Absurdist Fiction

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.

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.

Ein Blaubär entführt den Hörer in eine Welt, in der Phantasie und Humor auf abenteuerliche Weise außer Kontrolle geraten sind. Dem Hörer geht es in dieser akustischen Neufassung wie der Hauptfigur: Gepackt vom Sog der Lesung Dirk Bachs geht es über sparsam, aber effektvoll eingesetzte Musik zu Zwergpiraten, Klabautergeistern und Gimpeln. Dramatische Klangbilder machen die Reise so plastisch, dass Finsterberge, der Große Wald, der Ewige Tornado, Atlantis u.v.m.

A parallel universe. South Texas. Narcotics are legal, and there’s a new contraband on the market: ancient Olmec artifacts, shrunken indigenous heads, and filtered animals - species of animals brought back from extinction to clothe, feed, and generally amuse the very wealthy. Esteban Bellacosa has lived in the border town of MacArthur long enough to know to keep quiet. But his simple life starts to get complicated when the swashbuckling investigative journalist Paco Herbert invites him to come to an illegal underground dinner serving filtered animals.

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.

Asa’s husband is transferring jobs, and his new office is located near his family’s home in the countryside. During an exceptionally hot summer, the young married couple move in, and Asa does her best to quickly adjust to their new rural lives, to their remoteness, to the constant presence of her in-laws, and the incessant buzz of cicadas. While her husband is consumed with his job, Asa is left to explore her surroundings on her own: She makes trips to the supermarket, halfheartedly looks for work, and tries to find interesting ways of killing time.

1923 in Midland, Texas, and Miss Dara falls in love with her best friend - who also happens to be a girl. Terrified, Miss Dara takes a job at Sugar Land Prison for men, hoping to keep her secret attractions under lock and key. Once there, she befriends inmate and soon-to-be legendary blues singer Leadbelly, who sings his way out (true story) - but only after he makes her promise to free herself from her own prison. Sugar Land is a triumphant, beautiful debut novel about the heart’s refusal to be denied what the heart wants.

You meet the strangest people in cafes! Satirical, surreal, trippy, and a little gross, PURSUIT! is a weird ride all its own. Life changes drastically and forever for Gwen and her boyfriend when a peculiar elderly man enters their favorite cafe and strikes up a conversation. What happens next is... well, you'll see. It's hard to explain.

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?

Portraits While Portraits takes place in a modern law firm with recognizable surroundings, its collection of characters are just as tragic as those vagabonds, kings, prostitutes, puppets, and clowns who search for meaning in an absurd world. It questions our values and illusions as it forces us to ask who are the real winners and losers as we pass through an existence none of us understand. Portraits peels away the masks of conventionality through a quirky host that invites us to attend Bernie Geldmann's birthday party. The party is in the firm's conference room which has two portraits ...

A nameless narrator awakens to the muddle of middle age, no longer certain who or what he is. He finds himself at a party talking to a woman he doesn't know who proves to be his wife. Soon separated but still living in the same apartment, he is threatened by a litigious dachshund and saddled with a stubborn case of erectile dysfunction in a world that seems held together by increasingly mercurial laws and elusive boundaries.

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.

In a hotel room in the middle of the night, Abby, a young feminist economist, lies awake next to her sleeping husband and daughter. Anxious that she is grossly underprepared for a talk she is presenting tomorrow on optimism and John Maynard Keynes, she has resolved to practice by using an ancient rhetorical method of assigning parts of her speech to different rooms in her house and has brought along a comforting albeit imaginary companion to keep her on track—Keynes himself.

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.

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.

For Jim Nashe, it all started when he came into a small inheritance and left Boston in pursuit of a "life of freedom." Careening back and forth across the United States, waiting for the money to run out, Nashe met Jack Pozzi, a young man with a temper and a plan. With Nashe's last funds, they entered a poker game against two rich eccentrics, "risking everything on the single blind turn of a card."

In a forgotten corner of western Kentucky lies a haunted forest referred to locally as "The Deadening", where vampire cults roam wild and time is immaterial. Our protagonist and his accomplice - the one and only Carver Canute - set out down the Old Spur Line in search of the legendary Kudzu House, where an old couple is purported to have been swallowed whole by a hungry vine.

More than 500 years before his friendship with Kitty, noble Ricardo de Avila's life met a fate-changing twist, and his morally complex, blood-soaked existence as an immortal began. Before being turned, Ricardo de Avila would have followed Coronado to the ends of the earth. Instead he found the end of his mortal life - and a new one, as a renegade vampire. For over 500 years as an immortal, Ricardo has followed his own moral code, upsetting the established order in the demon world.

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.