Fiction - Absurdist

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...

A group of survivors trek this ruined world to get to the fabled colony of Adamsville. But the more they progress, the stranger things become as people with strange abilities and gadgets start to pop up. As for other survivors around the ruined United...

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...

The voice of disgraced love guru Brooks Nixon seems to haunt Hope Townsend, showing up at inopportune moments to deliver unwelcome commentary on her hapless romances. Brooks―who once doled out cliched dating advice to millions―fell out of favor with his fanbase when a life-altering...

In this delightful, cinema-inspired daydream of a novel, an identity-shifting protagonist uses the everyday inspirations of his life to catapult himself into the realm of imagination, blurring the boundaries between reality and fantasy. The Skin of Dreams is a novel of waking dreams. Even...

Belan is the CEO and he needs this PowerPoint deck asap. The narrator, however, just wants to fly home - and he might not deliver what Belan is expecting. Set mostly during a delay at SFO, The Belan Deck captures one traveler's reflections on...

As the French author Marcel Proust once remarked, the mind evokes endlessly changing thought patterns, much like a kaleidoscope. Reading Derrick R. Lafayette's Kaleidoscope: Dark Tales, a genuinely extraordinary collection of five short stories and a novella, is like gazing upon the world again...

Dink Flapple, former boy-wonder and man-child of late, embarks on a metaphysical journey that defies all reason, unwittingly proving witlessness wise in matters space-time, interplanetary travel, and, of course, unicycling. Madcap misadventures ensue, involving friendships old and new, seedy television programming, indiscriminate ingestion, superfluous...

A 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist "A unique alien invasion story that focuses on the human and the myriad ways we see and don't see our own world. Mesmerizing." --Jeff VanderMeer A blend of searing social commentary and speculative fiction, Chana Porter's fresh, pointed...

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 him...

"A highly original and engagingly odd book." - Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World "...wondrous...mysterious...Connor lands plenty of stimulating riffs on themes of memory, love, and loss, all in lyrical prose and suffused with surreal imagery." - Publishers Weekly...

A Best Novel of 2023 - Electric Literature and Largehearted Boy "The novel is a magical-realist office drama infused with millennial anomie, and McGhee's canny, often bittersweetly hilarious prose reads as if George Saunders infiltrated the Severance writers' room." --Rafael Frumkin, Washington Post "This...

"A hilarious bizarroid science fiction horror thriller, with great vivid characters, crackling first-rate dialogue, nonstop momentum and unguessable plot twists galore. Rarely does a book make me laugh out loud this often, while keeping me engaged in the delirious drama unfolding."-John Skipp, Wonderland Award...

In this biting satire, Matthew Binder takes surreal aim at the poses and pretensions of high art and fashion. With ruthless wit, Binder chronicles the struggles of Paul, an eccentric artist, and his companion dog, a disabled, quiche-obsessed terrier-mix named Blanche. Together they negotiate...

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...

At twenty-three years old, Dan Simmonds wants nothing more than time: time to listen to his favorite death metal bands, time to replay the video games of his childhood, time to study the dreamlike paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, time to watch all the classic...

In this biting satire, Matthew Binder takes surreal aim at the poses and pretensions of high art and fashion. With ruthless wit, Binder chronicles the struggles of Paul, an eccentric artist, and his companion dog, a disabled, quiche-obsessed terrier-mix named Blanche. Together they negotiate...

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...