Fiction - Absurdist

A hilarious exploration of the relativism of identity from Italian novelist and playwright Luigi Pirandello, winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature. This uproarious new translation of One, None, and a Hundred Grand delivers the defining work of Italian existentialism to an English...

A son follows the breadcrumbs through a volume of Grimms' Fairy Tales in search of his estranged fatherOn his eighteenth birthday, Carlos receives a strange gift: his father, whom he never knew, has died and left him his apartment. As he goes through the...

Winner of the most prestigious German prize for debut fiction, Swiss playwright and visual artist Ariane Koch's Overstaying is an absurdist tour de force. "I don't see my writing as chronological or classically narrative, but as spatial--a kind of architecture. I keep adding rooms,...

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...

One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years The urbane authority that Vladimir Nabokov brought to every word he ever wrote, and the ironic amusement he cultivated in response to being uprooted and politically exiled twice in his life, never...

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: naïf, magical, and frequently veering into...

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK - A BELLETRIST BOOK CLUB PICK - AN NPR 2024 "BOOKS WE LOVE" "If I owned a bookstore, I'd hand-sell Piglet to everyone."--Jennifer Weiner, The New York Times Book Review A "sensuous" (The New Yorker) debut about women's...

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK - A BELLETRIST BOOK CLUB PICK - AN NPR 2024 "BOOKS WE LOVE" "If I owned a bookstore, I'd hand-sell Piglet to everyone."--Jennifer Weiner, The New York Times Book Review A "sensuous" (The New Yorker) debut about women's...

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR - For fans of Interior Chinatown and American War, a surreal, hilarious, and sneakily profound debut novel that casts our current climate of gun violence and environmental destruction in a surprising new mold. A BEST BOOK OF THE...

"Outrageously funny."--Paul Harding"There is nobody doing it like Anton."--Tuck WoodstockFinally, a book for men!Have you ever engaged in totally normal male behavior like: Stealing porn magazines?Hooking up with guys on Grindr?Attempting to work in an open-pit mine despite having no relevant job experience?Crossdressing as...

From the author of Blackfishing the IUD, a darkly hilarious novel about familial trauma, chronic illness, academic labor, and contemporary art. In the tradition of Rabelais, Swift, and Fran Ross--the tradition of biting satire that joyfully embraces the strange and fantastical--and drawing upon documentary...

For those who've been sad and tried not to be, seventeen stories about the absurdity of searching for joy in a dying world. Winner of the 2025 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story CollectionA neighborhood of picturesque content-creation houses perched on too-green...

"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...

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 genre fiction writers under the age of 40 by The Guardian and...

Timely and timeless, a literary quest novel about trying to stay hopeful in hopeless times."To surrender yourself to the revelations of life and then to come back with the assertions of prose: that is the new heroism of the woman writer, and Kavenna is...

Early short stories by Thomas Pynchon, introduced by the author and praised as "an exhilarating spectacle of greatness discovering its powers" by the New Republic.Thomas Pynchon's literary career was launched not with the release of his widely acclaimed first novel, V., but with 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...

"A Canadian master of the form."--Gregory Cowles, New York TimesA former military policeman, a veterinarian, and a French poet walk into a bar and debate the Vietnam war. A couple of men who are part of a commune discover two dead bodies while out...

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...

Have you ever wished you could meet your favorite cartoon character? Just yank them right from the TV into your living room? Go on adventures and cause some mischief together? For Boyd, this wish came true. And at first, it was all fun and...