Fiction - Absurdist

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...

From the author of the Finlandia Award-winning novel Troll: A Love Story, The Core of the Sun further cements Johanna Sinisalo's reputation as a master of literary speculative fiction and of her country's unique take on it, dubbed "Finnish weird." Set in an alternative...

The long-awaited first short story-collection by the author of the cult sensation Convenience Store Woman, tales of weird love, heartfelt friendships, and the unsettling nature of human existenceWith Life Ceremony, the incomparable Sayaka Murata is back with her first collection of short stories ever...

Heather and Geoffrey -- twenty-something siblings -- become entangled in separate power struggles with a controversial professor, Dr. Barry Martin. His divisive views on masculinity have put him in the public spotlight in a way that's created both public disgust and a private lust...

One thing connects all cultures and people-we all want great stories that entertain.In Something Went Cold, you'll read five such stories. Short stories that will seduce and entertain while taking you on a jolting journey of surprise and enchantment. In "#MeToo," you'll relish how...

"If Duchamp or maybe Magritte wrote a novel (and maybe they did. Did they?) it might look something like this remarkable little book of Padgett Powell's."--Richard FordThe Interrogative Mood is a wildly inventive, jazzy meditation on life and language by the novelist that Ian...

Author: Louise PentlandISBN-10: 1785764640ISBN-13: 9781785764646Publisher: ZaffreLanguage: EnglishPublished: 05/02/2019Pages: 432Format: Paperback

The novel that reportedly caused a walkout upon publication, this grotesque, absurdist work by Russia's de Sade follows four individuals set upon a common goal of destruction and violence.Author: Vladimir SorokinISBN-10: 162897396XISBN-13: 9781628973969Publisher: Dalkey Archive PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 04/26/2022Pages: 204Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.75lbsSize: 8.90h x 5.98w...

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...

In the Cities of Coin and Spice and In the Night Garden introduced readers to the unique and intoxicating imagination of Catherynne M. Valente. Now she weaves a lyrically erotic spell of a place where the grotesque and the beautiful reside and the passport...

Artforum is certainly one of C駸ar Aira's most charming, quirky, and funny books to date. Consisting of a series of interrelated stories about his compulsion to collect Artforum magazine, this is not about art so much as it is about passionate obsession. At first...

From the New York Times Bestselling author of Lovecraft Country, now an HBO series.High above Manhattan android and human steelworkers are constructing a new Tower of Babel for billionaire Harry Gant, as a monument to humanity's power to dream. In the festering sewers below...

After being diagnosed with mental illness, Keats wants nothing more than to get away. His first day in Rome he falls in love - and she steals his wallet and passport. See, this isn't the Rome of La Dolce Vita. This is the Rome...

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...

"Darkly funny, surprisingly tender . . . witheringly dead-on." -- Los Angeles TimesNamed one of the year's best novels by: Time - Salon.com - Los Angeles Times - NPR/Fresh Air - New West - Kansas City Star - St. Louis Post-DispatchA comic and heartfelt...

Gala Murowski wasn't really looking for God when she joined her local nunnery, but when an ecstatic out-of-body experience sets her spinning through a godless cosmos, she becomes an avenging angel on a rogue crusade against the hypocrites who prey on the innocent in...

A Tale of Passion, Perseverance, and Missing MeatloafDr. Robert Chudinski, an idealistic academic, is fresh out of his doctoral program, when he accepts a position at Eastern Wisconsin University. Dr. Chudinski believes he will finally have the opportunity to change the world "one student...

The Blue Flowers follows two unlikely characters: Cidrolin, who alternates between drinking and napping on a barge parked along the Seine in the 1960s, and the Duke d'Auge as he rages through history--about 700 years of it--refusing to crusade, clobbering his king with a...

An irreverent, allusive, scatalogical, tragicomic masterpiece that centers on the patrons of a run-down bar as they try to document the details of their lives in a country that appears to have forgotten the importance of remembering. In Republic of the Congo, in the...

"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 Since 2010 writer and artist Renee Gladman has placed fantastic and philosophical stories in the invented city-state of Ravicka,...

"These immersive linked stories grapple with Ukrainian history through the waning years of the USSR and birth pangs of democracy ... Reva's characters spark off the page as they confront a brutal bureaucratic past with the only tool they possess--hope."--O, The Oprah Magazine A...

The wealthy scientist Martial Canterel guides a group of visitors through his expansive estate, Locus Solus, where he displays his various deranged inventions, each more spectacular than the last. First, he introduces a machine propelled by the weather, which constructs a mosaic out of...

