka's The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude," an imaginary crime that defies definition. Cincinnatus spends...

From the Nobel Prize-winning author comes the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like his own, with the sights, sounds and textures of a childhood steeped in poverty and a father's death yet redeemed by the beauty of Algeria...

The newest novel by Prix Medicis-winner Anne Garréta, In Concrete is a feminist inversion of a domestic drama crossed with Oulipian nursery rhyme.Author: Anne GarrétaISBN-10: 164605055XISBN-13: 9781646050550Publisher: Deep Vellum PublishingLanguage: EnglishPublished: 05/11/2021Pages: 152Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.48lbsSize: 7.90h x 4.90w x 0.60dReview Citation(s): Publishers Weekly 05/10/2021

In Temporary, a young woman's workplace is the size of the world. She fills increasingly bizarre placements in search of steadiness, connection, and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it's shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate...

From the author of Blackfishing the IUD, a darkly hilarious novel about familial trauma, chronic illness, academic labor, and contemporary art. In the tradition of Rabelais, Swift, and Fran Ross--the tradition of biting satire that joyfully embraces the strange and fantastical--and drawing upon documentary...

S has disappeared from Ruth and Leonard's home in Brighton. Suicide is suspected. The couple, who had been spying on their young lodger since before the trouble, begin to pour over her diary, her audio recordings and her movies - only to discover that...

One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years The urbane authority that Vladimir Nabokov brought to every word he ever wrote, and the ironic amusement he cultivated in response to being uprooted and politically exiled twice in his life, never...

Early short stories by Thomas Pynchon, introduced by the author and praised as "an exhilarating spectacle of greatness discovering its powers" by the New Republic.Thomas Pynchon's literary career was launched not with the release of his widely acclaimed first novel, V., but with the...

In this fantastically macabre tale, the separate halves of a nobleman split in two by a cannonball go on to pursue their own independent adventures In a battle against the Turks, Viscount Medardo of Terralba is bisected lengthwise by a cannonball. One half of...

Go on. Take the ride.Riding coattails to a notorious street racer investigating the disappearance of her brother, Zap's humdrum existence is galvanized into a weird and wild ride of high-octane racing that leads him out of his home town, the megatropolis Troubadour, and into...

A baby is born with gills. Foxes raise and then lose a human child. A man, in the final throes of his deathbed fever-dream, experiences a cross-Antarctic voyage. The stories in Farthest South, the second story collection from renowned writer Ethan Rutherford, find characters...

The always astonishing Yoko Tawada here takes a walk on the supernatural side of the street. In "Kollwitzstrasse," as the narrator muses on former East Berlin's new bourgeois health food stores, so popular with wealthy young people, a ghost boy begs her to buy...

"The linen besuited, white-booted barge of a man moving down the sidewalk was something to see, but the addition of the broad-brimmed straw fedora out of which protruded small antennae in four directions constituted another level of the unusual. The sight, augmented with Merlin's...

A novel by the author of the viral essay sensation "The Crane Wife" When Nolan Grey receives news that his father, a once-prominent biologist, has drowned off Leap's Island, he calls on Elsa, his estranged older half-sister, to help. This, despite the fact that...

Longlisted for the National Book Award Four siblings, two summer houses, one terrible secret--the "prickly, persuasive" bestseller from one of Norway's most celebrated novelists, perfect for readers of Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard (New Yorker) " . . . Hypnotic. Hjorth works finely...

At 5:45 am, Ampersand Jones develops a brain aneurysm and dies in his sleep. He then gets up and goes for a run. With his positive-thinking podcasts for company, he decides that he's going to run himself back to life, having to outrun warring...

With over three hundred new and previously published short stories as well as three novellas, The Collected Stories of Diane Williams brings together distilled works of "unsettling brilliance" (Vanity Fair) that have rewritten the rules of American short fiction. From Ben Marcus' introduction to...

'A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father . . .'So begins Ann Quin's madcap frolic with sinister undertones, a debut 'so staggeringly superior to most you'll never forget it' (The Guardian)....

One of the great works of the twentieth century, Kafka's The Trial has been read as a study of political power, a pessimistic religious parable, or a crime novel where the accused man is himself the problem. In it, a man wakes up one...

Arthur B. Johnson had always heard that a first novel is the easiest one to write. If that's true, THE NEW MANIFESTO may well be his last. In fact, assuming you're brave enough to open these pages, he'll be happy to tell you why....

"In Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, it's the sentence that is alive and that is also a kind of architecture or landscape." --Amina Cain "Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge is the third volume of Renee Gladman's magnificent, melancholy series about the city-state of Ravicka,...

