Series in Absurdist
Books in Absurdist
All This & More
From the critically acclaimed, bestselling author of The Cartographers and The Book of M comes an inventive new novel about a woman who wins the chance to rewrite every mistake she’s ever made… and how far she’ll go to find her elusive “happily ever after.” But there’s a twist: the reader gets to decide what she does next to change her fate. One woman. Endless options. Every choice has consequences. Meek, play-it-safe Marsh has just turned forty-five, and her life is in shambles. Her career is stagnant, her marriage has imploded, and her teenage daughter grows more distant by the day. Marsh is convinced she’s missed her chance at everything—romance, professional fulfillment, and adventure—and is desperate for a do-over. She can’t believe her luck when she’s selected to be the star of the global sensation All This and More, a show that uses quantum technology to allow contestants the chance to revise their pasts and change their present lives. It’s Marsh’s only shot to seize her dreams, and she’s determined to get it right this time. But even as she rises to become a famous lawyer, gets back together with her high school sweetheart, and travels the world, she begins to worry that All This and More’s promises might be too good to be true. Because while the technology is amazing, something seems a bit off.… Can Marsh really make her life everything she wants it to be? And is it worth it? Perfect for fans of Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library and Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, bestselling author Peng Shepherd’s All This and More is an utterly original, startlingly poignant novel that puts the reader in the driver’s seat.
Antic Hay
London life just after World War I, devoid of values and moving headlong into chaos at breakneck speed - Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay, like Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, portrays a world of lost souls madly pursuing both pleasure and meaning. Fake artists, third-rate poets, pompous critics, pseudo-scientists, con-men, bewildered romantics, cock-eyed futurists - all inhabit this world spinning out of control, as wildly comic as it is disturbingly accurate. In a style that ranges from the lyrical to the absurd, and with characters whose identities shift and change as often as their names and appearances, Huxley has here invented a novel that bristles with life and energy, what the New York Times called "a delirium of sense enjoyment!"
Autocorrect
From one of the most acclaimed masters of the short story form whom the New York Times calls “Genius,” a darkly funny collection of stories explores themes of identity, reality, and meaning. Etgar Keret is the world’s most famous living Israeli writer, known for writing short stories that are lean and accessible in style, and whimsical, surrealist, and darkly funny in subject. His work explores life’s smallest, most unremarkable interactions in ways that are profound and unusual. The characters populating his fiction have relatable work and relationship problems. They live in a world of ever-advancing technology, but it is always degraded by the baseness of human passions and brutality: a character’s partner is a reality show contestant from a parallel dimension; another finds the asteroid they paid to have named after their wife is scheduled to collide with earth; and an elderly widow convinces a popular AI program to commit suicide. These stories speak to our current moment in time: the uncertainty and fragility—full of misunderstandings and miscommunications—while looking for reasons and the strength to find hope. His stories reveal the fault lines and uncomfortable truths in our society in a style that is memorably his own.
Kill Ball
In a city where everyone lives inside of plastic bubbles, there is no such thing as intimacy. A husband can no longer kiss his wife. A mother can no longer hug her children. To do this would mean instant death. Ever since the disease swept across the globe, we have become isolated within our own personal plastic prison cells, rolling aimlessly through rubber streets in what are essentially man-sized hamster balls. Colin Hinchcliff longs for the touch of another human being. He can't handle the loneliness, the confinement, and he's horribly claustrophobic. The only thing keeping him going is his unrequited love for an exotic dancer named Siren, a woman who has never seen his face, doesn't even know his name. But when The Kill Ball, a serial slasher in a black leather sphere, begins targeting women at Siren's club, Colin decides he has to do whatever it takes in order to protect her... even if he has to break out of his bubble and risk everything to do it. Carlton Mellick III's Kill Ball is an existential thriller set in a surreal dystopian world. Oddly compelling and creepy as hell, this is a must-read for fans of Mellick's darkly absurd works like The Egg Man and Crab Town .
Norwood
Out of the American neon desert of Roller Dromes, chili parlors, country music, and girls who want “to live in a trailer and play records all night” comes ex-marine and troubadour Norwood Pratt. Sent on a mission to New York he gets involved in a wild journey that takes him in and out of stolen cars, freight trains, and buses. By the time he returns home to Texas, Norwood has met his true love, Rita Lee, on a bus; befriended the second shortest midget in show business and “the world's smallest perfect fat man”; and helped Joann “the chicken with a college education,” realize her true potential in life. As with all Portis’ fiction, the tone is cool, sympathetic, and funny.