New Directions is proud to present one of the most spellbinding novels you will read this year, and certainly the weirdest.First published in 1931, Unclay glows with an unworldly light--Death has come to the small village of Dodder to deliver a parchment with the...

Katherine is an average twenty-something with all the usual stress and anxiety: school; money; her soul-crushing job. But something else plagues her. It is as if something is lurking...inside her.Strange hallucinations, slips of reality, and dangerous urges drive her to the edge of sanity....

It's as if Richard Brautigan and Derek McCormack rewrote Collateral to make it a buddy film in which reality is constantly in the process of collapsing. This is the detective novel on acid.--Brian Evenson Detectives Michael and Daniel must try to solve a murder...

OH SHIT MOTHERFUCKERS IT'S GREAT GATSBY TIME The groundbreaking sequel to F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterwork,"The Great Gatsby". Lights greener than ever before Each dream more American than the last The jazziest age of all It's Great Gatsby time The Great Gatsby 2 The Great...

With a new introduction by Marianne Faithfull"Terry Southern writes a mean, coolly deliberate, and murderous prose." --Norman MailerKing B., an Oscar-winning director, is now determined to shoot the dirtiest and most expensive X-rated movie ever made. Displaced to Liechtenstein (which, in order to boost...

"A collection of flash fiction that feels seemingly arbitrary with an ache of human longing for connection peppered in. . . . These bizarre but beautiful stories transport you elsewhere with no intention of bringing you back." --Ashleah Gonzales, W magazine In this collection...

Grand and minute, elegiac and hilarious, Lynne Tillman expands the possibilities of the American novel in this dazzling read about a former historian ruminating on her own life and the lives of others--named a best book of the century by Vulture. In the hypnotic,...

Revenge of the Translator is acclaimed French writer Brice Matthieussent's brilliant, hilarious, rule-defying exploration of the creative acts of writing and translating, and the often complicated relationship between authors, their translators, and readers.Author: Brice MatthieussentISBN-10: 1941920691ISBN-13: 9781941920695Publisher: Deep Vellum PublishingLanguage: EnglishPublished: 09/25/2018Pages: 352Format: PaperbackWeight:...

"SPRAWL in fact does not sprawl at all; rather, it radiates with control and fresh, strange reflection." --Bookforum"Reads as if Gertrude Stein channeled Alice B. Toklas writing an Arcades Project set in contemporary suburbia." --The BelieverWhen Danielle Dutton's SPRAWL first broke upon the world...

"An elegant, postmodern fairy tale." --Jacob Hoefer, Bookseller, Labyrinth BooksAway! Away! -- a new novel from Jana Beňová, winner of the European Union Prize for Literature! Sometimes running away is the bravest option. Or, so believes Rosa, who ditches her husband and home and...

ONE OF BOOK RIOT'S "20 MUST-READ HORROR BOOKS YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF" Simon and Marie can't seem to have a baby. And so they flee the city for an idyllic village, where things will certainly be better. But the town is gloomy, even hostile...

The Flower Show and The Toth Family, two novellas in one volume by Istv n rk ny (1912-79), introduce to an English-speaking audience a Hungarian writer with a keen sense of the absurdities of modern life. In the '60s and '70s, rk ny's vein...

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...

Conversation of the Three Wayfarers is a tale overheard, rather than told directly. Abel, Babel, and Cabel, the wayfarers, carry on a three-sided monologue, each reporting curious incidents--the effect is of three capers rolled into one: a steeplechase performed on a floating pontoon. But...

"Noll is a hero of Brazilian literature who deserves to be widely known in the English-speaking world and this fascinating shape-shifting novel is a wonderful introduction to his work." --Jenny Offill, author of WeatherLike an Edenic Adam birthed from the clay, our narrator rises...

In a chaotic city, the latest in a line of viruses advances as a man recounts the fated steps that led him to be confined in a room with his lover while catastrophe looms. As he takes inventory of the city's ills, a strange...

After giving up on his dream of being a published writer, Chris is plagued by a series of nightmarish visions of grotesque creatures. As the visions manifest with greater frequency they start targeting his young daughter. They are finding their way into his world...

"Expansive and imaginative." --Kirkus Reviews "Irreverent and bursting prose... Fans of Mark Leyner will enjoy Kaufman's messy string of outrageous scenarios." --Publishers Weekly Part modern fable, part detective novel, a journey through grief in the imaginary world of Metaphoria. One cold winter night, Charlie...