Showing results by publisher "-emdashery books-" in Absurdist

The Kappa is a creature from Japanese folklore known for dragging unwary toddlers to their deaths in rivers: a scaly, child-sized creature, looking something like a frog, but with a sharp, pointed beak and an oval-shaped saucer on top of its head, which hardens with age. Akutagawa’s Kappa is narrated by Patient No. 23, a madman in a lunatic asylum: he recounts how, while out hiking in Kamikochi, he spots a Kappa.

Zebra is the last in a line of anarchists, atheists, and autodidacts. When war came, her family didn't fight; they took refuge in books. Now alone and in exile, Zebra leaves New York for Barcelona, retracing the journey she and her father made from Iran to the United States years ago.

Life is so unfair, and it sends many things to try Professor Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, in the proud Bavarian city of Regensburg. There is the undeserved rise of his rival (and owner of a one-legged dachshund), Detlev Amadeus Unterholzer; the interminable ramblings of the librarian, Herr Huber; and the condescension of his colleagues with regard to his unmarried state. But when his friend Ophelia Prinzel takes it upon herself to match-make, and duly produces a cheerful heiress with her own Schloss, it appears that the professor's true worth is about to be recognised.

An author goes on a book tour for his new bestseller which, as people keep telling him, is one hell of a book. One morning, he meets The Kid: a young Black boy who looks just like the one he keeps seeing on the news. And The Kid wants him to tell his story. It's the story of a boy who spent most of his life trying to hide. And it may not be that different from the story of our author. But to find out why, you'll have to listen to this for yourself.

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.

Dr. Whitfield is looking forward to a sabbatical year of peace and quiet, gardening in his backyard, and tinkering with what he calls his latest "unpublishable book". As the year begins, he is drawn by a series of seeming coincidences into involvement with a group of characters from across Europe, including a family that has been the target of assassination attempts by unknown powers. During his journey to Romania, the situation in which he finds himself becomes more sinister than it first seemed.

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.

Tasked by his horribly well-adjusted brother with clearing out the family home for sale, Gabriel’s sanity quickly begins to unravel. His parents’ old manuscripts appear to change each time he reads them. A bizarre home video hints at long-buried secrets. And there’s a hideous man in the garden.

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.

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 pressed against their skin, but they also all now feel a curious new hunger for home: Earth, that place many cannot even remember. The Board of Directors are eager to understand more, and so instruct a commission to interview each of the employees.

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?

For Jim Nashe, it all started when he came into a small inheritance and left Boston in pursuit of a "life of freedom." Careening back and forth across the United States, waiting for the money to run out, Nashe met Jack Pozzi, a young man with a temper and a plan. With Nashe's last funds, they entered a poker game against two rich eccentrics, "risking everything on the single blind turn of a card."

Sidney Geeder, King of Mortgages, wants nothing more than to cash in his lucrative company stock and quit his job, but his dreams are threatened by the disappearance of Eggs Igino, the only possible man who can replace him.

"Metafísica de los tubos" cuenta los primeros tres años de vida de un ser obsesionado por el agua que, disconforme con su entorno, adopta la inerte forma de tubo como condición existencial. Con la crueldad, el realismo y el peculiar humor al que nos tiene acostumbrados, Amélie Nothomb rememora, a través de una narración que combina filosofía y fontanería, episodios de su infancia japonesa, transcurrida en Osaka.

Violet Hetherington has taken the rash step of joining a transatlantic cruise ship to New York to visit Edwin, an old friend. As she makes the six day crossing, she relives the traumatic events that led to her losing Edwin's friendship, and abandoning her career as a poet, for the safety of marriage and domesticity.

It’s Hester’s fortieth birthday when she’s diagnosed with terminal cancer, and she knows immediately what she must do: abandon her possessions and drive to California to kill her estranged father. With no friends or family tying her to the life she’s built in New York City, she quits her wildly lucrative job in corporate law and sets off. She hasn’t made it far when she runs into John, an environmental activist in need of a ride to different superfund sites across the United States. From five-star Midwestern hotels to cultish Southwestern compounds, the two make their way across the country.

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:

A missing laptop, a critic, a sojourn in communal living - Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love is a bracingly intelligent examination of grief, autonomy, aging, desire, information overload, and the condition of being a thinking and feeling inhabitant of an often unthinkable, numbing world. Anna Moschovakis’s debut novel bristles with honesty, humor, and the hungers that propel us to revise and again revise our lives.

Tutto può accadere nel bar sotto il mare. Un bar in cui tutti vorremmo capitare, una notte, per ascoltare i racconti del barista, dell'uomo col cappello, dell'uomo con la gardenia, della sirena, del marinaio, dell'uomo invisibile, della vamp e degli altri misteriosi avventori. Sompazzo, il paese più bugiardo del mondo - Gaspard Ouralphe, il più grande cuoco di Francia - Il verme mangiaparole e l'incredibile storia del capitano Charlemont - La disfida di Salsiccia - Il dittatore pentito - Kraputnyk, il marziano innamorato - Priscilla Mapple e il delitto della II C.

Un cane troppo fedele che torna sempre come un boomerang dal padrone che lo vuole abbandonare; un potentissimo manager pronto a tutto pur di riunire i Beatles per un concerto; un terzino fantasioso e romantico su uno spelacchiato campo di periferia; un arrogante e irredimibile uomo d'affari; un frate che sceglie il silenzio per sentirsi più vicino a Dio ma viene vinto dalla bellezza di una muta; una perfida vecchietta divorata dall'invidia e dal livore sono solo alcuni dei protagonisti di questa raccolta di racconti, nella quale Benni mostra il lato più curioso, imprevedibile e misterioso della vita.