Showing titles in Absurdist

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.

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.

Never fall for your hot young fake fiancé… It's simple, convince my family the engagement to my new secretary is real, if it works, the yacht club’s mine. The trouble is…I don’t do relationships. And I don’t do marriage. Being Star Island’s most eligible billionaire, you’d think getting her to say yes would be easy. But faking it gets complicated. I can do anything for a short time except getting stuck on a yacht with this smok’n hottie. The thought of those thick thighs wrapped around my neck ignites a blaze in me and I can’t keep my hands off her. But Isabella’s half ...

Kernphysiker Möbius, Entdecker einer furchtbaren und gefährlichen Formel, flüchtet, seine Familie preisgebend, ins Irrenhaus. Er spielt Irrsinn, er fingiert die Heimsuchung durch den Geist Salomos, um das, was er entdeckte, als Produkt des Irrsinns zu diffamieren. Doch zwei Geheimagenten, ebenfalls als Wahnsinnige getarnt, sind ihm auf der Spur.

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.

This is a collection of bad poems, short stories, rushed parables, and hastily-written diatribes written over the last 4 years. Shut in my home due to the government’s tyrannical response to COVID, I did a lot of reading, thinking, and reflection. During this time, I came to admit to myself a lot of dismal truths about the “true” state of humanity, especially when it is pushed to the limits by fear and doubt. In such cases, Man becomes savage and focuses on the differences in his fellow men; he leans into his raw savageness to bifurcate and destroy. He is primal. He is reckless.

She’s my daughter’s nurse, ten years younger, and completely off-limits, but my heart doesn’t care. From the moment Janie stepped into my life, she’s been a distraction I can’t afford. Her laughter fills my home, her touch sends shivers down my spine, and those cut-off shorts make me lose control. As Pleasant Bay’s Police Chief, I’m supposed to be in control, but every glance from her makes me forget my duties. Janie’s here to help Violet, but she’s healing parts of me I thought were long dead. Our age gap is a constant worry, and I know everyone in town will have ...

"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," written by Lewis Carroll, is a whimsical tale that follows the journey of a young girl named Alice who falls through a rabbit hole into a fantastical world. In Wonderland, she encounters a host of peculiar characters, including the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, and the Queen of Hearts.

"Metafísica de los tubos" cuenta los primeros tres años de vida de un ser obsesionado por el agua que, disconforme con su entorno, adopta la inerte forma de tubo como condición existencial. Con la crueldad, el realismo y el peculiar humor al que nos tiene acostumbrados, Amélie Nothomb rememora, a través de una narración que combina filosofía y fontanería, episodios de su infancia japonesa, transcurrida en Osaka.

Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most enigmatic geniuses of European literature. What happens when his idiosyncratic imagination meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today? From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting.

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.

A parallel universe. South Texas. Narcotics are legal, and there’s a new contraband on the market: ancient Olmec artifacts, shrunken indigenous heads, and filtered animals - species of animals brought back from extinction to clothe, feed, and generally amuse the very wealthy. Esteban Bellacosa has lived in the border town of MacArthur long enough to know to keep quiet. But his simple life starts to get complicated when the swashbuckling investigative journalist Paco Herbert invites him to come to an illegal underground dinner serving filtered animals.

Björn is a compulsive, meticulous bureaucrat who discovers a secret room at the government office where he works—a secret room that no one else in his office will acknowledge. When Björn is in his room, what his co-workers see is him standing by the wall and staring off into space looking dazed, relaxed, and decidedly creepy. Björn’s bizarre behavior eventually leads his co-workers to try and have him fired, but Björn will turn the tables on them with help from his secret room.

As head of the crisis management team at a Madison Avenue PR firm, Leonard Lundell spends his days counseling executives whose reputations have been ruined by scandal. But Leonard has been managing a strange and debilitating crisis of his own that’s held him captive his entire adult life: Leonard likes to eat soap, pencils, paint chips—anything with no nutritional value. For years, he’s kept his compulsion hidden behind a professional veneer.

Despite overcoming every adversity placed before him, Brandon Andrew Morgan can’t seem to catch a break for long. At the very moment, he’s feeling at the top of the world, fate intervenes with a hearty dose of misfortune plus interest. In a stunning turn of events, Brandon is ditched at the altar, unceremoniously single, and forced to run Haven on his own without so much as an explanation. Suffice to say, he doesn’t take it well. Yet the time to wallow in such things is cut short, for a new danger to Haven and the entire world sets upon him with every inconvenience.

Die legendäre Originalversion der Lesung von Dirk Bach – pur, ungekürzt, virtuos. Man schrieb das Jahr 2002, als Dirk Bach ins Studio ging und seine charakteristische Stimme dem berühmten Käpt'n Blaubär, dem Held des ersten Romans von Walter Moers, seine Stimme lieh. Und so wurde der phantastische Kontinent Zamonien samt seiner Bewohner von Bachs leidenschaftlicher Virtuosität zum Leben erweckt:

Matt Kim is always tired. He keeps passing out. His cat is dead. His wife and daughter have left him. He’s estranged from his adoptive family. People bump into him on the street as if he isn’t there. He is pretty sure he’s disappearing. His girlfriend, Yumi, is less convinced. But then she runs into someone who looks exactly like her, and her doppelgänger turns out to have dated someone who looks exactly like Matt.

What would you do if you discovered that you were disappearing? Not physically, but a piece at a time: all tangible evidence that you exist as a person—beginning with your driver's license, bank accounts and your birth certificate...and soon you are a loose thread, being pulled from the fabric of reality—into the twilight of your physical existence. This is what happens to Wiley Hood, a 25-year-old artist-turned business executive who still struggles with his older brother’s suicide.

A mysterious object has appeared out in the snow. Gibbs and Cline are mesmerized. They can’t discern its exact shape and color, nor if it’s moving or fixed in place. But it is there. Isn’t it? Whatever it might be, Hart thinks the thing in the snow is an unwelcome distraction, and probably a huge waste of time. Though, come to think of it, time itself has been a bit wonky lately. Weekends pass in a blur, and he can hardly tell day from night. Gravity seems less-than-reliable. The lights have been flickering weirdly, and he feels an odd thrumming sensation in his beard.

Universal Love welcomes listeners to a near-future world where our everyday technologies have fundamentally altered the possibilities and limits of how we love one another. In these gripping stories, a young boy tries to understand what keeps his father tethered to the drowned city they call home. A daughter gets to know her dead mother's hologram better than she ever knew her living mother. And, at a time when unpleasant memories can be erased, a man undergoes electronic surgery to have his depression, and his past, forever removed.