Absurdist Fiction

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.

When a man's favourite elephant vanishes, the balance of his whole life is subtly upset. A couple's midnight hunger pangs drive them to hold up a McDonald's. A woman finds she is irresistible to a small green monster that burrows through her front garden. An insomniac wife wakes up in a twilight world of semi-consciousness in which anything seems possible - even death. In every one of these stories Murakami makes a determined assault on the normal.

Jack was never “right,” but that’s a lot of what made him magnetic to other people. When he was younger, he was that guy that girls wanted to be around. People were drawn in by him, even later on when there wasn’t much of him left. I never understood that. He never really put a lot of energy into grooming and maintaining relationships with people. I guess when you see someone that is content spending their time alone, it creates a vacuum and people flood in like water choking a storm drain. Even as his deterioration became apparent, people threw him lifelines.

He spent his life chasing a dream—but some dreams chase you back. A private detective takes on a missing person case with a difference. The client, a wealthy man named King, has hired him to find a beautiful young woman. King claims to have seen her three times over the course of twenty years – at a railway station in London, a lake ferry port in Italy, and an airport in New York – and each time she looked identical. Impossible, of course. A middle-aged man’s fantasy. Or is something stranger going on? Inspired in part by the Pygmalion myth, My Sweet Rock explores what dangers can ...

Fourteen years after her last adventure, Thursday Next, literary detective, finds herself in an unusual situation her job policing the fictional characters of the BookWorld has been downgraded since her previous escapades are now themselves in print. However, a pressing threat may call her back into action: first Sherlock Holmes and then Miss Marple are found dead, stopping their series in their tracks.

Sidney Geeder, King of Mortgages, wants nothing more than to cash in his lucrative company stock and quit his job, but his dreams are threatened by the disappearance of Eggs Igino, the only possible man who can replace him.

Il più celebre romanzo di Pirandello, scritto nel 1904, narra la storia del bibliotecario Mattia Pascal, il quale, da ricco proprietario terriero, dopo una vita di sprechi e scioperataggine, si ritrova ridotto in miseria, a causa delle ruberie perpetrate dall'amministratore dei suoi terreni.Un vortice di disgraziate vicissitudini travolge la sua vita, quando infine, alla morte delle due figliolette, in preda alla disperazione, fugge da Miragno e, per puro caso si ritrova nel Casino di Montecarlo, dove vince una considerevole somma alla roulette.

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.

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.

L'Empire du bien n'est pas un essai, c'est une charge, une provocation, un éclat de rire grinçantlancé contre le conformisme du monde moderne. Philippe Muray y démonte avec une ironiecinglante les travers d'une époque où le divertissement se confond avec la morale, où la critique est suspecte, où l'enthousiasme obligatoire dicte les règles. Dans la langue au panache aussisuperbe qu'excessif d'un moraliste sous nicotine, Muray s'attaque à une société qui transforme touten fête forcée et où la liberté de penser s'efface derrière le masque du bonheur collectif.

Fairy tales are as old as language itself. Long, long ago, storytellers all around the world told tales of wonder both to enchant and entertain us, and also to teach us that – if we are good and kind and courageous enough – we can change the world for the better. For this is what fairy tales do. They give us hope. As we travel through the dark and dangerous world of the fairy tale, as we fight dragons and outwit ogres and save our sisters and brothers, we learn that we are capable of anything.

Morgan Beale is a pop icon - and hates every second of it. He begins adapting the latest best seller, The Chihuahua in the Blue Prada Bag, into a blockbuster movie just before his celebutante wife starts remodeling their Hollywood home, driving Beale to a hotel. Dodging the paparazzi one morning on his way to Starbucks, he spots his writing partner, Luke, who has been dead for over a decade, and who is staring into a mysterious hole in the ground....

Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick scientist who lives out of her mobile lab. She scours the country’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails, while her relatives urge her to settle down and finally start a family of her own. What they don’t know: Yeva already dates plenty of men—not for love, but to fund her work—entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they’ll find docile brides untainted by feminism and modernity.

Lara the Runaway Cat tells the story of Gobi, the loveable pug who followed Dion Leonard across a gruelling 155-mile trek across the Gobi Desert, and her mischievous cat sister, Lara, who runs away from her family, seeking a courageous adventure and different life.

Lucas will nichts als seine Ruhe in einer Welt, die ihn einfach nicht in Ruhe lässt. Eine Kurzgeschichte vom internationalen Bestsellerautor Fredrik Backman Videospiele, Wein und Pad Thai – das ist der perfekte Abend für Lucas. Andere Menschen? Muss nicht sein. Warum denn, wenn er auch alleine glücklich sein kann? Als der dreiköpfige Vorstand der Bewohnervertretung überraschend an seiner Tür klingelt und eine Inspektion seiner Bratpfanne verlangt, ist Lucas alles andere als begeistert. Doch Abwimmeln ist nicht.

An anthropologist and his daughter travel to Kermunkachunk, the capitol of Chalazia, to conduct research for an ethnography on the Chalazian Mafia Faction (a splinter group of the Chalazian Children's Theater). The book takes place over the course of a night at the Bar Pulpo, Kermunkachunk's #1 spoken-word karaoke bar, where conversations are actually being read from multiple karaoke screens arrayed around the barroom. Moreover, it's Thursday, "Father/Daughter Nite", when the bar is frequented by actual fathers and daughters as well as couples cosplaying fathers and daughters.

Schwiegersohn seiner selbst sein? Der cholerische Majoratsherr Childerich von Bartenbruch sieht darin kein Problem. Überzeugt davon, der letzte in der Erbfolge der Merowinger zu sein, setzt der eingebildete Blaublüter aus Mittelfranken alles daran, die gesamte Familie in sich zu vereinen, verheiratet kreuz und adoptiert quer. Und dann ist da noch Professor Horn, der Psychiater des Wüterichs... Mit Sinn für Sprachwitz und ironischen Schmäh nimmt Doderer den Absolutheitsanspruch der Wissenschaften auf die Schippe und frönt seinem Faible für skurrile Figuren.

Zebra is the last in a line of anarchists, atheists, and autodidacts. When war came, her family didn't fight; they took refuge in books. Now alone and in exile, Zebra leaves New York for Barcelona, retracing the journey she and her father made from Iran to the United States years ago. Books are Zebra's only companions - until she meets Ludo. Their connection is magnetic; their time together fraught. Zebra overwhelms him with her complex literary theories, her concern with death, and her obsession with history. He thinks she's unhinged; she thinks he's pedantic.

When Nolan Grey receives news that his father, a once-prominent biologist, has drowned off Leap's Island, he calls on Elsa, his estranged, older half-sister, to help pick up the pieces. This, despite the fact that it was he and Elsa who broke the family in the first place. The Greys have been avoiding each other for a dozen years. Elsa and Nolan travel to their father's field station, a wild and isolated spot off the Gulf Coast.

A man with dark thoughts on his mind is racing along the remote snowy roads of Hurmevaara in Finland when there is flash in the sky and something crashes into the car. That something turns about to be a highly valuable meteorite. With euro signs lighting up the eyes of the locals, the unexpected treasure is temporarily placed in a neighbourhood museum, under the watchful eye of a priest named Joel.