Absurdist Fiction

Patrik, who sometimes calls himself "the patient," is a literary researcher living in present-day Berlin. The city is just coming back to life after lockdown, and his beloved opera houses are open again, but Patrik cannot leave the house and hardly manages to get out of bed. When he shaves his head, his girlfriend scolds him, "What have you done to your head? I don't want to be with a prisoner from a concentration camp!" He is supposed to give a paper at a conference in Paris, on the poetry collection Threadsuns by Paul Celan, but he can't manage to get past the first question on the registration form: "What is your nationality?" Then at a café (or in the memory of being at a café?), he meets a mysterious stranger. The man's name is Leo-Eric Fu, and somehow he already knows Patrik...In the spirit of imaginative homage like Roberto Bolaño's Monsieur Pain, Antonio Tabucchi's Requiem, and Thomas Bernhard's Wittgenstein's Nephew, Yoko Tawada's mesmerizing new novel unfolds like a lucid dream in which friendship, conversation, reading, poetry, and music are the connecting threads that bind us together.

"Go jump in a lake! Bawdy, fantastic, and surprisingly poignant, The Bear Hunter's Daughters is the perfect book for the wildest person in your life. Told with brio and humor, this fable of the seven redhaired sisters settles deep in your bones. I loved it from beginning to end." - Keith Donohue, author of The Girl in the Bog and The Stolen ChildIn this funny and unforgettable modern day fairy tale, seven sisters raised in the woods fight to keep their freedom.Deep in the woods of western Finland, a bear hunter has raised his seven daughters to live off the land and steer clear of the trappings of life in town, like cell phones and a social life outside their family. When on his youngest Elga’s twelfth birthday the hunter is killed by his prey and their mother dies soon thereafter, the sisters are left with unpaid bills and a leaky house.The tension between sticking to the wild ways their father taught them and submitting to well-meaning townsfolk’s efforts to “help” threatens to divide the seven sisters. The eldest, Johanna, tries to wield control, Elga feels tempted by the pull to education, artist Laura spends all her time dreaming up sculptures and exploring nature—but the sisters' trips to the farmer’s market to sell foraged mushrooms and their free time in their vast forest home bring them together in riotous fun. With evocative language and visceral scene-setting, readers get lost in world they’ve invented together and join the fight to protect it.Inspired by Aleksis Kivi’s classic Finnish novel Seven Brothers (1870), The Bear Hunter’s Daughters is at once realistic and fantastical, an intensely sensory exploration of our essential bonds both with nature and with one another.

In this thrilling chase narrative, a hunted being escapes certain death at breakneck speed-careening through Europe, heading blindly South. Faster and faster, escaping the assassins, our protagonist flies forward, blending into crowds, adjusting to terrains, hopping on and off ferries, always desperately trying to stay a step ahead of certain death: the past did not exist, only what was current existed-a prisoner of the instant, rushing into this instant, an instant that had no continuation...Krasznahorkai-celebrated for the exhilarating energy of his prose-outdoes himself in Chasing Homer. And this unique collaboration boasts beautiful full-color paintings by Max Neumann and-reaching out of the book proper-the wildly percussive music of Szilveszter Miklós scored for each chapter (to be accessed by the reader via QR codes).

'A brilliant, strange and tender exploration of what it is to fail, keep failing, and fail better' Sarah Bernstein, author of Study for Obedience Two men meet in a flat in London. They are total strangers and yet they look remarkably alike. Lewis is grieving his dead wife; Korine is hiding from his very-much-alive one. Lewis never had children; Korine is an ambivalent parent at best. Lewis is an erstwhile actor, too depressed to attend the big audition that has just fallen into his lap. Korine has tried a dozen dead-end jobs but never pursued his acting dreams.Two men living mirror image lives. Each seeking a second chance to get things right. Each wanting what the other has.As If is an existential farce about the road not taken. Surreal and slyly poignant, suffused with ironic melancholia, it is a parable for the twenty-first century everyman: a character trapped in reality's hall of mirrors, endlessly searching for something to live for.