Robinson
A suspense novel about three castaways marooned on an island owned by an eccentric recluse. January Marlow, a heroine with a Catholic outlook of the most unsentimental stripe, is one of three survivors out of twenty-nine souls when her plane crashes, blazing, on Robinson's island. Presumed dead for months, the three survivors must wait for the annual return of the pomegranate boat. Robinson, a determined loner, proves a fair if misanthropic host to his uninvited guests; he encourages January to keep a journal: as "an occupation for my mind, and I fancied that I might later dress it up for a novel. That was most peculiar, as things transpired, for I did not then anticipate how the journal would turn upon me, so that having survived the plane disaster, I should nearly meet my death through it." In Robinson, Muriel Spark's wonderful second novel, under the tropical glare and strange fogs of the tiny island, we find a volcano, a ping-pong playing cat, a dealer in occult as well as lucky charms, flying ants, sexual tension, a disappearance, blackmail, andperhapsmurder. Everything astounds, confounds, and convinces, frighteningly. "She is," as Charles Alva Hoyt once put it, "the Jane Austen of the Surrealists." Robinson, a unique and marvelous novel, is another display of the powers of "the most gifted and innovative British novelist" ( The New York Times ). In the work of Dame Murielin the last words of Robinson "immediately all things are possible."
Rock Manning Goes for Broke
“Disaffected young-adult filmmakers who specialize in escapist stunt comedy are caught in a propaganda war in Anders' sharp, absurdist novella…” —Booklist (Starred Review) “At times hilarious, at times brutal, this is an extremely personal look at how one person tries to survive constant tragedy.” —Publishers Weekly “…An astute capsule of that moment of overload when you can't decide whether to laugh or cry.” —Kirkus Reviews Vikings vs. Steampunks! Ice cream sundae hearse disasters! Roman gladiators meet vacuum-cleaner salesmen! Inappropriate uses of exercise equipment and supermarket trolleys! Unsupervised fires, and reckless destruction of public property! Nothing is off limits. Rock Manning lives and breathes slapstick comedy, and his whole life is an elaborate tribute to the masters, like Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Jackie Chan. With his best friend, Sally Hamster, he creates joyfully chaotic short movies that are full of mayhem and silliness. But Rock and Sally are becoming famous at a time of unrest, when America's economy has collapsed and people are taking refuge in highly addictive drugs. America's youth are being drafted to take part in endless wars against imaginary enemies overseas, while at home, a fascist militia known as the Red Bandanas is rising to power. As America becomes more mired in violence and destruction, Rock Manning's zany comedy films become the escapist fun that everybody needs. Over-the-top physical comedy and real-life brutality collide, as Rock and Sally find themselves unable to avoid getting sucked into the slow implosion of their country. The Red Bandanas want Rock Manning to star in propaganda films promoting their movement, and soon Rock and Sally are at the center of the struggle for the soul of America. The trauma and death that Rock witnesses begin to take a toll on him. When a botched weapon test plunges the world into deeper chaos, Rock and Sally must confront once and for all the outer limits of comedy.
Scorpion Ranch
For over 20 years, Carlton Mellick III has been writing some of the strangest and most compelling novels the bizarro fiction genre has to offer. Described as one of the top 40 genre fiction writers under the age of 40 by The Guardian and "one of the most original novelists working today" by extreme horror legend Edward Lee, Mellick returns with a literary exploration of gender identity and emotional abuse. Daniel Munch is in a toxic relationship, but not just because his girlfriend is selfish and manipulative. She is also literally toxic-born with glands in her mouth and genitals that spew deadly poison. Every time they kiss or make love, he puts his life at risk. She could kill him at any moment and he has no choice but to trust that she would never do anything to cause him harm. But when they decide to get married, Daniel is pressured into doing the switch -a procedure where couples swap bodies in order to better understand each other. For one month, he will become her girlfriend while she will become his boyfriend. It's only for one month, so what would be the harm in giving it a shot? Surely it wouldn't utterly destroy each and every aspect of his entire life... From the Wonderland Book Award-winning author of Quicksand House , Glass Children , and The Girl with the Barbed Wire Hair .
