Absurdist Comedy

Mr. Quark is a down-on-his-luck pot smuggler hiding out in the mountains of Columbia with his dog, High Pockets, and a small band of banditos led by the irascible José. Times are lean, and to liven up their exile, José decides to mug a family of American tourists. Among the spoils are physics texts, which launch Mr. Quark on a sidesplitting, boisterous adventure north to California, where he confronts the owner of the books with his own theories.

From the author of 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 character study of a man whose public life has accelerated beyond his control. The setting is a nameless Central European city where Ryder, a renowned pianist, has come to give the most important performance of his life. Instead, he finds himself diverted on a series of cryptic and infuriating errands that nevertheless provide him with vital clues to his own past.

A few years ago, small-time finance journalist Matthew Prior quit his day job to gamble everything on a quixotic notion: a Web site devoted to financial journalism in the form of blank verse. When his big idea - and his wife's eBay resale business - ends with a whimper (and a garage full of unwanted figurines), they borrow and borrow, whistling past the graveyard of their uncertain dreams.

Richard Brautigan's world is one of gentle magic and marvelous laughter, of the incredibly beautiful and the beautifully incredible. Trout Fishing in America is a pseudonym for the miraculous. A journey that begins at the foot of the Benjamin Franklin statue in San Francisco's Washington Square, that wanders through the wonders of America's rural waterways, and that ends, inevitably, with mayonnaise. Funny, wild, and sweet, Trout Fishing in America is an incomparable guidebook to the delights of exploration.

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.

From the outside, Harold is an average seven-year-old third grader growing up in the 1960s. Bored by school. Crushing on a girl. Likes movies and baseball—especially the hometown Boston Red Sox. Enjoys spending time with his grandfather. But inside Harold’s mind, things are a lot more complex and unusual. His thoughts come to him as birds flying through a small rectangle in the middle of his brain. He visits an outdoor cafe on the moon and is invited aboard a spaceship by famed astronomer Carl Sagan.

Jonny Hollywood is living the dream. As the king of late-night television, his charm and charisma light up screens across America, masking a past of razor-sharp comedy now dulled by fame's golden sheen. From adoring fans to endless luxury, Jonny has it all—or so he thinks. When a bizarre encounter unravels the carefully curated facade of his life, Jonny learns the truth: he’s not just a talk show host. He’s a sleeper agent for an ancient alien race. His mission? To take out the most powerful figure on Earth—the President of the United States—in a moment that will change history ...

"Bigfoot Buds" is a hilarious, heartwarming, and utterly absurd tale of friendship, cannabis, and the unexpected magic of rural life. When Hank 'Hazy' Thompson, a third-generation cannabis farmer, finds himself on the brink of financial ruin, he discovers an unlikely savior in the form of Gronk, a gentle giant of a Sasquatch with a surprising affinity for cannabis and a knack for keeping thieves at bay. As Hank and Gronk navigate the challenges of running a cannabis farm, they forge an unbreakable bond, communicating through a mix of grunts, gestures, and shared laughter. Their partnership ...

A member of the landed gentry, with a seemingly guaranteed income from his estate in the country, Oblomov lives in Petersburg, uninterested in the business that provides his living and barely aware that the revenue is diminishing. Not that he leads a dissolute life of extravagance, balls and entertainment. Instead he is a dreamer, a sybarite, content above all to spend most of the day supine, in bed. The novel opens with Oblomov thus ensconced, attended only by his dirty, grumbling, indolent servant Zahar, who has looked after him since childhood, catering to his every need.

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.

In the fading days of late summer, 2011, self-taught astrophysicist Petra has calculated that the atmosphere will collapse in a few weeks’ time—on September 21, at approximately 9:20 pm—ending the world as we know it. But the distraught Petra will not have to carry the burden of this terrible news alone for long. Fate intervenes, bringing her into the orbit of a pair of unlikely companions: Johan, a man whose intellectual prowess is remarkably overshadowed by his culinary skills, and Agnes, a seventy-five-year-old widow who has made a fortune posing as a young influencer on social media.

After botching a suicide attempt, salaryman Hanio Yamada decides to put his life up for sale in the classifieds section of a Tokyo newspaper. Soon interested parties come calling with increasingly bizarre requests and what follows is a madcap comedy of errors, involving a jealous husband, a drug-addled heiress, poisoned carrots - even a vampire. For someone who just wants to die, Hanio can't seem to catch a break, as he finds himself enmeshed in a continent-wide conspiracy that puts him in the crosshairs of both his own government and a powerful organized-crime syndicate.

Philip Horkman is a happy man - the owner of a pet store called The Wine Shop, and on Sundays a referee for kids' soccer. Jeffrey Peckerman is the sole sane person in a world filled with goddamned jerks and morons, and he's having a really bad day. The two of them are about to collide in a swiftly escalating series of events that will send them running for their lives, pursued by the police, soldiers, terrorists, subversives, bears, and a man dressed as Chuck E. Cheese.

It’s as if her life only began once Moon appeared in it. The desultory copywriting work, the boyfriend, and the want of anything not-Moon quickly fall away when she beholds the idol in concert, where Moon dances as if his movements are creating their own gravitational field; on live streams, as fans from around the world comment in dozens of languages; even on skincare products endorsed by the wildly popular Korean boy band, of which Moon is the youngest, most luminous member. Seized by ineffable desire, our unnamed narrator begins writing Y/N fanfic.

Evoking such classics as Elmer Gantry and The Day of the Locust, William Giraldi's About Face boldly transfers the perennial literary themes of celebrity, ambition, and obsession to twenty-first-century Boston. There we meet Val Face, a charismatic self-help guru who captivates multitudes with his uncanny ability to heal adherents using only the power of his words, the mysterious touch of his hands, and the transcendent beauty of his face.

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.

Set in the time of Charlemagne and narrated by a nun with her own secrets to keep, The Nonexistent Knight tells the story of Agilulf, a gleaming white suit of armor with nothing inside it. A challenge to his honor sends Agilulf on a search through France, England, and North Africa to confirm the chastity of a virgin he saved from rape years earlier.

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 best friends who built their careers writing about a single work of art meet after a decades-long falling-out. One of them, called to the other’s deathbed for unknown reasons by a “relatively short” nine-page email, spends his flight to Berlin reflecting on Dutch Renaissance painter Count Hugo Beckenbauer.

Bob Honey, the disillusioned divorcee with a penchant for murder by mallet, weaves his way toward Washington DC, for the ultimate showdown with a certain nefarious "landlord", but nothing is as it seems, and Bob will have more than just the government working against him. Part comedy and part thriller, Bob Honey Sings Jimmy Crack Corn establishes Sean Penn as a fixture of the literary landscape for years to come.

Alan Blair, the hero of Wake Up, Sir!, is a young, loony writer with numerous problems of the mental, emotional, sexual, spiritual, and physical variety. He's very good at problems. But luckily for Alan, he has a personal valet named Jeeves, who does his best to sort things out for his troubled master. And Alan does find trouble wherever he goes.