Showing titles in Absurdist

The excoriating stories in Mark Doten's brilliant first collection dissect the pathological narratives that shape our culture and country. Narrated by a crosscutting array of White people, Doten's stories spotlight the self-serving logic through which their characters struggle to make sense of, and take control of, the narrative of our time.

Walter Schuler was undeniably dead, and there was no getting around that fact. But what led to his demise? Was there a goose involved in some way? Can a man truly be considered dead if no one in a position of authority is there to confirm it? Walter Schuler was gone, but did anyone actually care? As he rests in the deep freezer of his mansion, alongside a dead deer head that seems to have its own grievances with him, these are the kinds of questions he finds himself pondering.

In these 11 stories, the individuals who lift the curtains of their orderly homes and workplaces are confronted with the bizarre, the grotesque, the fantastic, the alien - and through it, find a way to liberation. The Lonesome Bodybuilder is the English-language debut of one of Japan's most fearlessly inventive young writers.

Award Winner! "Honorable Mention," Contemporary Fiction, 2021 Writers Digest Self-Published E-Book Awards If you like stories told in unusual ways, enter the emotional, funny, and scary world of Backstory—a single mom’s search for new love and Hollywood fame. But wait: Is a serial killer stalking her and her daughter? Told with a series of letters and brief screenplay scenes, this story's dynamic format will make you laugh, cry, and cheer for Merry Mayfield, a mid-life Columbia University film school grad, who relocates to Austin, Texas, after a devastating divorce. Through her diary-...

Clay Donovan thought dying was the end of his troubles, but fate isn’t done with him yet. Assigned as a temporary Death Walker, he makes one reckless decision—sparing the life of a social media influencer. Now, death is out of balance, and every life saved means another is lost. Now, something ancient and unforgiving is watching, waiting, and Clay is running out of time to fix his mistake before the cost becomes permanent.

Peter Knox lives quietly in one of those small country villages that's up for the Village Garden of the Year award. Until Doc and Constance Rabbit move in next door, upsetting the locals (many of them members of governing political party United Kingdom Against Rabbit Population), complicating Peter's job as a Rabbit Spotter, and forcing him to take a stand, moving from unconscious leporiphobe to active supporter of the UK's amiable and peaceful population of anthropomorphised rabbits.

Strange, almost magical, things are afoot in Lviv. Seagulls circle overhead while the passing breeze carries a briny whiff, even though the coast is far away. A ragtag group of aging hippies gather around a mysterious grave in Lychakiv Cemetery. Among them are an ex-KGB officer and the old subversive he once spied upon. Soon, Captain Ryabtsev and Alik Olisevych band together to uncover the source of the city's “anomalies.”

The world is ending. It has been ending for some time. When did the ending begin? Perhaps when Evie’s mother died, or when her father died soon after. Perhaps when her sister, Elena, was forcibly institutionalized in a psychiatric hippie commune in Colorado. Certainly at some point over the last year, as New York City spun down the tubes, as bedbugs and vultures descended, as apartments crumbled to the ground and no one had the time or money to fight it, or even, really, to notice.

Amane is ten years old when she discovers she's not like everyone else. Her school friends were all conceived the normal way, by artificial insemination, and raised in the normal way, by parents in 'clean', sexless marriages. But Amane's parents committed the ultimate taboo: they fell in love, had sex and procreated. As Amane grows up and enters adulthood, she does her best to fit in and live her life like the rest of society: cultivating intense relationships with anime characters, and limiting herself to extra-marital sex, as is the norm.

Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick scientist who lives out of her mobile lab. She scours the country’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails, while her relatives urge her to settle down and finally start a family of her own. What they don't know: Yeva already dates plenty of men—not for love, but to fund her work—entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they'll find docile brides untainted by feminism and modernity.

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 always just around the corner. In these masterful short stories from the singular mind of the actor and comedian Brett Gelman, you’ll meet five individuals, each navigating a uniquely strange stage of life.

Un capolavoro letterario senza tempo, in cui l'autore mescola il reale con l'assurdo, l'insensibilità con la compassione...

From the bestselling author of Submerged: Life on a Fast Attack Submarine in the Last Days of the Cold War In the spring of 2001, Hiram Bleeker, a lonely, guilt-wracked Vietnam veteran with severe PTSD, is holding a gun to his mouth. As he is about to pull the trigger, an enchanting woman who does not seem to be of this world introduces him to something that restores his soul—rescuing immigrants in the desert and flying them over the internal checkpoints of the US Border Patrol in southwest Texas. As he flies immigrants in his small plane and saves them from the killing dehydration and ...

At the turn of the 20th century, as he composes a treatise on melancholy, Jacov Reinhardt sets off from his small Croatian village in search of his hero and unwitting mentor, Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla, who is rumored to have disappeared into the South American jungle - "not lost, mind you, but retired." Jacov's narcissistic preoccupation with melancholy consumes him, and as he desperately recounts the myth of his journey to his trusted but ailing scribe, hope for an encounter with the lost philosopher who holds the key to Jacov's obsession seems increasingly unlikely.

In this fiendishly original novel, Mark Leyner is a leather-blazer-wearing, Piranha 793-driving, narcotic-guzzling monster who has potential rivals eliminated by his bionically enhanced bodyguards, has his internal organs tattooed, and eavesdrops on the erotic fantasies of Victoria's Secret models–fantasies that naturally revolve around him.

A man with dark thoughts on his mind is racing along the remote snowy roads of Hurmevaara in Finland when there is flash in the sky and something crashes into the car. That something turns about to be a highly valuable meteorite. With euro signs lighting up the eyes of the locals, the unexpected treasure is temporarily placed in a neighbourhood museum, under the watchful eye of a priest named Joel.

Where were you when you first heard President Kennedy had been shot? This is a question most people can answer, even if the answer is "I wasn't born yet." In this epic novel, David Bowman makes the strong case that the shooting on November 22nd, 1963 was the defining turning point that catapulted the world into an entirely new stratosphere. It was the second big bang. Written with an almost documentary film like intensity, Big Bang is a posthumous work from the award-winning author of Let the Dog Drive. A riotous account of a country, perhaps, at the beginning of the end.

A mysterious object has appeared out in the snow. Gibbs and Cline are mesmerized. They can’t discern its exact shape and color, nor if it’s moving or fixed in place. But it is there. Isn’t it? Whatever it might be, Hart thinks the thing in the snow is an unwelcome distraction, and probably a huge waste of time. Though, come to think of it, time itself has been a bit wonky lately. Weekends pass in a blur, and he can hardly tell day from night. Gravity seems less-than-reliable. The lights have been flickering weirdly, and he feels an odd thrumming sensation in his beard.

Hilarious, profound, and achingly true to life, Jonas Karlsson's new novel explores the true nature of happiness through the eyes of a hero you won't soon forget. A passionate film buff, our hero's life revolves around his part-time job at a video store, the company of a few precious friends, and a daily routine that more often than not concludes with pizza and a movie in his treasured, small space in Stockholm. When he receives an astronomical invoice from a random national bureaucratic agency, everything will tumble into madness.

THE AUTHOR is a dark absurdist take on the artist as a young man in a world damaged by social media, designer drugs, and the dark underbelly of Hollywood. The anonymous author of the saga peels back the curtain to reveal the inner life of a one-day superstar (or sociopath) desperate to become famous by any means necessary, who one day does, and pulls off one of the greatest public relations stunts in entertainment history.