Absurdist Comedy

Mr. Quark is a down-on-his-luck pot smuggler hiding out in the mountains of Columbia with his dog, High Pockets, and a small band of banditos led by the irascible José. Times are lean, and to liven up their exile, José decides to mug a family of American tourists. Among the spoils are physics texts, which launch Mr. Quark on a sidesplitting, boisterous adventure north to California, where he confronts the owner of the books with his own theories.

The First Mann on Mars is a riotous, irreverent romp across the solar system, blending absurd comedy, interplanetary intrigue, and just the right amount of science fiction chaos, perfect for fans of Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, and anyone who’s ever wondered if Earth’s fate could hinge on a slightly incompetent human, a snarky AI, and a rogue sausage. Derek Mann is, by most reasonable definitions, completely unqualified for space exploration. Yet somehow he has become the First Mann on Mars. With him are Barry, the highly sarcastic and occasionally metallic companion, and Doreen, a ...

From “weird, scary, ingenious” (The New York Times) stand-up comedian Maria Bamford, an instant New York Times bestselling, brutally honest, and “laugh-out-loud funny” (Jennette McCurdy, #1 New York Times bestselling author) memoir about show business, mental health, and the comfort of...

The biggest joke in existence is that all of it was rejected by the Peer Review Committee. Universe Under Review is an absurd, sharply satirical take on evolution, told through the universe’s hopeless struggle against a catastrophically cautious Peer Review Committee. Every breakthrough that shaped reality is rejected on principle. The Peer Review Committee hated all of them. Particles? Too unstable. Stars? Too dramatic. Cells? Too experimental. Multicellularity? Absolutely not. Skeletons, lungs, warm blood? Denied for budgetary reasons. Fire? Introduces catastrophic risk without ...

“A propulsive, madcap story” (The New York Times) about a salaryman who decides to put his life up for sale in the classifieds section of a Tokyo newspaper after a botched suicide attempt. "An outstanding writer not only of Japan, but of the world." —The Atlantic After salaryman...

Richard Brautigan's world is one of gentle magic and marvelous laughter, of the incredibly beautiful and the beautifully incredible. Trout Fishing in America is a pseudonym for the miraculous. A journey that begins at the foot of the Benjamin Franklin statue in San Francisco's Washington Square, that wanders through the wonders of America's rural waterways, and that ends, inevitably, with mayonnaise. Funny, wild, and sweet, Trout Fishing in America is an incomparable guidebook to the delights of exploration.

Four years. One mistake. Infinite trouble. After settling into married life and something dangerously close to respectability, time-hopping duo Stewart and Frankie thought their chaotic days were behind them. But when a sharp-eyed journalist blackmails them over a small historical hiccup (involving a guard, the Tower of London, and perhaps one too many jokes), they’re forced back into the madness they once barely escaped. Their mission? Obey her bizarre demands—or have their very existence unravelled. With help from their old friends—headstrong Anne Boleyn, the ever-enigmatic alien ...

A member of the landed gentry, with a seemingly guaranteed income from his estate in the country, Oblomov lives in Petersburg, uninterested in the business that provides his living and barely aware that the revenue is diminishing. Not that he leads a dissolute life of extravagance, balls and entertainment. Instead he is a dreamer, a sybarite, content above all to spend most of the day supine, in bed. The novel opens with Oblomov thus ensconced, attended only by his dirty, grumbling, indolent servant Zahar, who has looked after him since childhood, catering to his every need.

You didn’t mean to open this book. You probably paused. Maybe frowned. Maybe smirked. Maybe thought, “That’s dumb.” And yet… here you are. This book exists for one reason: curiosity always wins. If You Read This Book You’re Gay is not about sexuality, identity, or labels. It’s about the strange, universal human impulse to click things we were explicitly told not to click. It’s about headlines that hijack your attention, social rules that collapse under scrutiny, and the quiet internal voice that says, “I just want to see what this is.” Written in a sharp, self-aware, ...

From the author of 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 beyond his control. The setting is a nameless Central European city where Ryder, a renowned pianist, has come to give the most important performance of his life. Instead, he finds himself diverted on a series of cryptic and infuriating errands that nevertheless provide him with vital clues to his own past.

All George ever wanted to do was make the world laugh. That's why its strange that he grew up to be a sad clown in a local circus. When he's fired from his job because the world no longer wants to be reminded of their sorrows, he finds himself spiraling into places he no longer recognizes. Is art reflecting life? Will George rise to the occasion or drown in his new-found despair? A satirical look at the interplay between art and capitalism, told through the person least likely to succeed.

What if you were sent back to Earth, but this time, you remembered everything? The celestial pub was comfortable, the afterlife was grand, and Nigel was perfectly happy being a non-corporeal wisecracker. But no—some cosmic lottery has forced him to do the whole "human" thing again. And to make matters worse, he has to narrate it all back to his pals in Monty Python-esque fashion. From the indignity of birth (Why all the screaming?) to the horror of puberty (Who designed this system?!), through the madness of adulthood and the slow decay of old age, Nigel stumbles through the absurdity of ...

Told with biting humor, brutal honesty, and moments of absurd laughter, Why Is My Bra Still On? is a darkly comedic, deeply emotional novel about friendship, loyalty, and what it really means to be family.

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...

What if the world’s not ending, it’s just having an allergic reaction to itself? Step into the wings of the Apollo Theatre with Reggie Porter, the most dangerous man in British comedy (according to Zara, his manager, and possibly MI5). With a biro, a Greggs leaflet, and six pages of forbidden insight, Reggie isn’t just doing a set, he’s detonating sacred cows one punchline at a time. From gay frogs to £6 cheddar, from God to oat milk, The Gig is not a short story, not a manifesto, and definitely not safe for anyone still clinging to certainty. It’s a stand-up sermon. A comic ...

One of them is a bestselling Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist. The other is a winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Together, they form the League of Comic Justice, battling evildoers in the name of . . . Okay, we made that line up. What they do form is a writing team of pure comic...

¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤ Chaos erupts at Howling Manor! Rival spies crash and clash. Werewolves howl and prowl. Evil genius Dr. Vladislav Volkov’s deranged experiments are coming back to bite—literally. Your survival depends on unraveling the truth... fast. Before someone unravels you! ¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤ In the ominous shadows of 1930s pre-World War II espionage, the shrewdly scheming Dr....

When Ned Plunkett's brilliant brother John dies suddenly, he inherits everything. The house. The lab. The equipment. And seventeen patents on technologies that are, in John's own words, not quite ready yet. Ned is not a scientist. Ned has never been a scientist. But Ned has been told his entire life by everyone who loves him that he has a gift, a natural instinct, a practical genius that formal qualifications could never measure. And John always said he believed in him. It says so right there in the will. So when Ned finds a booth in the corner of the lab with three letters stencilled on ...

You didn’t pick up a book. You picked up a Node—a pocket doorway into a set of worlds where stories don’t describe reality. They shape it. In Sector Folio-7, a catastrophic cascade has begun. Worlds are bleeding into each other, rules are breaking, and a city built from living pages is starting to collapse from the inside. Streets repeat out of order. People forget who they are mid-sentence. And “plot holes”—literal voids—open in the ground and swallow entire blocks. Mara Keene is a Scriptor tasked with keeping this place intact. She enters the City of Echoing Pages to recover...

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.