Fiction - Absurdist

In this latest novel from the award-winning author of The Polyglot Lovers, a writer searching for inspiration in Spain goes on a darkly comic, delightfully absurd journey through an underground society. Awarded a three-month stipend to travel and work, a Swedish writer flies to...

In this thrilling chase narrative, a hunted being escapes certain death at breakneck speed--careening through Europe, heading blindly South. Faster and faster, escaping the assassins, our protagonist flies forward, blending into crowds, adjusting to terrains, hopping on and off ferries, always desperately trying to...

Surprise, you're dead! This hilarious and moving novel follows a couple forced into unthinkable challenges when, after dying in a plane crash, they find themselves in the lowest tier of heaven, filled with laughter and dread, fear and acceptance, and family bonds even death...

Literary Latin American FLATLINERS: a smart, engrossing, and darkly funny novel experimenting with where life and love begin and end.Author: Roque LarraquyPublisher: Coffee House PressPublished: 07/10/2018Pages: 152Binding Type: PaperbackWeight: 0.30lbsSize: 7.80h x 5.10w x 0.90dISBN: 9781566895156Review Citation(s): Publishers Weekly 04/16/2018About the AuthorRoque Larraquy is...

A sharp, satirical romp through the absurdities of academia, where ambition knows no bounds and rankings rule all.When Charles Ogden Dean III-better known (to his chagrin) as "Dean Dean"-takes charge of a once-floundering law school now rebranded under the prestigious Brown University banner, he's...

The world changed when she went to the bathroom.Now, she's dead.She needs to prove she is not-and was not-the Villain of the story. She needs to reconcile with the choices she's made in the past. She needs to fight, tooth and ice cream scoop,...

A dazzling, surrealist fairy tale of a young woman's quest for house and home--from New York to the Texas hinterlands and, maybe, back again. The world is ending. It has been ending for some time. When did the ending begin? Perhaps when Evie's mother...

A dazzling, surrealist fairy tale of a young woman's quest for house and home--from New York to the Texas hinterlands and, maybe, back again. The world is ending. It has been ending for some time. When did the ending begin? Perhaps when Evie's mother...

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE - ONE OF THE NEW YORKER'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR SO FAR Set in Ukraine, an eccentric scientist breeding rare snails crosses paths with sisters posing as members of the marriage industry to find their activist mother. As...

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE - WINNER OF THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE - WINNER OF THE GORDON BURN PRIZE - WINNER OF THE ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZE - SHORTLISTED FOR THE CLIMATE FICTION PRIZE - SHORTLISTED FOR THE VCU CABELL FIRST...

Aesop meets Anaïs Nin in these absurdist stories of very unexpected redemptionGetting to the Shamrock Motel isn't easy. It's just off Concession #18, but you can't get there through a sequence of lefts and rights. To find the Shamrock you have to be lost...

"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...

Five , selected from over 100 untranslated novels and stories by "the Duchamp of Latin America" (Natasha Wimmer), brings together--each an astonishing work--Margarita: A Memory, The Dream, Musical Brushstrokes, Princess Springtime, and The Hormone Pill. Following a cast of dreamlike characters including cyber nuns,...

From an award-winning international rising star, a dazzlingly inventive novel, spanning ancient and modern China, that interweaves stories of romance and showbiz Inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China, Ghost Cities follows multiple narratives, including one in which a young man named Xiang...

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...

A truly brilliant, wonderfully bizarre novel by one of our great American novelists, the author of the perennial bestseller True Grit Jimmy Burns is an expatriate American living in Mexico who has an uncommonly astute eye for the absurd little details that comprise your...

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...

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...

I first read Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita on a balcony of the Hotel Metropole in Saigon on three summer evenings in 1971. The tropical air was heavy and full of the smells of cordite and motorcycle exhaust and rotting fish and wood-fire...

A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF 2024 A PUBLISHERS WEEKY BEST BOOK OF 2024 The gentle giant Florian Herscht has a problem: having faithfully attended Herr Köhler's adult education classes in physics, he is convinced that disaster is imminent. And so, he embarks upon...