Showing titles in Absurdist

Oskar Matzerath ist anders. Mit drei Jahren beschließt er, nicht weiter zu wachsen. Der groteske Außenseiter betrachtet die Welt mit schonungslos-sarkastischem Blick "von unten". Sein ständiger Begleiter ist eine Blechtrommel. Mit ihr ertrommelt er sich Distanz, fordert, schreckt auf. Wird sie ihm genommen, setzt er sich mit einem Schrei zur Wehr, der Glas zerspringen lässt. So absonderlich der zornige Zwerg ist, so frei ist er. Oskar ist ein unerbittlich scharfsinniger Beobachter des Danziger Kleinbürgertums im "Dritten Reich".

Sabine is a conceptual artist whose latest show, Fuck You, Help Me, is about to launch, when her world begins to unravel. Stalked by a mysterious figure whose approaches grow increasingly threatening, she spirals deeper into her neuroses as exhibition day approaches and her fear transforms into something primal and untamed.

At turns nonchalantly hip and charmingly deranged, Suzuki's singular slant on speculative fiction would be echoed in countless later works, from Margaret Atwood and Harumi Murakami, to Black Mirror and Ex Machina. In these darkly playful and punky stories, the fantastical elements are always earthed by the universal pettiness of strife between the sexes, and the gritty reality of life on the lower rungs, whatever planet that ladder might be on.

Damned If I Do is a set of brilliantly postmodern short stories from the twice Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Trees, James and Erasure. An artist, a cop, a cowboy, several fly fishermen and even a reluctant romance novelist inhabit these revealing and often hilarious stories. An old man...

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.

When Tony Hardstaff breaks the bank playing ‘Snap!’ at the St Petersburg Casino, he is swept up in a maelstrom of romance and adventure. Seduced by the sultry Natassia Fillipovna Karamazov – a woman with curves so perfect they could make a geometry professor spontaneously combust – Tony is caught in flagrante by the Russian mafia, and flees for his life.

Ten years have passed since Nathan Muir rescued Tom Bishop from a Suzhou Prison and escaped the CIA for good. Now, all his former agents have suddenly vanished leaving the CIA blinded around the globe. Then a coded message comes in from Malaysia with astonishing news: a lone spy has survived the mysterious purge. There's just one catch. He'll only reveal himself to the man Langley trusts less and despises more than Nathan Muir: Tom Bishop...

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.

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:

One evening, Gillis—a young Scottish minister who technically doesn't believe in god—falls into a hole left by a recently dug up elm tree and discovers an ancient disembodied hand in the soil. He's about to rebury it when the hand... beckons to him. He spirits it back to his manse and gives it pen and paper, whereupon it begins to doodle scratchy and anarchic visions. Somewhere, in the hand's deep history, there lies a story of the Scottish reformation, of art and violence, and of its owner long since dead.

Émile, négociateur du GIGN, doit intervenir lors d’une prise d’otages dans une école maternelle. Une situation presque banale pour lui, à ceci près : le forcené prétend s’appeler Elon Musk. Après le succès de S’adapter, prix Goncourt des Lycéens et prix Femina 2021, Clara Dupont-Monod nous offre un texte haletant, conçu comme une joute médiévale. Une farce triste, qui rappelle aussi la sacralité du verbe.

Edicion en audio conmemorativa del IV centenario de su primera publicacion (1605). En 1955 el mundo de habla espanola se preparaba para conmemorar los 350 anos de la primera edicion de esa obra maxima de la literatura universal que es "Don Quijote" de Cervantes.

Publicado na Hungria em 1985, Sátántangó é um romance monstruoso. A ação se concentra na chegada de um homem misterioso, que pode ser um profeta, um vigarista, ou o próprio demônio, a uma aldeia húngara onde a chuva não para de cair. Os habitantes do lugar, um elenco de desajustados e enlouquecidos (camponeses esfarrapados; um médico alcoólatra observando obsessivamente seus vizinhos; jovens perdidas num moinho destroçado; uma garota com deficiência tentando matar seu gato).

After decades of loyal service, Ma Daode, a corrupt and lecherous party official, has been appointed director of the China Dream Bureau, charged with promoting President Xi Jinping’s China Dream of national rejuvenation. But just as he is about to present his plan for a microchip that will be implanted into the brain of every citizen to replace all painful recollections with a collective dream of national supremacy, his sanity begins to unravel.

The Stone Door is an omen, an incantation, and an adventure story rolled into one. Built in layers like a puzzle box, it is the tale of two people, of love and the Zodiac and the Kabbalah, of Transylvania and Mesopotamia converging at the Caucasus, of a mad Hungarian King named Böles Kilary and of a woman's discovery of an initiatory code that leads to a Cyclopean obstacle, to love, self and awareness, to the great stone door of Kescke and beyond.

The Collected Stories of Diane Williams brings together over 300 new and previously published short fictions - distilled works of "unsettling brilliance" (Vanity Fair) that have rewritten the rules of the American short story. 

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE WINNER OF THE GORDON BURN PRIZE WINNER OF THE ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE CLIMATE FICTION PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD LONGLISTED FOR THE...

In Temporary, a young woman’s workplace is the size of the world. She fills increasingly bizarre placements in search of steadiness, connection, and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it’s shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the Board, for the mythical Temporary, “there is nothing more personal than doing your job.”

From the first puzzling sentence, Banker's Holiday—a euphemism for a federal bank closure—conjures the bleak and humorous world of Cincinnatus Stillman Fuller, a billionaire financier who suffers a breakdown in the middle of a Monday morning staff meeting.

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.