Perhaps one reason not enough people kill billionaires is it's actually quite tricky...<BR><BR>'Hopeful and exciting. Funny and heartbreaking ... I want to read more books like this!' Mikaela Loach<BR>'Scarily believable' Daily Mail<BR><BR>When her home is destroyed in wildfires, fourteen-year-old Australian outback genius Kayla Connolly decides to hunt down the culprits of climate change: billionaires.<BR><BR>She teams up with Mr P, a giant ex-soldier from Tuvalu whose home is being flooded by rising sea levels. Together, they find ingenious ways to kill a property developer building on protected wetlands and a mining company CEO poisoning the earth with toxic chemicals. They also find an unexpected ally in Nancy, a wealthy elderly woman with a shocking past.<BR><BR>The trio's mission soon develops a life of its own, taking them first to California to crack billionaire tech bros and then to London for superrich oil executives, spawning a global movement along the way. In pursuit are the FBI and Detective Sergeant Kate Anderson of Scotland Yard, but Kate is having doubts about whether Kayla is even in the wrong. Will Kayla be able to stay ahead of the game and pull off one final, remarkable hit?<BR><BR>'I wouldn't be surprised if it became a handbook for the revolution' Patrick Alley

“Prescient and captivating, hilarious and horrifying. A book that enchants and entices and enrages is a rare thing; Patrick Cottrell has once again solidified his prose as knowing, and generous, and vicious, and tender."- Bryan Washington, author of Palaver, National Book Award finalistA darkly funny and profoundly moving new novel by Whiting award-winning author Patrick Cottrell.And who did I think I was, trying to teach the troubled youth how to write?...I would say I was Dan Moran, a Korean adoptee, single, approaching forty, once plain-in-appearance as a woman, now ugly as a man, that’s who or what I thought I was. Most importantly, I was no longer useless, I was a writer.Five years after the death of his youngest brother, Dan Moran is now the published trans author of the autofictional novel Sorry to Disrupt the Peace. He is teaching fiction in Brooklyn and working on his next book–a psychological thriller–when a mysterious envelope arrives for him in the mail. Addressed to the wrong name, it includes a childhood photo of his deceased brother. But who would send such a thing, and why?Against his better judgment, Dan returns to his childhood home on the eve of his brother’s memorial dinner. His estranged family is surprised to see him, but he ignores them. He drives around in his brother’s Honda Accord, believing he is a detective. He searches for a constellation of unidentified women who may have been involved with his brother, all while being mistaken for another man. He hopes his investigation will reveal exactly who he was to his brother, but in a series of unsettling and destabilizing encounters, what he discovers is the irrevocable distance between who we are and how we are perceived.Afternoon Hours of a Hermit is Patrick Cottrell’s long-awaited second novel—an existential noir, an absurd comedy, a complex character study, and a heartbreaking inquiry into the paradox of identity, memory, and the very enterprise of writing fiction.

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.  <BR><BR> Arvy Keening is just trying to get through the week. Tantalizingly close to leaving her college years at Westheimer University behind, all she has to do is pass her finals, pack up her life, and ship off to San Francisco for a prestigious Big Pharma internship. The problem? Arvy just found 200 hits of Molly in her dead mother’s closet. And when two drug dealers come to collect what they are owed, they reveal that the pills are not Molly, but Mona—a rare pharmaceutical that induces intense orgasms. The dealers give Arvy an ultimatum: Sell 200 Monas in 48 hours or die.   <BR><BR> To aid in her seemingly impossible quest, Arvy recruits Wolf, Westheimer's resident drug dealer who also happens to be infuriatingly charming and distractingly sexy. In a race against the clock, Arvy and Wolf barrel through their college town, leaving a series of erotic shenanigans in their wake; appealing to horny co-eds, lonely barflies, and a mysterious sorority whose sisters have their own ideas for Mona’s potential uses. But if Mona has a knack for unleashing visceral reactions in the body, what will it unlock in Arvy, who has been repressing grief over her mother’s death for weeks?   <BR><BR> Unashamedly brash, bold, and blistering, 200 Monas is a truly one-of-a-kind read, a playful and honest examination of sexuality and grief, and a sharp, searing love letter on how to release all that’s inside you.  

