Absurdist Fiction

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.

Dr. Whitfield is looking forward to a sabbatical year of peace and quiet, gardening in his backyard, and tinkering with what he calls his latest "unpublishable book". As the year begins, he is drawn by a series of seeming coincidences into involvement with a group of characters from across Europe, including a family that has been the target of assassination attempts by unknown powers. During his journey to Romania, the situation in which he finds himself becomes more sinister than it first seemed.

Penny Rush has problems. Her marriage is over; she’s quit her job. Her mother and stepfather went missing in the Australian outback five years ago; her mentally unbalanced father provokes her; her grandmother Dr. Pincer keeps experiments in the refrigerator and something worse in the woodshed. But Penny is a virtuoso at what’s possible when all else fails. Elizabeth McKenzie, the National Book Award–nominated author of The Portable Veblen, follows Penny on her quest for a fresh start.

"Gros-Câlin" paraît au Mercure de France en 1974. Il met en scène un employé de bureau qui, à défaut de trouver l'amour chez ses contemporains, s'éprend d'un python. L'auteur de ce premier roman, fable émouvante sur la solitude de l'homme moderne, est un certain Émile Ajar. On apprendra plus tard que derrière ce nom se cache le célèbre Romain Gary. L'histoire loufoque et touchante de Monsieur Cousin et de son python est racontée avec humour et tendresse par Jacques Gamblin. Un régal absolu !

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.

In the final year of the 19th century, Peter Winceworth is toiling away at the letter S for Swansby’s multivolume Encyclopaedic Dictionary. Increasingly uneasy that his colleagues are attempting to corral language and regiment facts, Winceworth feels compelled to assert some sense of individual purpose and artistic freedom, and begins inserting unauthorized, fictitious entries into the dictionary.

There’s no problem Professor Chandra can’t solve. Except for one: the secret to happiness. In the moments after the accident, Professor Chandra doesn’t see his life flash before his eyes, but his life’s work. He’s just narrowly missed the Nobel Prize (again) and even though he knows he should get straight back to his pie charts, his doctor has other ideas. All this work. All this success. All this stress. It’s killing him. He needs to take a break, start enjoying himself.

Edicion en audio conmemorativa del IV centenario de su primera publicacion (1605). En 1955 el mundo de habla espanola se preparaba para conmemorar los 350 anos de la primera edicion de esa obra maxima de la literatura universal que es "Don Quijote" de Cervantes.

Trina FastHorse Goldberg-Oneka is a fifty-year-old trans woman whose life is irreversibly altered in the wake of a gentle--but nonetheless world-changing--invasion by an alien entity called The Seep. Through The Seep, everything is connected. Capitalism falls, hierarchies and barriers are broken down; if something can be imagined, it is possible. Trina and her wife, Deeba, live blissfully under The Seep’s utopian influence--until Deeba begins to imagine what it might be like to be reborn as a baby, which will give her the chance at an even better life.

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.

This ingenious novel is presented as a chronicle of an island from medieval to modern times. The island is not on the map, but it is real beyond doubt. It cannot be found in history books, yet the events are painfully recognizable. The monastic chroniclers dutifully narrate events they witness. The entries mostly seem objective, but at least one monk simultaneously drafts and hides a "true" history, to be discovered centuries later. And why has someone snipped out a key prophesy about the island's fate?

Avishay is up for the Nobel Prize for Economics. There’s just one problem—he’s dead. His four closest friends agree that the well-earned prize must stay within his grasp, and so conspire to conceal Avishay’s corpse until the committee’s announcement. The potential of a glorious legacy for their late friend – and by extension, for them all – is only a mere eight days away. What could go wrong?

After a domestic terrorist unleashes a dirty bomb in Manhattan in 1970, making the borough uninhabitable, FBI Agent Uli Sarkisian finds himself in a world that is suddenly unrecognizable, as the United States faces its greatest immigration crisis ever: finding housing for millions of its own citizens. The federal government hastily retrofits an abandoned government installation in the Nevada desert. Despite the government's best intentions, as the military pulls out of "Rescue City", the residents are increasingly left to their own devices, and tribal gang warfare fuses with democracy.

A busybody aunt who disapproves of hair removal; a pair of door-to-door saleswomen hawking portable lanterns; a cheerful lover who visits every night to take a luxurious bath. Where the Wild Ladies Are is populated by these and many other spirited women - who also happen to be ghosts. This is a realm in which jealousy, stubbornness, and other excessive “feminine” passions are not to be feared or suppressed, but rather cultivated; and, chances are, a man named Mr. Tei will notice your talents and recruit you, dead or alive (preferably dead), to join his mysterious company.

The Late Mattia Pascal (Italian: Il fu Mattia Pascal) is a 1904 novel by Luigi Pirandello. It is one of his best-known works and was his first major treatment of the theme of the mask. The protagonist, Mattia Pascal, finds that his promising youth has, through misfortune or misdeed, dissolved into a dreary dead-end job and a miserable marriage.

Between life and death, dreaming and waking, at the train stop beyond the end of the world is the city of Palimpsest. To get there is a miracle, a mystery, a gift, and a curse - a voyage permitted only to those who’ve always believed there’s another world than the one that meets the eye. Those fated to make the passage are marked forever by a map of that wondrous city tattooed on their flesh after a single orgasmic night. To this kingdom of ghost trains, lion-priests, living kanji, and cream-filled canals come four travelers.

Exposing his father’s transgressions in a tell-all was the ethical, righteous--and profitable--thing to do. What’s left but to slink back home for a humbling face-to-face with the man whose secrets he sold? He was a notorious government whistle-blower. Depending on whom you ask, he’s a treasonous felon, a folk hero, a validated patriot, or a national disgrace. To his son, Michael, he’s the father who threw his family into upheaval. Now, having moved back home at the age of thirty-four, Michael is getting to know him as a man.

"Nous avions deux sacoches d'herbe, soixante-quinze pastilles de mescaline, cinq feuilles d'acide-buvard carabiné, une demi-salière de cocaïne, et une galaxie complète et multicolore de remontants, tranquillisants, hurlants, désopilants... sans oublier un litre de tequila, un litre de rhum."

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.

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.