Show Them a Good Time
"Show Them a Good Time is a master class in the short story-bold, irreverent and agonizingly funny." Sally Rooney, Author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends Named A Most Anticipated Novel of 2020 by Entertainment Weekly * Marie Claire * Wall Street Journal * The A.V. Club * The Millions * Time * Parade * The Chicago Review of Books * LitHub A blisteringly original and wickedly funny collection of stories about the strange worlds that women inhabit and the parts that they must play. A sense of otherworldly menace is at work in the fiction of Nicole Flattery, but the threats are all too familiar. SHOW THEM A GOOD TIME tells the stories of women slotted away into restrictive roles: the celebrity's girlfriend, the widower's second wife, the lecherous professor's student, the corporate employee. And yet, the genius of Flattery's characters is to blithely demolish the boundaries of these limited and limiting social types with immense complexity and caustic intelligence. Nicole Flattery's women are too ferociously mordant, too painfully funny to remain in their places. In this fiercely original and blazingly brilliant debut, Flattery likewise deconstructs the conventions of genre to serve up strange realities: In Not the End Yet , Flattery probes the hilarious and wrenching ambivalence of Internet dating as the apocalypse nears; in Sweet Talk , the mysterious disappearance of a number of local women sets the scene for a young girl to confront the dangerous uncertainties of her own sexuality; in this collection's center piece, Abortion, A Love Story , two college students in a dystopian campus reconfigure the perilous stories of their bodies in a fraught academic culture to offer a subversive, alarming, and wickedly funny play that takes over their own offstage lives. And yet, however surreal or richly imagined the setting, Flattery always shows us these strange worlds from startlingly unexpected angles, through an unforgettable cast of brutally honest, darkly hilarious women and girls. Like the stories of Mary Gaitskill, Miranda July, Lorrie Moore, Joy Williams, and Ottessa Moshfegh, SHOW THEM A GOOD TIME is the work of a profoundly resonant and revelatory literary voice – at once spiky, humane, achingly hilarious-- that is sure to echo through the literary culture for decades to come.
Slow Learner
Early short stories by Thomas Pynchon, introduced by the author and praised as "an exhilarating spectacle of greatness discovering its powers" by the New Republic. Thomas Pynchon's literary career was launched not with the release of his widely acclaimed first novel, V. , but with the publication in literary magazines of the five stories collected here. In his introduction to Slow Learner , the author reviews his early work with disarming candor and recalls the American cultural landscape of the early post-Beat era in which the stories were written. Time magazine described this introductory essay as "Pynchon's first public gesture toward autobiography." "Funny and wise enough to charm the gravity from a rainbow...All five of the pieces have unusual narrative vigor and inventiveness." -- New York Times
Tartufo
From the author of Hollow Kingdom, a fantastically funny story featuring a cast of colorful characters in a dying Italian village and a giant truffle that changes their fate forever in this “deliciously absurd tale....I savored every page of this book.” (Shelby Van Pelt, author of Remarkably Bright Creatures ) After nearly losing the election to a geriatric donkey, newly installed Mayor Delizia Miccuci can’t help but feel like the sun has finally set on the rural Italian village of Lazzarini Boscarino. Tourists only stop by to ask for directions, Nonna Amara’s cherished ristorante is long shuttered, and the town hall is disgustingly overrun with glis glis poo—even Postman Duccio has been disgraced. All that’s left is Bar Celebrità, a rustic establishment where weary locals gather to quibble over decades-long disputes, submit their poor stomachs to bartender Giuseppina’s volcanic espresso, and wonder what will become of the place where together they’ve spent their entire lives. Little do the villagers know that local truffle hunter Giovanni Scarpazza has just happened upon something that could change everything. A truffle— un tartufo , that is—sits beneath the soil with the power to either be the greatest gift or the foulest curse the village has ever seen. Written with the same enchanting style and raucous humor that defines Hollow Kingdom and Feral Creatures , Tartufo is a reflection on the interconnectedness of life in all its manifestations—and how holding on to harmony in the face of hardship can grow something beautiful and rare beneath the surface.
The Dog of the North
* Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize * A New Yorker Best Book of the Year * A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * Nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction * “I’m in love with a grieving misfit driving around with a donkey-shaped piñata in an old van held together by duct tape…the great miracle of McKenzie’s writing… is how she manages to transform misery into gentle humor…darkly hilarious.” — The Washington Post “An addictive read with an ultimately hopeful core that recalls Haruki Murakami, Sayaka Murata, Richard Brautigan, and Miranda July” – Sanjena Sathian, author of Gold Diggers 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. There will be a road trip in the Dog of the North, an old van with gingham curtains, a piñata, and stiff brakes. There will be injury and peril. There will be a dog named Kweecoats and two brothers who may share a toupee. There will be questions: Why is a detective investigating her grandmother. What is “the Scintillator”? And can Penny recognize a good thing when it finally comes her way? This slyly humorous, thoroughly winsome novel finds the purpose in life’s curveballs, insisting that even when we are painfully warped by those we love most, we can be brought closer to our truest selves.