Best Absurdist Fiction Books
Here you will get Best Absurdist Fiction Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. A Confederacy of Dunces
Author: by John Kennedy Toole
Grove Weidenfeld
English
405 pages
Winner of the Pulitzer PrizeA masterwork … The novel astonishes with its inventiveness … It is nothing less than a grand comic fugue. The New York Times Book ReviewA Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole’s hero, one Ignatius J.
Reilly, is “huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans’ lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures” (Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times).
2. Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal
Author: by Christopher Moore
0380813815
William Morrow Paperbacks
English
Everyone knows about the immaculate conception and the crucifixion. But what happened to Jesus between the manger and the Sermon on the Mount? In this hilarious and bold novel, the acclaimed Christopher Moore shares the greatest story never told: the life of Christ as seen by his boyhood pal, Biff.
Just what was Jesus doing during the many years that have gone unrecorded in the Bible? Biff was there at his side, and now after two thousand years, he shares those good, bad, ugly, and miraculous times. Screamingly funny, audaciously fresh, Lamb rivals the best of Tom Robbins and Carl Hiaasen, and is sure to please this gifted writer’s fans and win him legions more.
3. Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts
Author: by Samuel Beckett
Grove Press
English
128 pages
Performed across the globe by some of the world’s most iconic performers, Samuel Beckett’s indelible masterpiece remains an unwavering testament of what it means to be human. From an inauspicious beginning at the tiny Left Bank Theatre de Babylone in 1953, followed by bewilderment among American and British audiences, Waiting for Godot has become of the most important and enigmatic plays of the past fifty years and a cornerstone of twentieth-century drama.
As Clive Barnes wrote, Time catches up with genius Waiting for Godot is one of the masterpieces of the century. The story revolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someoneor somethingnamed Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree, inhabiting a drama spun of their own consciousness.
The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as mankind’s inexhaustible search for meaning. Beckett’s language pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existential post-World War II Europe. His play remains one of the most magical and beautiful allegories of our time.
4. Pale Fire
Author: by Vladimir Nabokov
Vintage
English
224 pages
In Pale Fire Nabokov offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures: a 999-line poem by the reclusive genius John Shade; an adoring foreword and commentary by Shade’s self-styled Boswell, Dr. Charles Kinbote; a darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue.
5. The Liar's Dictionary: A Novel
Author: by Eley Williams
Doubleday
English
288 pages
Winner of the 2021 Betty Trask AwardShortlisted for the 2021 Desmond Elliott PrizeAn audacious, idiosyncratic dual love story about how language and people intersect and connect, and about how far we’ll go to save what we’re passionate about. NPR An exhilarating and laugh-out-loud debut novel from a prize-winning new talent that chronicles the misadventures of a lovelorn Victorian lexicographer and the young woman put on his trail a century later to root out his misdeeds while confronting questions of her own sexuality and place in the world.Mountweazel n.
The phenomenon of false entries within dictionaries and works of reference. Often used as a safeguard against copyright infringement. Peter Winceworth, Victorian lexicographer, is toiling away at the letter S for Swansby’s multivolume Encyclopaedic Dictionary. His disaffection compels him to insert unauthorized fictitious entries into the dictionary in an attempt to assert some sense of individual purpose and artistic freedom.
6. The Castle
Author: by Franz Kafka
Schocken
English
352 pages
Translated and with a preface by Mark HarmanLeft unfinished by Kafka in 1922 and not published until 1926, two years after his death, The Castle is the haunting tale of K.’s relentless, unavailing struggle with an inscrutable authority in order to gain access to the Castle.
Scrupulously following the fluidity and breathlessness of the sparsely punctuated original manuscript, Mark Harman’s new translation reveals levels of comedy, energy, and visual power previously unknown to English language readers.
7. The Book Tour
Author: by Andi Watson
English
272 pages
1603094792
A page-turning, Kafkaesque dark comedy in brilliant retro style, this graphic novel watches one man try to keep it together while everything falls apart. Upon the publication of his latest novel, G.H. Fretwell, a minor English writer, embarks on a book tour to promote it.
Nothing is going according to plan, and his trip gradually turns into a nightmare. But now the police want to ask him some questions about a mysterious disappearance, and it seems that Fretwell’s troubles are only just beginning… In his first book for adults in many years, acclaimed cartoonist Andi Watson evokes all the anxieties felt by every writer and compresses them into a comedic gem of a book.
Witty, surreal, and sharply observant, The Book Tour offers a captivating lesson in letting go.
8. Terminal Boredom: Stories
Author: by Izumi Suzuki
English
224 pages
1788739884
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 by Thrillist, The Millions, Frieze, and Metropolis JapanThe first English language publication of the work of Izumi Suzuki, a legend of Japanese science fiction and a countercultural iconAt 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. Translated by Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi, and Helen O’Horan.
9. The Hearing Trumpet (New York Review Books Classics)
Author: by Leonora Carrington
English
224 pages
1681374641
An old woman enters into a fantastical world of dreams and nightmares in this surrealist classic admired by Bjrk and Luis Buuel. Leonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and The Hearing Trumpet is the witty, celebratory key to her anarchic and allusive body of work.
The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with a man-made apocalypse that promises to usher in the earth’s rebirth. In between we are swept off to a most curious old-age home run by a self-improvement cult and drawn several centuries back in time with a cross-dressing Abbess who is on a quest to restore the Holy Grail to its rightful owner, the Goddess Venus.
Guiding us is one of the most unexpected heroines in twentieth-century literature, a nonagenarian vegetarian named Marian Leatherby, who, as Olga Tokarczuk writes in her afterword, is hard of hearing but full of life.
