Absurdist

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....

Obsessed by what they are certain is the impending apocalypse, a mismatched trio set off on a globetrotting road-trip in the latest feel-good adventure from the internationally bestselling author of The Hundred Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared. In the fading days of...

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE WINNER OF THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE WINNER OF THE GORDON BURN PRIZE WINNER OF THE ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZE WINNER OF THE WRITERS' LEAGUE OF TEXAS FICTION AWARD SHORTLISTED FOR THE CLIMATE FICTION PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR...

The Waves traces the lives of six friends from childhood to old age....

From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize-winning novel 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...

Traveling across the landscapes of time and of space, heading always west, and carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest, our undead narrator encounters and loses parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another.

A uniquely humorous and deeply profound novel from a legendary stand-up comedian that follows the thoughts of a 1960s third grader during a single day at school. Steven Wright is one of the most significant and influential stand-up comedians in history. Rolling Stone ranked him fifteenth on...

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....

“Here, at last, is someone doing something new.” —The New York Times “The style is George Saunders meets Ottessa Moshfegh.” —The Guardian “The funniest book of the year and one of the smartest.” —Gary Shteyngart A hilarious, surreal, and devastating journey into the mind of...

"Hinds’ depiction of Piglet’s frantic appetite is piercing, capturing her insatiable need for the lushly described food. This is a listen like slightly burnt caramel—sharp and dark, yet still luscious."—AudioFile (Earphones Award Winner) An elegant, razor-sharp debut about women's...

Humor is healthy. Author & narrator Alfonso F.R. provides a vital tool for snapping millions out of hip-hop hypnosis, this audiobook. You’ve heard a disgusting hip-hop song today, haven’t you? The most pervasive poison in society is difficult to avoid.

For fans of Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Miranda July comes a whip-smart, irresistible novel about a college senior who has 48 hours to sell her recently deceased mother's surprise stash of rare pills, or suffer the consequences. Arvy Keening is just trying to get through the week. Tantalizingly...

“A wonderful storyteller with a vibrant voice.” —The New York Times From the author of the cult classic Treasure Island!!!, a delightfully unhinged comedy following a woman as she attempts to exorcise the spirit of a dead corgi from her nephew and renegotiate the borders of her previously...

VACATION CHECKLIST Pack swim trunks. Apply sunscreen. Survive the apocalypse? Professional underachiever Dan Foster is finally taking a vacation. Sure, his life has been average at best, and yeah, he’s never quite lived up to his potential. But after a few Miller Lites in paradise with his...

An explosive, jaw-dropping debut about a woman who loses her job as an oil company CEO after she’s filmed having sex with a tree in her sleep, a calamity that unravels her mind, spiraling her through history until she’s united with a centuries-old coven of ecstatically revolutionary women...

Written in one cascading sentence with the power of atomic particles colliding, Krasznahorkai’s novel is a tour de force, a morality play, a blistering satire, a devastating encapsulation of our helplessness when confronted with the moral and environmental dilemmas we face.

Haunted by the ghosts of past, present, and future spies, Aiken is trapped in a lethal battle with Havana intelligence officers desperate to discover the CIA's top spy hidden inside Fidel Castro's government.

The haunting classic about hope, fear, and absurdity—Franz Kafka's The Castle is an expressionistic masterpiece.

“There is so much at play in this wondrous novel. Vi, struggling to place herself in any context that makes sense within the world, earnestly leads us into a wild experiment, to turn a blob into the man of her dreams, and I was transfixed by her voice. This is a book that looks at identity and...

In his first novel, A Happy Death, written when he was in his early 20s and retrieved from his private papers following his death in 1960, Albert Camus laid the foundation for The Stranger, focusing in both works on an Algerian clerk who kills a man in cold blood. But he also revealed himself to...

“A unique alien invasion story that focuses on the human and the myriad ways we see and don’t see our own world. Mesmerizing.” —Jeff VanderMeer A blend of searing social commentary and speculative fiction, Chana Porter’s fresh, pointed debut explores a strange new world in the wake of...

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. Meet Ole Mbatian Jr., a Maasai warrior; Kevin...

Ten years have passed since Nathan Muir rescued Tom Bishop from a Suzhou Prison and escaped the CIA for good. Now, all his former agents have suddenly vanished leaving the CIA blinded around the globe.

Ijon Tichy, Lem's Candide of the Cosmos, encounters bizarre civilizations and creatures in space that serve to satirize science, the rational mind, theology, and other icons of human pride....

One of the New York Times' “Novels We’re Excited About This Spring” David Lynch meets Fight Club in T. C. Boyle’s No Way Home, an obsessive psychological study that illuminates the darkness that lurks inside all of us. Terrence Tully, work-obsessed and a naif in the arenas of sex and...

