Absurdist Fiction

Enter the wonderfully weird, always uncomfortable, side-splittingly funny world of The Terrifying Realm of the Possible, where your worst fears of who you are or might become are always just around the corner. In these masterful short stories from the singular mind of the actor and comedian Brett Gelman, you’ll meet five individuals, each navigating a uniquely strange stage of life.

Alice in Blunderland: An Iridescent Dream is a novel by John Kendrick Bangs, first published in 1907 by Doubleday, Page & Co. of New York. Illustrated by Albert Levering, this work serves as a political parody of Lewis Carroll's famous Alice books: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871). In this whimsical tale, Alice finds herself in "Blunderland", also humorously referred to as "Municipal Ownership Country". Here, she encounters familiar characters from Wonderland, including the dormouse, the Mad Hatter, and the Cheshire Cat.

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.

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.

"Gros-Câlin" paraît au Mercure de France en 1974. Il met en scène un employé de bureau qui, à défaut de trouver l'amour chez ses contemporains, s'éprend d'un python. L'auteur de ce premier roman, fable émouvante sur la solitude de l'homme moderne, est un certain Émile Ajar. On apprendra plus tard que derrière ce nom se cache le célèbre Romain Gary. L'histoire loufoque et touchante de Monsieur Cousin et de son python est racontée avec humour et tendresse par Jacques Gamblin. Un régal absolu !

Voilà un coin de campagne où l'on a de drôles de façons... La foire aux vieux, par exemple. Curieuse institution ! On sait bien que tous les enfants peuvent voler comme des oiseaux dès qu'ils étendent leurs bras - mais est-ce une raison suffisante pour les enfermer derrière des murs de plus en plus hauts de plus en plus clos ?

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.

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.

Ein Blaubär entführt den Hörer in eine Welt, in der Phantasie und Humor auf abenteuerliche Weise außer Kontrolle geraten sind. Dem Hörer geht es in dieser akustischen Neufassung wie der Hauptfigur: Gepackt vom Sog der Lesung Dirk Bachs geht es über sparsam, aber effektvoll eingesetzte Musik zu Zwergpiraten, Klabautergeistern und Gimpeln. Dramatische Klangbilder machen die Reise so plastisch, dass Finsterberge, der Große Wald, der Ewige Tornado, Atlantis u.v.m.

Oyelo.com lo invita a seguir disfrutando de las aventuras de Don Quijote en esta segunda parte de la gran obra de Miguel de Cervantes. Es una obra clásica de la literatura hispana y en la que el autor ha logrado capturar con su magnífica prosa el espíritu humano, con todos los sueños y las aspiraciones que todos tenemos de cambiar el mundo y hacerlo un lugar mejor para todos. Please note: This audiobook is in Spanish.

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.

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.

De Belleville à Marne-la-Vallée, une bande d'enfants part en croisade pour mettre le feu à Eurodisney. Bienvenue aux avants-postes de la Révolution, menée par la lecture engagée, poétique et militante d'Aloïse Sauvage. Elle est née à l'Orée du bois, une cité réduite à néant par les bulldozers des médias et de la finance. Hantée par les ruines de son Eden foiré, elle a rejoint la commune solidaire à Belleville, où l'on s'organise et lutte en marge du système répressif. Elle, c'est Fi. Quarante piges à tenter de trouver de la beauté dans ce monde fatal : Fi est un chaos de fils et d'aiguilles, de coutures impossibles.

After a domestic terrorist unleashes a dirty bomb in Manhattan in 1970, making the borough uninhabitable, FBI Agent Uli Sarkisian finds himself in a world that is suddenly unrecognizable, as the United States faces its greatest immigration crisis ever: finding housing for millions of its own citizens. The federal government hastily retrofits an abandoned government installation in the Nevada desert. Despite the government's best intentions, as the military pulls out of "Rescue City", the residents are increasingly left to their own devices, and tribal gang warfare fuses with democracy.

Thoroughly absurd and yet all-too-real, My Way to Canossa follows four journeys that re-imagine the Middle Ages amid the political and technological changes of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. It isn't an historical novel. It's an exploration of how the present uses the past.

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.

When a dispute over her parents’ will grows bitter, Bergljot is drawn back into the orbit of the family she fled 20 years before. Her mother and father have decided to leave two island summer houses to her sisters, disinheriting the two eldest siblings from the most meaningful part of the estate. To outsiders, it is a quarrel about property and favoritism. But Bergljot, who has borne a horrible secret since childhood, understands the gesture as something very different - a final attempt to suppress the truth and a cruel insult to the grievously injured.

Lucy and Jake live in a house by a field where the sun burns like a ball of fire. Lucy has set her career aside in order to devote her life to the children, to their finely tuned routine, and to the house itself, which comforts her like an old, sly friend. But then a man calls one afternoon with a shattering message: His wife has been having an affair with Lucy's husband, Jake. The revelation marks a turning point: Lucy and Jake decide to stay together but make a special arrangement designed to even the score and save their marriage - she will hurt him three times.

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.

Nuns. Super Soakers. Oversexed Assistants! An ancient organization of women who suck cruelty out of people tasks one surly centenarian with a bubble-brained teenager to save the world. Yup, the world is in some pretty deep doo-doo. Bonus chapters from some of the author’s other books are included.