Fiction - Absurdist

An old woman enters into a fantastical world of dreams and nightmares in this surrealist classic admired by Bj rk and Luis Bu uel. Leonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and The Hearing Trumpet is the witty, celebratory...

Judgment Day & Other White Lies is a short fiction collection that deconstructs whiteness by retelling versions of Greek, Roman, and Christian myths, concepts, and characters through a contemporary lens that reads whiteness into history as a force of destruction for white characters (in...

From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day, here is a novel that is at once a gripping psychological mystery, a wicked satire of the cult of art, and a poignant...

A darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue from one of the leading writers of the twentieth century, the acclaimed author of Lolita. "Half-poem, half-prose...a creation of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality and moral truth. One of the great...

For almost 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...

Search History oscillates between a wild cyberdog chase and lunch-date monologues as Eugene Lim deconstructs grieving and storytelling with uncanny juxtapositions and subversive satire. Frank Exit is dead--or is he? While eavesdropping on two women discussing a dog-sitting gig over lunch, a bereft friend...

From the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial--one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century--the haunting tale of K.'s relentless, unavailing struggle with an inscrutable authority in order to gain access to the Castle. Translated and with a preface by Mark Harman.Arriving...

Mel Lane assumed his life was on the track it was supposed to be: a career with upward movement, a home, a long-term relationship. That is, until he comes home one day to a girlfriend he knows and a child he doesn't. Stranger still,...

What if you could remember everything that ever happened to you? Would it make it any more possible to solve the mystery of existence? This story takes a hard look at what happens when we know too much. Author: Jeremy DelgadoISBN-10: 195205544XISBN-13: 9781952055447Publisher: Vegetarian...

Time is running out for Haddie.Haddie, her dad, and her friends are all at risk in a twisting turn of events. The Unceasing are back and stronger than ever. Her co-worker has already been coerced, will one of her friends be next? In a...

At the Husav勛 Research Institute, a paradise of Nordic perfection where the blemished are banished and the pretty are promoted, acne-ridden Magnus is sent on a bogus anthropological fact-finding mission to visit every village, town, and city in Wales to file "reports" for Iceland's...

The beloved author of The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared returns with an enchanting adventure that skewers the greed and hypocrisy that dominates our time and holds lessons about what's truly important in life. Meet Ole Mbatian Jr., a...

The beloved author of The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared returns with an enchanting adventure that skewers the greed and hypocrisy that dominates our time and holds lessons about what's truly important in life. Meet Ole Mbatian Jr., a...

Nominated for the 2021 Shirley Jackson Award From the author of the internationally bestselling Strange Weather in Tokyo, a collection of interlinking stories that masterfully blend the mundane and the mythical--"fairy tales in the best Brothers Grimm tradition: na?, magical, and frequently veering into...

Satan Burger explores a new kind of apocalypse. Not an apocalypse caused by disease or nuclear war, but an apocalypse of boredom. A plague of monotony has spread across the countryside, sucking all passion and out of everyone over the age of twenty-five, leaving...

"A propulsive, madcap story" (The New York Times) about a salaryman who decides to put his life up for sale in the classifieds section of a Tokyo newspaper after a botched suicide attempt. - "An outstanding writer not only of Japan, but of the...

"Carefully considered, successful instances of experimental fiction" disrupt gender, genre, and identity in this deranged, otherworldly collection (Literary Hub).A woman metamorphoses into a giant slug; another quite literally eats her heart out; a wasp falls in love with an orchid; and hair starts sprouting...

The first novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author lays the foundation for The Stranger, telling the story of an Algerian clerk who kills a man in cold blood. In A Happy Death, written when Albert Camus was in his early twenties and retrieved from...

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 by Thrillist, The Millions, Frieze, and Metropolis Japan The first English language publication of the work of Izumi Suzuki, a legend of Japanese science fiction and a countercultural icon At turns nonchalantly hip and charmingly deranged, Suzuki's...

Asa's husband is transferring jobs, and his new office is located near his family's home in the countryside. During an exceptionally hot summer, the young married couple move in, and Asa does her best to quickly adjust to their new rural lives, to their...