Haunted by the ghosts of past, present, and future spies, Aiken is trapped in a lethal battle with Havana intelligence officers desperate to discover the CIA's top spy hidden inside Fidel Castro's government. Aiken must betray Nathan Muir and Tom Bishop—exposing CIA operations that link Cuba, China, and Venezuela in a startling conspiracy—in order to rescue the woman he loves...all in a single night without leaving the hotel room of his interrogation.

The gentle giant Florian Herscht has a problem: having faithfully attended Herr Köhler’s adult education classes in physics, he is convinced that disaster is imminent. And so, he embarks upon a one-sided correspondence with Chancellor Angela Merkel, to convince her of the danger of the complete destruction of all physical matter. Otherwise, he works for the Boss (the head of a local neo-Nazi gang), who has taken him under his wing and gotten him work as a graffiti cleaner and also a one-room apartment in the small eastern German town of Kana.

An award-winning novel from an international rising star—spanning ancient and modern China—in the dazzlingly inventive style of Susanna Clarke, David Mitchell, and Charles Yu. Inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China, Ghost Cities follows multiple narratives, including one in...

An award-winning novel from an international rising star – spanning ancient and modern China – in the dazzlingly inventive style of Haruki Murakami and Kaliane Bradley 'Lu has a brilliant mind for style, language, pace and ideas, and this is a funny and fascinating book that I can’t wait...

It started with a phone call. “I need a large.” Margaret works reception at Sterling, Wolfe & Fierce, so she has learned not to ask unnecessary questions. Unfortunately, the caller wants a jockstrap. Even more unfortunately, the new consulting firm upstairs has actually named itself The Jockstrap. The three very serious businessmen behind it insist the name is a metaphor for support, strength, and strategic leadership. Everyone else hears underwear. Then Mortimer discovers a bulk discount. Four thousand jockstraps arrive. Corporate classifies Sterling, Wolfe & Fierce as a receiving ...

Brenda retired on a Tuesday. By Thursday, the pigeon was in management. Sterling, Wolfe & Fierce is a prestigious Manhattan firm with a rosé fountain in the lobby, a reception desk carved from a failed competitor's yacht, and four women known collectively as The Bitches. Unfortunately, only one of them appears to know how the office works. That would be Skyler. When Brenda, the firm's five-foot-nothing, chain-smoking, all-knowing human support system, retires to Florida to fight seagulls, everything comes unhooked. Clients flee. The Wi-Fi disappears. Motivational haikus are deployed. A ...

THE POPPY SEED PROTOCOL Small seeds. Big chaos. After surviving last Tuesday’s highly unusual breakfast incident, Cindy is rewarded by Corporate with something truly dangerous: a better parking space. Brittany has worked at Sterling, Wolfe & Fierce for seven years. She parks on Level Five, where the raccoons have begun asserting property rights. Cindy ate one seed. Apparently, that qualifies as resilience. So Brittany, Riley, and Avery develop a perfectly reasonable plan to restore workplace justice. It requires six poppy seeds. Unfortunately, Avery buys twelve pounds. By the next morning...

What if, one ordinary morning, humanity discovered that animals could suddenly understand us… and talk back? In The Cats Have Notes, Sam Peterson and his wife Sally wake to a world forever changed when their three household cats begin carrying on perfectly understandable conversations. Morgana, the self-important Maine Coon mix; Melisandre, the sardonic black cat with a Goth streak; and Grizabella, the sharp-tongued young tabby, suddenly have opinions about everything—from food and litter boxes to television, politics, personal privacy, and the baffling habits of humans.

Imagine a noir thriller that turns completely sideways. A man confronting the darkest reflections of his own obsessions and delusions, and discovers that killing the mirror only deepens the fracture. A SUITABLE CASE FOR TREATMENT is a darkly comic psychological noir in which a mild-mannered man's life descends into chaos when he confronts Andor Vescov, a charming and unhinged figure from his past; a fever-dream of absurdity, horror, and dark comedy, blending psychological tension, cult rituals, and a protagonist whose only crime is surviving his own madness.

Gregg Kattz has a plan. And with Erich Gravelle beside him, almost anything seems possible. Gregg lives in a sprawling old mansion with a pack of puppies, an unforgettable family legacy, and dreams considerably larger than his circumstances. His best friend, Erich Gravelle, is a self-proclaimed master of romance, strategy, and just about everything else. Together, they are Team Gravelle. When Gregg sets his sights on reclaiming the beloved Puppy Parade Show his family once helped create, he and Erich embark on a series of increasingly ambitious schemes. There will be disguises. Surveillance...