Libraries are magical places. But what if they're even more magical than we know? In Cyrille Martinez's library, the books are alive: not just their ideas or their stories, but the books themselves. Meet the Angry Young Book, who has strong opinions about who...

Kat Cataclysm is an ethically non-monogamous bisexual woman and absurdist short fiction writer who embarks upon writing a book called 99 Erics, chronicling her experiences dating ninety-nine different people named Eric. The book is largely comprised of humorous anecdotes from Kat's dates with various...

At once truly appalling and appallingly funny, Blaise Cendrars's Moravagine bears comparison with Naked Lunch--except that it's a lot more entertaining to read. Heir to an immense aristocratic fortune, mental and physical mutant Moravagine is a monster, a man in pursuit of a theorem...

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...

Publishers Weekly "Top 10 Books of the Year" selectionFrom one of Spain's most original authors comes a wild, absurdist story about a lonely man's misguided attempts to connectLaid off from his job, Damián Lobo obsessively imagines himself as a celebrity being interviewed on TV....

At the turn of the twentieth century, as he composes a treatise on melancholy, Jacov Reinhardt sets off from his small Croatian village in search of his hero and unwitting mentor, Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla, who is rumored to have disappeared into the South American...

A childhood trauma leaves N. emotionally stalled but yearning for connection. When she meets a seductive but damaged young attorney, she falls hard, overlooking his technology vendetta, fear of intimacy, and dark past. But their affair ends abruptly, sending N. on a quest to...

A "shamelessly funny" (Kirkus) and utterly original new novel from Mark Leyner about a father and his intense and devout relationship with his daughter and with alcohol. An anthropologist and his daughter travel to Kermunkachunk, the capitol of Chalazia, to conduct research for an...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - "You wouldn't expect a comic novel about a dictionary to be a thriller too, but this one is. In fact, [it] is also a mystery, love story (two of them) and cliffhanging melodrama." --The New York Times Book Review An award-winning...

A delightful fictional memoir about C駸ar Aira's small hometown. The narrator, born the same year and now living in the same great city (Buenos Aires) as C駸ar Aira, could be the author himself. Beginning with his parents--an enigmatic handsome black father who gathered linden...

Michael Kohlhaas has been wronged. First his finest horses were unfairly confiscated and mistreated. And things keep going worse--his servants have been beaten, his wife killed, and the lawsuits he pursues are stymied--but Kohlhaas, determined to find justice at all costs, tirelessly persists. Standing...

Here is a typical Stone Age family, reimagined by Roy Lewis in this hilarious novel as characters in some glittering drawing-room comedy. Father, who has a scientific turn of mind, has just discovered fire. Mother makes sure the children finish supper, even when the...

Wilbur is an unassuming little man living an unassuming little life. He and his wife have a stereotypical 1950s existence, but in modern America. One day, he arrives home to discover a mysterious crate. His attempts to deal with a seemingly minor mistake lead...

"What I wanted more than anything was to be standing beside Schmidt, in concert with Schmidt, at the foot of Saint Sebastian's Abyss along with Schmidt, hands cupped to the sides of our faces, debating art, transcendence, and the glory of the apocalypse." Former...

A New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceFeatured on recommended reading lists by the New York Times - New York Post - Library Journal - Thrillist - Locus - USA TODAY"The first great science fiction novel of 2020. " --NPR "As intellectually playful as...

"Ryan Ridge's verbal prestidigitation suggest a more rueful Mark Leyner, and he can make you both laugh and wince, but he can also kick up your pulse with a storytelling urgency that thrums under the attractively fragmented surfaces. His hard-boiled punchlines are rooted in...

Through tight dialogue and absurd settings Kafka creates a maze-like prose to mimic the bureaucracy of early 20th century Germany, trapping his protagonist in an unlawful conviction that alters the path of his life. Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library, a series of stunning,...

An intergalactic odyssey of love, ambition, and self-discovery. Orphaned as a boy, raised in the Czech countryside by his doting grandparents, Jakub Prochv zka has risen from small-time scientist to become the country's first astronaut. When a dangerous solo mission to Venus offers him...

"Crimson King is a darkly comical story of a young boy's personal apocowlypse at his grandparent's farm. JB Rockwell milks this wonderfully strange tale of udder catastrophe for all its worth!" - Michael Patrick Hicks, author of the Salem Hawley Series and Broken Shells...

A hypnotic collection of speculative fiction about compassion, love, and human resilience in the technological hyper-age, from Alexander Weinstein, author of Children of the New World. Universal Love welcomes readers to a near-future world where our everyday technologies have fundamentally altered the possibilities and...