Fiction - Absurdist

A mysterious man appears suspended in the air above a major American city. A foul-mouthed posse of machete-wielding scoundrels wreak havoc on a small-town mayor. A cocaine-addled boxer starts a torrid affair with the wife of the Invisible Man-who just might be watching (and...

Written in 1914, The Trial is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K, an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did...

"Braverman spins images that pull that perfect trick of making the familiar feel fresh... It's a thrill to see that language can still be made to help us feel the rush of life anew." ---Lynn Steger Strong, New York Times Book Review The woman...

Sugar Land is the southern story of Nana Dara, a prison cook at the Imperial State Prison Farm for men in 1923, who-with the help of the blues singer Lead Belly-discovers how to break out of her own physical and emotional prison to become...

A Summer/Fall 2018 Indies Introduce Debut Fiction SelectionWhen Samuel Johnson dies, he finds himself in the body of the man who killed him, unable to depart this world but determined, at least, to return to the son he left behind. Moving from body to...

"Verica Gerber writes with a luminous intimacy; her novel is clever, vibrant, moving, profoundly original. Reading it made me feel as if the world had been rebuilt." --Francisco Goldman"From the very beginning, Verica Gerber set out to write a novel that would end up...

A book of mourning told through a coolly evocative series of life (and death) vignettes, from a lauded French writer, now in English for the first time; #34;Six Feet Under" meets Georges PerecAuthor: Val駻ie Mr駛enISBN-10: 1944700900ISBN-13: 9781944700904Publisher: Deep Vellum PublishingLanguage: EnglishPublished: 10/15/2019Pages: 80Format: PaperbackWeight:...

"An intriguing take on crime/noir writing, this collection of 40 very short stories by leading and emerging literary voices . . . investigates crimes both real and imagined. Despite their diminutive size, these tales promise to pack a punch." --Chicago Tribune Forty very short...

The latest work in English by renowned Peruvian-Mexican cult writer Mario Bellatin, a short, allegorical novel that questions truth, art, language, and the split between East and West.Author: Mario BellatinISBN-10: 1646050290ISBN-13: 9781646050291Publisher: Deep Vellum PublishingLanguage: EnglishPublished: 12/22/2020Pages: 112Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.25lbsSize: 6.90h x 4.90w x...

The Little Buddhist Monk is a story of Asian invention gone wild, as a diminutive Korean Buddhist monk acts as a tour guide to an increasingly distraught French couple on a working vacation in the Far East. The Proof brings us quickly back to...

From the brilliant and incisive author of Mislaid--"a writer of extraordinary talent and range" (Jonathan Franzen) whose "capacity for inventions is immense" (BookForum)--comes a new collection of her earliest work: two wildly funny novellas (Sailing Towards the Sunset by Avner Shats and European Story...

A selection of short stories.Library Girl. Departure, Flagrant. Ecstatic. Pretty Vroom. 74.Tantalizing thrills too far. Alluring Macau.Inviting Tiger love wealth death.An Irresistible woman... exotic so far.Devotion, chasing a persuasive mystic fortune. Author: Les CookISBN-10: 1999002342ISBN-13: 9781999002343Publisher: Les CookLanguage: EnglishPublished: 03/18/2022Pages: 142Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.35lbsSize: 8.00h...

In Chicago, a secret L train runs through the mythical East Side of the city. On that train, you'll find a house-cat conductor, an alcoholic elf, a queen of the last city farm, the most curious wind, and an exceptional girl by the name...

Tom Pistilini has just discovered he's an unwitting investor in a macabre tourism company bringing wealthy European sightseers obsessed with America's murder culture to explore mass shooting sites. It's a business that will make him wealthy, although he might just despise it enough to...

Wilkes' debut is a rich and heartfelt yarn that resonates as deeply as his music." --Kirkus ReviewsWith the energy, wit, and singularity of vision that have earned him a reputation as a celebrated and charismatic musician, The Vine That Ate the South announces J.D....

A debut story collection of darkly humorous, feminist speculative fiction from the Balkans.Author: Asja BakicISBN-10: 1936932482ISBN-13: 9781936932481Publisher: Feminist PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 03/12/2019Pages: 144Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.45lbsSize: 8.00h x 5.20w x 0.70dReview Citation(s): Kirkus Reviews 01/01/2019Publishers Weekly 02/04/2019Shelf Awareness 03/15/2019

"A postmodern masterwork that outdoes Pynchon in eccentricity--and electricity, with all its dazzling prose." --Kirkus Reviews, Starred ReviewAfter a domestic terrorist unleashes a dirty bomb in Manhattan in 1970, making the borough uninhabitable, FBI agent Uli Sarkisian finds himself in a world that is...

