Hapax Legomenon's 3 favorite reads in 2026

• 2025
• 2026

Did Edgar Allen Poe fake his death? That’s what a Baltimore doctor needs to figure out in the title tale for this 11th story collection by Jack Matthews. As one critic wrote, “Matthews stories are like friends from small towns: They are honest, warm, occasionally lyrical and as strange and idiosyncratic as the rest of us.”

Characters face all kinds of improbable situations in this collection. A US army battalion finds itself locked in an absurd stalemate with German troops at the end of World War Two. A second-string college football player inexplicably receives an athletic prize. A middle-aged man… show more.

Poe and Kafka meet The Twilight Zone in this anthology of fifty fantastical tales, many of them reflecting the political and social energies of the time, by an Italian master of the short story.

Dino Buzzati was a prolific writer of stories, publishing several hundred over the course of forty years. Many of them are fantastic—reminiscent of Kafka and Poe in their mixture of horror and absurdity, and at the same time anticipating the alternate realities of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror in their chilling commentary on the barbarities, catastrophes, and fanaticisms of the twentieth century.

In The Bewitched… show more.

In this ribald, titillating, exciting book, Marco Vassi exposes the human animal in all its absurdity. He spares no one and nothing in his ironic X‑ray of our exalted obsessions. Capturing the sizzling vitality of our current erotic upheaval while grasping its peculiar pretensions, Vassi creates a gallery of unforgettable characters who are only ourselves in a form larger than life. In these nineteen stories, Vassi turns erotic literature inside out, unraveling the seams of our most secret fantasies. The Erotic Comedies offers a mere taste of what awaits readers in his full‑length novels.