Absurdist Fiction

At turns nonchalantly hip and charmingly deranged, Suzuki's singular slant on speculative fiction would be echoed in countless later works, from Margaret Atwood and Harumi Murakami, to Black Mirror and Ex Machina. In these darkly playful and punky stories, the fantastical elements are always earthed by the universal pettiness of strife between the sexes, and the gritty reality of life on the lower rungs, whatever planet that ladder might be on.

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.

Émile, négociateur du GIGN, doit intervenir lors d'une prise d'otages dans une école maternelle. Une situation presque banale pour lui, à ceci près : le forcené prétend s'appeler Elon Musk. Après le succès de S'adapter, prix Goncourt des Lycéens et prix Femina 2021, Clara Dupont-Monod nous offre un texte haletant, conçu comme une joute médiévale.

Gregor Samsa, a seemingly average salesman and cloth merchant, awakes one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect. Trapped inside his new grotesque form, Gregor struggles to hold down his job and maintain his place in the family who become increasingly wary of him, frightful of his new body. Soon Gregor is unable to communicate at all, and becomes fearful he will forget his human side altogether.

A retired general—the leader of the latest military takeover—moves to a peaceful island and decides to rid it of what he sees as its last remaining “anarchic” components. The island, described by its people as a utopia, the last peaceful resort for mankind, morphs into dystopia when the general, in the hope of bringing order to the island life, begins to act more and more like a dictator. The first ones to revolt against the general are the seagulls.

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.

Maintenu en parfait état de conservation par les eaux glaciales de la mer du Nord, repêché par un chalutier, puis décongelé, Napoléon Bonaparte revient à la vie au moment des attentats djihadistes de Paris, juste à temps pour sauver le monde... Une fable loufoque et jubilatoire par un auteur qui s'est imposé, en quelques années, dans les meilleures ventes, avec plus de 600 000 exemplaires vendus.

The Novices of Lerna introduces the enigmatic fictions of Ángel Bonomini to English listeners for the first time. Shot through with wry humor and tender absurdity, these meditations on identity, surveillance, and isolation remain eerily prescient. The collection's central novella follows Ramon Beltra, an unambitious scholar who receives a mysterious invitation to a lucrative six-month fellowship at the University of Lerna in Switzerland.

Gregor Samsa, el protagonista, se despierta una mañana sintiendo extraños dolores. Asustado, se percata de que sus miembros no le responden, y además nota que su cuerpo pesa en exceso. Gregor vive con sus padres y hermana, y piensa en ellos y en su trabajo, cuando aquella mañana descubre que ha dejado de ser humano para convertirse en un bicho.

Der einzige Teil der Bittenichthören-Trilogie ist einerseits die Fortsetzung vom drittletzten Teil der Daswarsdann-Trilogie, andererseits auch nicht. Es hat etwas mit einem rechtlichen Unsinn zu tun. Der interversale Geflunkerverlag wollte infolge des Unsinns dieses Buch partout nicht in seinem Programm haben.

Distraught and hopeless, an eighteen-year-old distance runner, Regan, decides to end her life. And she’ll do it through an unusual new method available only on the dark web. Enter Ülle, a woman with amnesia, who will, inadvertently, make Regan’s wish come true.

Salman Rushdies Quichotte ist ein Reisender, der besessen ist von der "unwirklichen Wirklichkeit" des Fernsehens. Er will das Herz der Königin der Talkshows erobern und begibt sich auf eine Reise quer durch Amerika, um sich ihrer als würdig zu erweisen; auf dem Beifahrersitz, Sancho, der Sohn, den er sich immer gewünscht hat. Rushdie nimmt Quichottes Abenteuer mit in unsere verrückte Gegenwart.

Zebra is the last in a line of anarchists, atheists, and autodidacts. When war came, her family didn't fight; they took refuge in books. Now alone and in exile, Zebra leaves New York for Barcelona, retracing the journey she and her father made from Iran to the United States years ago. Books are Zebra's only companions - until she meets Ludo. Their connection is magnetic; their time together fraught. Zebra overwhelms him with her complex literary theories, her concern with death, and her obsession with history. He thinks she's unhinged; she thinks he's pedantic.

Blending the piercing humor of Alexandra Kleeman and the jagged satire of Black Mirror, an audacious, eerily prescient debut novel that chronicles the rise and fall of a massive high-rise housing complex, and the lives it affected before - and after - its demise. Standing nearly 500 stories tall, Los Verticalés once bustled with life and excitement. Now this marvel of modern architecture and nontraditional urban planning has collapsed into a pile of rubble known as the Heap.

One cold winter night, Charlie shares a cab with a stranger in a purple hat. As they talk, a cloud of purple smoke overwhelms him, and he wakes up to find himself behind the only desk in the Epiphany Detective Agency. Charlie, as it turns out, is trapped in Metaphoria, an otherworldly place that reality has forgotten, a place where everything means something else. His first client is Shirley Miller, who insists on hiring Charlie to find her husband’s missing heart. In fact, she’s so insistent that she replaces Charlie’s heart with a bomb.

Lucy and Jake live in a house by a field where the sun burns like a ball of fire. Lucy has set her career aside in order to devote her life to the children, to their finely tuned routine, and to the house itself, which comforts her like an old, sly friend. But then a man calls one afternoon with a shattering message: His wife has been having an affair with Lucy's husband, Jake. The revelation marks a turning point: Lucy and Jake decide to stay together but make a special arrangement designed to even the score and save their marriage - she will hurt him three times.

Que faire lorsque la femme de votre vie décide de vous quitter parce qu'elle vous aime ? Comment sauver le couple de ses parents quand on a huit ans ? Une fille à la dérive peut-elle devenir une fée parce qu'un petit garçon a décidé de croire en elle ? Avec la force, l'humour et le style qui ont fait le succès de tous ses romans, Didier van Cauwelaert, prix Goncourt pour "Un aller simple", nous montre une fois encore comment le quotidien le plus cruel peut basculer dans le merveilleux, et la détresse ouvrir le chemin d'une seconde vie.

Nuns. Super Soakers. Oversexed Assistants! An ancient organization of women who suck cruelty out of people tasks one surly centenarian with a bubble-brained teenager to save the world. Yup, the world is in some pretty deep doo-doo. Bonus chapters from some of the author’s other books are included.

Size matters. Or at least it does to Ed, nitpicking quantity surveyor and captain of his local pub football team who has faked a business trip abroad to get some cheap plastic surgery. Ed intends to be even more of a man upon his return. But has he managed to keep this as secret as he thinks? Will this really be such a wonderful surprise for Fiona on their wedding night? And just who is this operation for anyway?

Jack was never “right,” but that’s a lot of what made him magnetic to other people. When he was younger, he was that guy that girls wanted to be around. People were drawn in by him, even later on when there wasn’t much of him left. I never understood that. He never really put a lot of energy into grooming and maintaining relationships with people. I guess when you see someone that is content spending their time alone, it creates a vacuum and people flood in like water choking a storm drain. Even as his deterioration became apparent, people threw him lifelines.