A missing laptop, a petulant critic, a sojourn in communal living--Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love is a bracingly intelligent examination of grief, autonomy, aging, desire, information overload, and the condition of being a thinking and feeling inhabitant of an often...

Spectacular, genre-defying stories, including the reimagining of Lee Harvey Oswald's murder as an attempt to create generation-defining performance art.Author: Robert TrammellISBN-10: 1646050495ISBN-13: 9781646050499Publisher: Deep Vellum PublishingLanguage: EnglishPublished: 12/07/2021Pages: 308Format: PaperbackWeight: 1.05lbsSize: 8.40h x 5.50w x 1.00dReview Citation(s): Publishers Weekly 11/01/2021

Four writers, four different perspectives on the problematic notion of purity. All purity is created by resemblance and disavowal. With this sentence as a starting point, four authors each write a novella considering the concept of purity, all from astonishingly different angles. Jean Marc...

In a parallel or future Estonia, whose language has been outlawed and its native population deported after the invasion by the Russian Tsardom, Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol is resurrected, Christ-like, bringing phantasmagoric mayhem to the sleepy town of Viljandi.By the end of the story, four...

"A singular novel." --Lydia Davis, author of Can't and Won't and Essays One"An exhilarating adventure " --Alberto Manguel, author of The Library at Night and Fabulous Monsters"Extraordinary. . . . Brings to mind the great mushroom scenes of the film Phantom Thread. How not...

An "exceptional" (Los Angeles Times) tale of fate, loyalty, responsibility, and the real meaning of freedom, from the author of the forthcoming 4 3 2 1: A Novel A finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award This "rich and dazzling" (Wall Street Journal) novel follows Jim...

Peter Weiss's first prose work, The Shadow of the Coachman's Body, was unanimously praised as an original and perfect work of art by critics when it appeared in 1960. Here, in poet Rosmarie Waldrop's stunning translation, Weiss arranges a dark, vividly alive comedy of...

The standalone follow up to Shadows of the Short Days is a gritty, dark fantasy novel for fans of China Mieville and Neil Gaiman, that will thrill readers as they explore Hrimland's dark, horrifying depths. CHANGE DOES NOT ALWAYS HAPPEN FOR THE BETTER. War...

This comic novel by renowned Norwegian writer Jens Bj rneboe follows the exploits of a community of expatriates living off-season in a small Italian fishing village: their lives, loves, and interactions with the locals, including involvement in a dispute between the fishermen and the...

Eddie Plum, who insists he's been unjustifiably committed to a California psychiatric hospital, manages to finally escape after fourteen years of incarceration to start his life anew. On the run, he holes up in a sheltered barrio on a bluff above the Pacific Ocean...

This bawdy, high-spirited novel--whose author, Laurence Sterne, was described by Diderot as "the Rabelais of the English"--provoked a literary scandal when its first two volumes were published in 1759. A masterpiece of narrative absurdity, ribald humor, and philosophical playfulness, Tristram Shandy is famously studded...

Set during World War I, this monumental philosophical novel about human despair inspired Albert Camus' own writing and prefigured the greater existential movement. Blood Dark tells the story of a brilliant philosopher trapped in a provincial town and of his spiraling descent into self-destruction....

In this satirical, phantasmagorical novel by a star of contemporary Russian literature, Lipskerov writes about an aging man trying to find his place in modern society despite significant damage to his ego... and his "tool."Author: Dmitry LipskerovISBN-10: 1646050398ISBN-13: 9781646050390Publisher: Deep Vellum PublishingLanguage: EnglishPublished: 01/12/2021Pages:...

Do you like escape? From self-imposed retreat to world venture.Travel with a freethinking man, and a woman free to think. Year 2000. Isolation Spa - Art of Confusion.Damascus - Peshawar - Kashgar.Bratislava - Vancouver - Phnom Penh.And the lot in-between. Author: Les CookISBN-10: 1999002334ISBN-13:...

A punky, raw novel of millenial disaffection, trauma and 1960s cinemaMargot is the child of renowned musicians and the product of a particularly punky upbringing. Burnt-out from the burden of expectation and the bad end of the worst relationship yet, she leaves New York...

