Absurdist Fiction

On his deathbed, Franz Kafka asked that all his unpublished manuscripts be burned. Fortunately, his request was ignored, allowing such works as The Trial to earn recognition among the literary masterpieces of the 20th century. This brilliant new translation of The Castle captures comedic elements and visual imagery that earlier interpretations missed.

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.

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.

With Life Ceremony, the incomparable Sayaka Murata is back with her first collection of short stories ever to be translated into English. In Japan, Murata is particularly admired for her short stories, which are sometimes sweet, sometimes shocking, and always imbued with an otherworldly imagination and uncanniness.

FonoLibro, el líder en audiolibros en español, celebra los 400 años de la obra mas importante y universal de nuestra lengua Las Aventuras del Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha, mas conocida por el nombre abreviado de Don Quijote.

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.

In this fantastically macabre tale, the separate halves of a nobleman split in two by a cannonball go on to pursue their own independent adventures. In a battle against the Turks, Viscount Medardo of Terralba is bissected lengthwise by a cannonball. One half of him returns to his feudal estate and takes up a lavishly evil life. Soon the other, virtuous half appears. The two halves become rivals for the love of the same woman, fight a bloody duel, and achieve a miraculous resolution.

Orphaned as a boy, raised in the Czech countryside by his doting grandparents, Jakub Procházka has risen from small-time scientist to become the country's first astronaut. When a dangerous solo mission to Venus offers him both the chance at heroism he's dreamt of, and a way to atone for his father's sins as a Communist informer, he ventures boldly into the vast unknown.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A surrealist story of mourning and messiahs, deserts and droughts, cowboys and junkies, miracles and mass hysteria, the lure of despair and the solace of friendship. Peter Mendelsund's Weepers is a novel for this age: our age of anesthesia and anger.

The Collected Stories of Diane Williams brings together over 300 new and previously published short fictions - distilled works of "unsettling brilliance" (Vanity Fair) that have rewritten the rules of the American short story.

In the final year of the nineteenth century, Peter Winceworth is toiling away at the letter S for Swansby’s multivolume Encyclopaedic Dictionary. But his disaffection with his colleagues compels him to assert some individual purpose and artistic freedom, and he begins inserting unauthorized, fictitious entries.

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 from the walls. These stories slip and slide between genres - from video games to fan fiction, body horror to choose-your-own-adventure - as characters cycle through giddying changes in gender, physiology, species, and identity. Collapsing boundaries between bodies and forms, these fictions interrogate the visceral, gross, and absurd.

For any task you might want to do, there's a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally complex, excessive, and inadvisable that no one would ever try it. How To is a guide to the third kind of approach. It's full of highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole.

"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 ...

Tras saber que el Turco baja por la costa con una peligrosa armada, Don Alonso Quijano, el caballero don Quijote de la Mancha, saldrá, una vez más, y con la oposición de su sobrina y de su ama, a una nueva batalla que empezará en la Mancha y terminará en.

A 999 line poem in heroic couplets, divided into 4 cantos, was composed - according to Nabokov's fiction - by John Francis Shade, an obsessively methodical man, during the last 20 days of his life.