Showing titles in Absurdist

Combine an offbeat cast of characters with Murakami's idiosyncratic prose, and the result is the remarkable story Dance Dance Dance: high-class call girls billed to MasterCard, a psychic 13-year-old dropout has a passion for talking heads, and meet a hunky matinee idol doomed to play dentists and teachers. Don’t forget the one-armed beach-combing poet, an uptight hotel clerk and one very bemused narrator caught in the web of advanced capitalist mayhem.

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.

Brought to you by Penguin. This Penguin Classic is performed by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, winner of the 2019 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical. A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he...

* LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025 * * WINNER OF THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2026 * * SHORTLISTED FOR THE CLIMATE FICTION PRIZE * * WINNER OF THE ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZE * * A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: GUARDIAN, OBSERVER, IRISH TIMES, BBC, WASHINGTON POST, THE NEW YORKER, NPR, GOOD...

There is another 1985, somewhere in the could-have-been, where the Crimean war still rages, dodos are regenerated in home-cloning kits and everyone is deeply disappointed by the ending of 'Jane Eyre'. In this world there are no jet-liners or computers, but there are policemen who can travel...

'A writer of virtuostic talents who can seemingly do anything' New York Times 'Wallace is a superb comedian of culture . . . his exuberance and intellectual impishness are a delight' James Wood, Guardian 'He induces the kind of laughter which, when read in bed with a sleeping partner, wakes said...

Brought to you by Penguin. 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...

The cult classic that can still change your life… Let the dice decide! When a bored psychologist hands over all of his decisions to chance, making choices on the roll of a die, he transforms his life – and the world. Because when you follow the dice, anything can happen. Entertaining...

When 34-year-old Ms Shibata gets a new job in Tokyo to escape sexual harassment at her old one, she finds that, as the only woman at her new workplace—a company that manufactures cardboard tubes—she is expected to do all the menial tasks. One day, she announces that she can't clear away her colleagues' dirty cups—because she's pregnant and the smell nauseates her. The only thing is...Ms Shibata is not pregnant.

À la fin du siècle, une figure du Décadentisme invoque un démon sans visage: l’absurde. Dans ce roman où le réel se lézarde, les certitudes vacillent, les élans et les répulsions se heurtent, et la condition humaine affleure, mise à nu. Fidèle à une esthétique anti-réaliste, la narration glisse entre clairvoyance et vertige, mêlant trouble, ironie sombre et élégance vénéneuse, pour sonder ce qui nous meut quand toute logique se défait.

A 999 line poem in heroic couplets, divided into 4 cantos, was composed - according to Nabokov's fiction - by John Francis Shade, an obsessively methodical man, during the last 20 days of his life.

The world might be in disarray, but for one young woman, the very weave of herself seems to have loosened. Time and memories pass straight through her body, she’s afraid of her own floorboards, and ‘WHAT IS LOVE? BABY DON’T HURT ME’ plays over and over in her ears. ‘I’m sorry not to respond to your email,’ she writes, ‘but I live completely in the present now.’ But tearing through the slippery terrains of fiction and reality, the possibility for human connection seems to beckon from the other side – and with it, the chance for a blinding re-emergence into the world.

A member of the landed gentry, with a seemingly guaranteed income from his estate in the country, Oblomov lives in Petersburg, uninterested in the business that provides his living and barely aware that the revenue is diminishing. Not that he leads a dissolute life of extravagance, balls and entertainment. Instead he is a dreamer, a sybarite, content above all to spend most of the day supine, in bed. The novel opens with Oblomov thus ensconced, attended only by his dirty, grumbling, indolent servant Zahar, who has looked after him since childhood, catering to his every need. 

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.

Salman Rushdies Quichotte ist ein Reisender, der besessen ist von der "unwirklichen Wirklichkeit" des Fernsehens. Er will das Herz der Königin der Talkshows erobern und begibt sich auf eine Reise quer durch Amerika, um sich ihrer als würdig zu erweisen; auf dem Beifahrersitz, Sancho, der Sohn, den er sich immer gewünscht hat. Rushdie nimmt Quichottes Abenteuer mit in unsere verrückte Gegenwart.

FonoLibro, el líder en audiolibros en español, celebra los 400 años de la obra mas importante y universal de nuestra lengua Las Aventuras del Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha, mas conocida por el nombre abreviado de Don Quijote.

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.

I Am Not Sidney Poitier is a comic tour de force from the Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Trees, Dr No and Erasure (adapted into an Oscar-nominated film). The sudden death of Not Sidney Poitier’s mother orphans him at age eleven. He is left with a name no one understands, an uncanny...

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss by Rajeev Balasubramanyam, read by Ramon Tikaram. There’s no problem Professor Chandra can’t solve. Except for one: the secret to happiness In the moments after the accident, Professor Chandra doesn’t see...

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.”