"Complete Stories, a collection of Carrington's published and unpublished short stories--many newly translated from their original French and Spanish--is a terrific introduction to her bizarre, dreamlike worlds." --Carmen Maria Machado, NPR Surrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was a master of the macabre,...

The English-language debut of one of Japan's most exciting new writers, The Factory follows three workers at a sprawling industrial factory. Each worker focuses intently on the specific task they've been assigned: one shreds paper, one proofreads documents, and another studies the moss growing...

The Last Known Taxpayer at King Henry's Faire is a satiric crime novel about two IRS agents, Nix and Steiger, who are assigned a ten-year-old case where the last known taxpayer is dead. Despised by their boss, they wonder if he's out to get...

Most people had considered the original manuscript of Jack Torrance's fabled novel All Work and No Play lost to time-its physical existence dismissed by the masses as mere rumor or urban legend. But the manuscript absolutely survived and, for the first time, is officially...

Phil Ochs has his troubles. His adult son is a failed artist who's targeting him in a terroristic poetry campaign, his wife has developed an addiction to As Seen On TV gadgets, and a professional rival is poaching managers from his seventeen Fry Buddy...

The grandson of Prince Genji lives outside of space and time and wanders the grounds of an old monastery in Kyoto. The monastery, too, is timeless: a place of prayer and deliverance, with barely a trace of any human presence. The wanderer is searching...

The Trial, is a terrifying psychological journey into the life of Joseph K, an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he...

HARLEY DODGE can barely contain her enthusiasm for the upcoming Thanksgiving feast in Boolee, West Virginia. The only time she's glad to be stuck to the hills of holler. Unfortunately, she hadn't counted on her clairvoyant talent wreaking havoc by jumping to her palate....

Anna has been living happily for twenty years with loving, sturdy, outgoing Guillaume when she suddenly (truly at first sight) falls in love with Thomas. Intelligent and handsome, but apparently scarred by a terrible early emotional wound, he reminds Anna of Jude the Obscure....

In this prize-winning Iranian novel, a spoiled and foul-mouthed young woman looks to get high while her family and city fall to pieces.What do you do when the world is falling apart and you're in withdrawal?Disillusioned, wealthy, and addicted to opium, Shadi wakes up...

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER. A book "that has very little to do with trout fishing and a lot to do with the lamenting of a passing pastoral America . . . an instant cult classic" (Financial Times).Richard Brautigan was a literary idol of the 1960s and...

Adam Gopnik presents the very best of S. J. Perelman, America's zaniest humorist. S. J. Perelman (1904-1979) wrote for the Marx Brothers films Horse Feathers and Monkey Business and won an Oscar for his screenwriting on Around the World in Eighty Days, but he...

The beloved author of The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared returns with an enchanting adventure that skewers the greed and hypocrisy that dominates our time and holds lessons about what's truly important in life.Meet Ole Mbatian Jr., a Maasai...

A breathtaking free fall into the long-buried (and fictional) history of a utopian era in American lighter-than-air travel, as told by its death-defying, aero-acrobatic heroes."Foster and Romo's 'real fake dream' of the future-past history of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines is...

An orphanage for wayward stories. A labyrinth of secrets. A home on the border of reality...Open each door to find a world of magic and menace waiting for you, if you dare. In The House of Untold Stories, every page is a door, and...

Spadework for a Palace bears the subtitle "Entering the Madness of Others" and offers an epigraph: "Reality is no obstacle." Indeed. This high-octane obsessive rant vaults over all obstacles, fueled by the idées fixe of a "gray little librarian" with fallen arches whose name--mr...

Widely praised and winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction among other mentions, Call Me Zebra follows a feisty heroine's idiosyncratic quest to reclaim her past by mining the wisdom of her literary icons -- even as she navigates the murkier myseteries of love.Named...

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...

"One of the great novels of the century. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the late 20th century has produced a novel on the level of Joyce, Proust, Mann, Kafka, and Nabokov."--Boston Globe Structured around a single moment in time -- 8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975...

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