“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 desire in profoundly interesting ways.” — Kevin Wilson, bestselling author of Now Is Not the Time to PanicA humorous and deeply moving debut novel in the vein of Bunny and Convenience Store Woman about a young woman who tries to shape a sentient blob into her perfect boyfriend.A New Yorker Best Book of 2025 · A Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut NovelThe daughter of a Taiwanese father and white mother, Vi Liu has never quite fit into her Midwestern college town. Aimless after getting dumped by her boyfriend and dropping out of college, Vi works at the front desk of a hotel where she greets guests, refills cucumber water samovars, and tries to evade her bubbly blond coworker, Rachel. Little does Vi know her life is about to be permanently transformed when she agrees to a night out with Rachel. In the alley outside the bar, Vi discovers a strange blob—a small living creature with beady black eyes. In a moment of concern and drunken desperation, she takes it home.But the blob is no ordinary pet. Becoming increasingly sentient, it begins to grow, shift shape, and obey Vi’s commands. As the entity continues to change, Vi is struck with a daring idea: she’ll mold the creature into her ideal partner. Feeding it a stream of sweet breakfast cereals and American pop culture, the creature grows into a movie-star handsome white man. But when Vi’s desire to be loved unconditionally threatens to spiral out of control, she is forced to confront her lonely childhood, her aloof ex-boyfriend, and the racial marginalization that has defined her relationships—a journey of self-discovery that teaches her it’s impossible to control those you love.Blending the familiar with the surreal, Blob is a witty, heartfelt story about the search for love and self and what it means to be human.

A “genuinely transcendent” (The New Yorker) portrait of the poet as an office worker, plumbing the depths of the spiritual gulf between art and work.<BR><BR>It’s the summer of 2017 and D__, a poet working by day as a copywriter at a retail start-up, can’t dispel a creeping sense of dissolution on the horizon. Whether it’s the company’s new twenty-four-year-old CEO, the growing distance between D__ and his longtime girlfriend, or a mounting sense of unreality in the wake of the first delirious months of the Trump administration, there’s a sense that things are speeding towards collapse—and that they’ve perhaps been unraveling for some time.<BR> <BR>Borne along on these ambivalent straits, D__ begins to keep a notebook, filling it with everything: scenes from his own life, dreams, poetic fragments, stoned revelations, and broadly defined moments, both real and fictional, that he calls parables: attempts to learn from the underlying schedule of the universe, some music of the spheres that, if heard correctly, might help him finally tie together the disparate threads of his life, his poetry, and his labor. As the notebooks fill up over the course of two years, season by season, D__ circles a series of perennial questions about art and work, capturing in the process the unique absurdism of the gone-but-not-forgotten era of office culture between the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic.<BR> <BR>“Comic and profound, an intricate collage of a novel that plants itself in exhausted earth and, somehow, flourishes” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), The Copywriter is a story following the absurd paths that office work can take us on and the subtle ways in which seemingly mindless labor can determine our fate.

Unsere Heldin befindet sich im Jenseits. Sie lebt im Hotel der Untoten und hat einen Arm zu wenig, dafür aber eine Krähe zu viel. An ihren Namen kann sie sich nicht erinnern, ebenso wenig an ihre Kindheit - mochte sie Erdbeereis? Hatte sie einen grünen Spielzeuglaster? Seit der 'großen Katastrophe' befindet sie sich im Reich der Namen- und Geschichtslosen, und doch zeigt sie keine Resignation. Im Gegenteil, denn eine kostbare Erinnerung ist ihr geblieben: Die Erinnerung an eine Person. Mit ihr. In den Dünen. Also macht sie sich mit Krähe und ohne Arm auf den Weg nach Westen, ans Meer, auf die Suche nach dem, was sie eigentlich ist. Und auf die Suche nach dem, was man früher wohl Liebe nannte.Es währt für immer und dann ist es vorbei ist ein hinreißend skurriler, witziger und ergreifender Streifzug durch eine Welt ohne Gewissheiten. Eine Welt, die der unseren gar nicht so unähnlich scheint und in der sich aber die Frage, was uns im Kern ausmacht, auf haarsträubend einleuchtende Weise beantworten lässt.