10. The Book of Mr. Natural
Author: by R. Crumb
Fantagraphics
English
112 pages
A Crumb classic featuring his signature creation, available in hardcover for the first time! This collection features over 120 pages of vintage Crumb comics starring the white-bearded, diminutive sage-cum-charlatan, ranging from charming, free-wheeling early ’70s stories to the disturbing, controversial ’90s stories (as seen in the Crumb movie), including the entire 40-page Mr. Natural and Devil Girl epic.
Crumb’s Mr. Natural is probably the most famous underground character of all (topping even Fritz the Cat and the Freak Brothers), recognizable even to civilians. Don’t miss this opportunity to snatch up this jam-packed collection of comics from one of the all-time masters!
112 pages of black-and-white comics
11. Where the Wild Ladies Are
Author: by Aoko Matsuda
English
288 pages
1593766904
In this witty and exuberant collection of feminist retellings of traditional Japanese folktales, humans live side by side with spirits who provide a variety of useful servicesfrom truth-telling to babysitting, from protecting castles to fighting crime. 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; a silent house-caller who babysits and cleans while a single mother is out working.
Where the Wild Ladies Are is populated by these and many other spirited womenwho 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.
In this witty and exuberant collection of linked stories, Aoko Matsuda takes the rich, millenia-old tradition of Japanese folktalesshapeshifting wives and foxes, magical trees and wellsand wholly reinvents them, presenting a world in which humans are consoled, guided, challenged, and transformed by the only sometimes visible forces that surround them.
12. Dementia 21 Vol.1
Author: by Kago
Fantagraphics
English
300 pages
This is a disturbingly funny manga about plucky home aide tasked with caring for a series of bizarre patients, from one of Japan’s most twisted cartoonists. Yukie Sakai is a sprightly young home health aide eager to help her elderly clients.
But what seems like a straightforward job quickly turns into a series of increasingly surreal and bizarre adventures that put Yukie’s wits to the test! Cartoonist Kago, who is well known for combining a more traditional manga style with hyper realistic illustration technique, an experimental visual storytelling approach, and outrageously sexual and scatological subject matter, has single-handedly created his own genre: fashionable paranoia.” Black & white illustrations throughout.
13. Trout Fishing in America
Author: by Richard Brautigan
Mariner Books
English
144 pages
Richard Brautigan was a literary idol of the 1960s and 1970s whose comic genius and iconoclastic vision of American life caught the imagination of young people everywhere. He came of age during the Haight-Ashbury period and has been called the last of the Beats.
His early books became required reading for the hip generation, and on its publication Trout Fishing in America became an international bestseller. An indescribable romp, the novel is best summed up in one word: mayonnaise. This new edition includes an introduction by the poet Billy Collins, who first encountered Brautigan’s work as a student in California.
14. A Happy Death
Author: by Albert Camus
Vintage
English
208 pages
In his first novel, A Happy Death, written when he was in his early twenties and retrieved from his private papers following his death in I960, Albert Camus laid the foundation for The Stranger, focusing in both works on an Algerian clerk who kills a man in cold blood.
But he also revealed himself to an extent that he never would in his later fiction. For if A Happy Death is the study of a rule-bound being shattering the fetters of his existence, it is also a remarkably candid portrait of its author as a young man.
As the novel follows the protagonist, Patrice Mersault, to his victim’s house – and then, fleeing, in a journey that takes him through stages of exile, hedonism, privation, and death -it gives us a glimpse into the imagination of one of the great writers of the twentieth century.
For here is the young Camus himself, in love with the sea and sun, enraptured by women yet disdainful of romantic love, and already formulating the philosophy of action and moral responsibility that would make him central to the thought of our time.
15. Life for Sale (Vintage International)
Author: by Yukio Mishima
Vintage
English
192 pages
After botching a suicide attempt, salaryman Hanio Yamada decides to put his life up for sale in the classifieds section of a Tokyo newspaper. Soon interested parties come calling with increasingly bizarre requests and what follows is a madcap comedy of errors, involving a jealous husband, a drug-addled heiress, poisoned carrotseven a vampire.
For someone who just wants to die, Hanio can’t seem to catch a break, as he finds himself enmeshed in a continent-wide conspiracy that puts him in the cross hairs of both his own government and a powerful organized-crime syndicate.
By turns wildly inventive, darkly comedic, and deeply surreal, in Life for Sale Yukio Mishima stunningly uses satire to explore the same dark themes that preoccupied him throughout his lifetime.
16. Donald Barthelme: Collected Stories (LOA #343) (Library of America)
Author: by Donald Barthelme
English
1004 pages
1598536842
The definitive collection of a twentieth-century master of the short story, whose unforgettable inventions revolutionized the formThe short stories of Donald Barthelme, revered by the likes of Thomas Pynchon and George Saunders, are gems of invention and pathos that have dazzled and delighted readers since the 1960s.
Here, for the first time, these essential stories are preserved as they were published in Barthelme’s original collections, beginning with Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964), a book that made a generation of readers sit up and take notice. Collected Stories also includes the work that appeared for the first time in Barthelme’s two retrospective anthologies, Sixty and Forty, as well as a selection of uncollected stories.
Discover, in this comprehensive gathering, Barthelme’s unique approach to fiction, his upside-down worlds that are nonetheless grounded in fundamental human truths, his scrambled visions of history that yield unexpected insights, and his genius for dialogue, parody, and collage, which was for him “the central principle of all art in the twentieth century.” Engage with sophisticated works of fiction that, often in just the space of a few pages, wrest profundities out of what might first seem merely ephemeral, even trivial.
