Absurdist Fiction

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.

A nameless narrator awakens to the muddle of middle age, no longer certain who or what he is. He finds himself at a party talking to a woman he doesn't know who proves to be his wife. Soon separated but still living in the same apartment, he is threatened by a litigious dachshund and saddled with a stubborn case of erectile dysfunction in a world that seems held together by increasingly mercurial laws and elusive boundaries.

Like Kafka's The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude", an imaginary crime that defies definition.

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.

This ingenious novel is presented as a chronicle of an island from medieval to modern times. The island is not on the map, but it is real beyond doubt. It cannot be found in history books, yet the events are painfully recognizable. The monastic chroniclers dutifully narrate events they witness. The entries mostly seem objective, but at least one monk simultaneously drafts and hides a "true" history, to be discovered centuries later. And why has someone snipped out a key prophesy about the island's fate?

In this fantastically macabre tale, the separate halves of a nobleman split in two by a cannonball go on to pursue their own independent adventures. In a battle against the Turks, Viscount Medardo of Terralba is bissected lengthwise by a cannonball. One half of him returns to his feudal estate and takes up a lavishly evil life. Soon the other, virtuous half appears. The two halves become rivals for the love of the same woman, fight a bloody duel, and achieve a miraculous resolution.

King Edward IV did not like that Simon was thrice removed from some long-forgotten ancestor who was somehow related to the owner of the cow that gave milk to King Henry V. Or something like that, Simon was not very good at genealogy. But now, the Lancastrian lordling has fled to the far reaches of the world to brood on revenge. He's stranded in these strange waters with money-hungry Captain Aldo Mitacchione, his halfwit first mate, Neno, and a crew of starving Italians. Things are about to get stranger.

A busybody aunt who disapproves of hair removal; a pair of door-to-door saleswomen hawking portable lanterns; a cheerful lover who visits every night to take a luxurious bath. Where the Wild Ladies Are is populated by these and many other spirited women - who also happen to be ghosts. This is a realm in which jealousy, stubbornness, and other excessive “feminine” passions are not to be feared or suppressed, but rather cultivated; and, chances are, a man named Mr. Tei will notice your talents and recruit you, dead or alive (preferably dead), to join his mysterious company.

A bureaucratic glitch omits an entire building, along with its residents, from municipal records. So begins Reva's "darkly hilarious" (Anthony Doerr) intertwined narratives, nine stories that span the chaotic years leading up to and immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union. But even as the benighted denizens of 1933 Ivansk Street weather the official neglect of the increasingly powerless authorities, they devise ingenious ways to survive.

Distraught and hopeless, an eighteen-year-old distance runner, Regan, decides to end her life. And she’ll do it through an unusual new method available only on the dark web. Enter Ülle, a woman with amnesia, who will, inadvertently, make Regan’s wish come true.

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.

Trina FastHorse Goldberg-Oneka is a fifty-year-old trans woman whose life is irreversibly altered in the wake of a gentle--but nonetheless world-changing--invasion by an alien entity called The Seep. Through The Seep, everything is connected. Capitalism falls, hierarchies and barriers are broken down; if something can be imagined, it is possible. Trina and her wife, Deeba, live blissfully under The Seep’s utopian influence--until Deeba begins to imagine what it might be like to be reborn as a baby, which will give her the chance at an even better life.

Asa’s husband is transferring jobs, and his new office is located near his family’s home in the countryside. During an exceptionally hot summer, the young married couple move in, and Asa does her best to quickly adjust to their new rural lives, to their remoteness, to the constant presence of her in-laws, and the incessant buzz of cicadas. While her husband is consumed with his job, Asa is left to explore her surroundings on her own: She makes trips to the supermarket, halfheartedly looks for work, and tries to find interesting ways of killing time.

An urgent and unforgettable collection of stories, Show Them a Good Time explores types - men and women, their assigned roles and meanings - in modern society. A young, broke Irish woman narrates her relationship with a successful comedian in New York; two hapless university students take to the stage in a bid to assert their autonomy; a school teacher makes her way through a series of dead-end dates, gamely searching for love or distraction as the world teeters towards ruin.

Avishay is up for the Nobel Prize for Economics. There’s just one problem—he’s dead. His four closest friends agree that the well-earned prize must stay within his grasp, and so conspire to conceal Avishay’s corpse until the committee’s announcement. The potential of a glorious legacy for their late friend – and by extension, for them all – is only a mere eight days away. What could go wrong?

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.

Gregor Samsa, el protagonista, se despierta una mañana sintiendo extraños dolores. Asustado, se percata de que sus miembros no le responden, y además nota que su cuerpo pesa en exceso. Gregor vive con sus padres y hermana, y piensa en ellos y en su trabajo, cuando aquella mañana descubre que ha dejado de ser humano para convertirse en un bicho.

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".

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.

"Si un invité meurt inopinément chez vous, ne prévenez surtout pas la police. Appelez un taxi et dites-lui de vous conduire à l'hôpital avec cet ami qui a un malaise. Le décès sera constaté en arrivant aux urgences et vous pourrez assurer, témoin à l'appui, que l'individu a trépassé en chemin. Moyennant quoi, on vous fichera la paix..."