Description: Aurora, a glittering city of light and progress, promises its people a perfect tomorrow. But beneath the neon sky, physicist Yusuf holds a secret that could unravel everything. His invention, the *Chronoscope*, allows him to see ten seconds into the future-a power that feels like salvation at first. He can prevent accidents, save lives, and rewrite fate itself. Yet with every glimpse comes a cost. Each life saved echoes with unseen consequences, disasters rippling outward in ways Yusuf could never predict. What begins as small victories soon spirals into a nightmare of unintended tragedies, leaving him haunted by guilt and pursued by those who believe fate itself must remain untouched.

* LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025 *<BR>* WINNER OF THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2026 *<BR>* SHORTLISTED FOR THE CLIMATE FICTION PRIZE *<BR>* WINNER OF THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE *<BR>* WINNER OF THE ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZE *<BR>* A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: GUARDIAN, OBSERVER, IRISH TIMES, BBC, WASHINGTON POST, THE NEW YORKER, NPR, GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY *<BR><BR>An unforgettable debut novel about the journey of three women and one extremely endangered snail through contemporary Ukraine<BR> <BR> 'A fierce and funny road-trip novel' GUARDIAN, the 50 hottest books to read right now<BR> 'Inventive and playful' SUNDAY TIMES<BR>'A stunning debut' OBSERVER<BR>'I was gripped . . . Brilliant' DAILY MAIL<BR>'A thrilling ride' FINANCIAL TIMES<BR>'A bold, brilliant, original, funny and devastating novel' KATE MCLOUGHLIN, TLS<BR> 'Brilliant and heart-stopping' LOS ANGELES TIMES<BR> 'Startling and ambitious' NEW YORK TIMES<BR> 'Animated by dark humor and cool fury' NEW YORKER<BR> 'Dexterous and formally inventive' MARCEL THEROUX, GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE DAY<BR><BR> Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a maverick scientist who scours the country's forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails while her relatives urge her to settle down and 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.<BR><BR> Nastia and her sister, Solomiya, are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother, who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours.<BR><BR> So begins a journey of a lifetime across a country on the brink of war: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species.<BR><BR>* LONGLISTED FOR THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE *<BR>* FINALIST FOR THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARDS *<BR><BR>'Fantastic . . . I love works that are smarter than I am and this is one' PERCIVAL EVERETT, author of Booker-shortlisted JAMES<BR><BR> 'Funny and smart, full of science, longing and adventure . . . This is essential reading' ANN PATCHETT, bestselling author of TOM LAKE<BR><BR>'Heartbreaking, hilarious, profound, and vital' LARA PRESCOTT, bestselling author of THE SECRETS WE KEEP

A perilous voyage, a forbidden love, and the legendary Midnight Star. Will their hearts survive the twelfth journey across enchanted seas?

Over 20 million people are born, live, and die inside the Ultimart Dome without ever stepping foot in the outside world. The Dome is artificial grass, plastic trees, toilet-blue water, crammed with colorful, decaying malls and desperate people. And at the center of it all is The Dream, the suburban fantasy of comfort and plenty.Corwin Scaggs grinds out a meager living in a low-level AI advertising firm, surviving the four hours of sleep everyone's allowed each night, the yearly Black Friday massacres, and the brutality of Ultimart Security. His family lives on the razor's edge of "bankruptcy", a one-way ticket to corporate slavery in enormous underground factories.He's fighting for the Dream and he'll do anything to get it: corporate coups, blackmail, extortion, even industrial warfare. But the Dream is actually a nightmare, and when Corwin discovers this horrifying secret, he has to tell everyone the truth at any cost.Ultimart is a darkly comic look at an absurd world, one made more terrifying the more plausible it now seems.