"A story of madness, art, alcohol and creativity...elegantly translated...vivid." --New York Times An exasperated writer obsessed with American cinema embarks on an increasingly bizarre journey in this heady, engrossing novel. A man writes an enormous screenplay on the life of Herman Melville. Not a...

Literary Latin American FLATLINERS: a smart, engrossing, and darkly funny novel experimenting with where life and love begin and end.Author: Roque LarraquyISBN-10: 1566895154ISBN-13: 9781566895156Publisher: Coffee House PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 07/10/2018Pages: 152Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.30lbsSize: 7.80h x 5.10w x 0.90dReview Citation(s): Publishers Weekly 04/16/2018

Winner of the 2020 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation PrizeThe Fox and Dr. Shimamura toothsomely encompasses East and West, memory and reality, fox-possession myths, and psychiatric mythmaking. As an outstanding young Japanese medical student at the end of the nineteenth century, Dr. Shimamura is...

Originally published in 1969 and now back in print after over a decade, Robert Coover's first novel instantly established his mastery. A coal-mine explosion in a small mid-American town claims ninety-seven lives. The only survivor, a lapsed Catholic given to mysterious visions, is adopted...

"The President Shop is a marvelous, timeless book that sweeps between the personal and the panoramic as it asks, Does every family, or country, contain an axis, around which the rest of it spins? Can you hear the voice of a stone? How clearly...

"Show Them a Good Time is a master class in the short story-bold, irreverent and agonizingly funny." Sally Rooney, Author of Normal People and Conversations with FriendsNamed A Most Anticipated Novel of 2020 byEntertainment Weekly * Marie Claire * Wall Street Journal * The...

Ken Wilber's latest book is a daring departure from his previous writings--a highly original work of fiction that combines brilliant scholarship with tongue-in-cheek storytelling to present the integral approach to human development that he expounded in more conventional terms in his recent A Theory...

Gulliver's Travels meets The Underground Railroad: a road trip through the countryside - and the psyche - by the author of Fifteen Dogs. Botanist Alfred Homer, ever hopeful and constantly surprised, is invited on a road trip by his parents' friend, Professor Morgan Bruno,...

Bob Honey Sings Jimmy Crack Corn--the madcap follow-up to his debut novel, which was hailed by authors as diverse as Salman Rushdie, Jane Smiley, and Paul Theroux --explores the deepest recesses of American politics and culture. Bob Honey, the disillusioned divorcee with a penchant...

The natural successor to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg collection, Caves of the Rust Belt: Ohio Stories travels to the Heart of It All, where drowned sailors reminisce over a hot meal, and the rules of the yard sale are law. In his stunning debut, Joe...

Fitzgerald's characters in this novel are complex, especially with respect to marriage and intimacy. The work is generally considered to have drawn upon and be based on Fitzgerald's relationship and marriage with his wife Zelda Fitzgerald. The Beautiful and Damned tells the story of...

When we last saw our hero he had taken to his bed in England, his beloved home in Tuscany having inexplicably capsized into a ravine. As Rancid Pansies opens, Samper is recuperating in Sussex at the home of the famous conductor Max Christ when...

The Dark Secrets of Barth and Williams College is a rabbithole into a world where common sense characters are helpless in the face of hyperbolic depravity. Get ready to be transported to the seedy underbelly of Lutheran academia. The journey is no less hilarious...

In the beltline of a run-of-the-mill metropolis, an apartment complex called Cambrian Court has become the focal point of an outlandish unfurling, where even the laws of physics are becoming questioned. Embroiled within this psychic plot are three neighbours who are strangers to one...

"If Kafka got it on with Flannery O' Connor, Pinkies would be their love child." -Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Small Backs of ChildrenIn Shane Hinton's debut story collection, gritty Florida realism collides with the absurd, and fears of fatherhood materialize in surreal scenarios....

Basil the demon king has come to a crossroads. He has grown tired of life underground and regretful of the atrocities he has committed to maintain his hold on power. Wanderlust leads him to the surface, to live freely among humans. Considering the state...

Mister Posted, the stoic horseman of Famine, and Sharon, the fiery, sharp-tongued Brain Freeze Goddess, are back! One year has elapsed since the events of Mister Posted and the Brain Freeze Goddess, plenty of time to establish a routine. Mister Posted is still traveling...

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...