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.

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...

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.

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.

“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.

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 ...

Cannibal queens, vampire gods, and a collapsing timeline. Time travel’s messiest crew is back—this time, in a world too bloody for even Molly’s ink. When time travel starts to make sense, you’re doing it wrong. Molly Thompson—former 19th-century lady of the night, now married and moonlighting as a time-travel archivist—is at her wit’s end. Her latest chronicle defies logic, taste, and any semblance of order. And that’s before the vampire world shows up. It all begins when their ever-glamorous alien companion, Vah, declares her intention to rescue her long-lost sister, Vibeta...

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...

A very unique and comical view of life, death and all that comes after it. This very darkly humorous but strangely heart warming tale follows the unremarkable Bernard Fish as he learns that living is far less simple than he thought. He also discovers that being dead is more exciting than he could ever have imagined, not that he has ever had much of an imagination. Betrayal, greed, love and lust all play a part in this simple everyday story of an ordinary man who wasn't supposed to know he was going to die. With guest appearances from God and of course Satan as well as a host of afterlife ...

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, ...

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....

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...

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.

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 ...

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.

YOU DIDN’T BUY THIS BOOK. YOU PICKED UP A NODE. In New Orleans, a “normal” lunch turns into an intake line—forms, name tags, and rules that start acting like they’ve always been true. When the room tries to file people into permanent categories, Mara does the only thing that works: she makes reality messy again. Today. Right now. This weather. This shift. No forever-words. But the storm doesn’t stop at the door. A service entrance peels open into the City of Echoing Pages—a metropolis built from book spines, ink-lamps, and sentences that rearrange themselves when you blink. ...

What I wanted more than anything was to be standing beside Schmidt, in concert with Schmidt, at the foot of Saint Sebastian’s Abyss along with Schmidt, hands cupped to the sides of our faces, debating art, transcendence, and the glory of the apocalypse.” Former best friends who built their careers writing about a single work of art meet after a decades-long falling-out. One of them, called to the other’s deathbed for unknown reasons by a “relatively short” nine-page email, spends his flight to Berlin reflecting on Dutch Renaissance painter Count Hugo Beckenbauer.