From the 2023 winner of the Prix Goncourt for poetry comes a debut novel unlike any other, a lyrical anti-epic about the beauty, violence, trauma, and absurdity of the internet age.<BR><BR>Like Beckett’s novels or Kafka’s stranger tales, The Endless Week is a work outside of time, as if novels had never existed and Laura Vazquez has suddenly invented them. And yet it could not be more contemporary, as startling and constantly new as the scrolling hyper-mediated reality it chronicles. Its characters are Salim, a young poet, and his sister Sara, who rarely leave home except virtually; their father, who is falling apart; and their grandmother, who is dying. To save their grandmother, Salim and Sara set out in search of their long-lost mother, accompanied by Salim’s online friend Jonathan, though their real quest is through the landscape of language and suffering that saturates both the real world and the virtual. The Endless Week is sharp and ever-shifting, at turns hilarious, tender, satirical, and terrifying. Not much happens, yet every moment is compulsively engaging. It is a major work by one of the most fearlessly original writers of our time.

WINNER OF THE 2025 GOLDSMITHS PRIZE<BR><BR><BR>A wickedly smart, Borgesian novel that explores the boundaries between art and life, vision and reality, beauty and commerce . . .<BR><BR><BR>When visitors to a famous conceptual artist's installation start mysteriously disappearing, the aftershocks radiate outwards through twelve people who were involved in the project, changing all of their lives, and launching them on a crazy-quilt trajectory that will end with them all together at one final, apocalyptic bacchanal.<BR><BR>Mixing illusion and reality, simulacra and replicants, sound artists and death artists, performers and filmmakers and theorists and journalists, We Live Here Now ranges across the world of weapons dealers and international shipping to the galleries and studios on the cutting edge of hyper-contemporary art. It spins a dazzling web that conveys, with eerie precision, the sheer strangeness of what it is like to be alive today.

'I was obsessed from the first page to the last. A strange, beautiful, deeply intelligent and provocative investigation into humanity. The Employees is an alarmingly brilliant work of art' Max Porter<BR><BR>On the Six-Thousand Ship, things have started to feel changed. Since bringing aboard a number of strange objects from a newly discovered planet, the crew - both human and humanoid - have begun to feel a yearning. They want to be near the objects, to feel them pressed against their skin, but they also all now feel a curious new hunger for home: Earth, that place many cannot even remember.<BR><BR>The Board of Directors are eager to understand more, and so instruct a commission to interview each of the employees. Those who are born dream of soil, the smell of warm asphalt, the sound of animals and birds. Those who are made know only what is programmed, and yet feel it deeply, truly. As their testimonies accumulate, a tapestry of longing and quiet rebellion emerges, blurring the lines between work and life, between human and machine.<BR><BR>The Employees was the breakout novel from one of the most celebrated authors in world literature, and is now seen as a masterpiece of twenty-first century literary science fiction. In stark, pristine prose, Olga Ravn forms a timeless meditation on productivity, pleasure and what the far-flung future might miss.<BR><BR>'Beautiful, sinister, gripping. A tantalising puzzle you can never quite solve.' Mark Haddon

Religion meets capitalism. Miracles meet marketing. The Bible gets a hostile corporate takeover. From bestselling satirist Johann Bachmann comes Trumpianity, a laugh-out-loud, irreverent take on faith, finance, and the absurdity of modern religion gone corporate. When Donald Trump, a self-proclaimed Messiah of Capitalism(TM), appears out of nowhere with a divinely inspired (and heavily monetized) business plan, he assembles a team of questionable disciples to help him build a faith-based financial empire: ? Saint Mike Pence-iel - a reluctant spiritual advisor turned corporate sellout ? Joe Rogan - a marketing guru who can spin conspiracy theories into ad revenue ? Burnout Sanders - a tech genius tasked with automating divine intervention ? Alex Jones - a financial mastermind who tries to trademark the Book of Revelations ? Elon Musk - a social media expert turning Judgment Day into a viral event Together, they set out to do the impossible: sell salvation, license the afterlife, and make the Ten Commandments a subscription-only service. From NFT-based blessings to pay-per-view apocalypses, Trumpianity is a biting, hilarious, and disturbingly realistic satire of the intersection of faith and finance. ? Perfect for fans of Christopher Moore, Terry Pratchett, and anyone who's ever wondered what happens when religion goes full corporate. (Warning: Reading this book may cause divine audits and unsolicited prayers.)