The best books featuring absurdist humor

Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy—previously published as City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room—is an astonishingly original take on detective and mystery novels. Although I love reading these genres, in real life puzzles rarely get solved in such a neat and tidy fashion, which is why I find this trilogy so intriguing. Auster’s stories are paradoxical and perplexing, replete with ambiguities, enclosing the reader in a hall of mirrors. The three novels expose the absurdity of fiction, which by definition is make-believe, yet repeatedly fools us into regarding the contrived imaginings of the author as real.

Calvino’s Cosmicomics is perhaps the funniest and most outlandish collections of short stories I’ve ever come across. Think Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time meets Alice in Wonderland. Starting with the Big Bang and charting the entire evolution of the universe and of life on Earth, Calvino’s narrator shape-shifts from a man, to a dinosaur, to a mollusk, a single-cell organism, a subatomic particle, and even a disembodied being. In this linked collection of modern fairy tales, the author displays wild flights of imagination, combining scientific rigor with an uproarious repudiation of logic. Oh, and the narrator’s name is Qfwfq.

Geek Love is one of the strangest, most fascinating, and thoroughly unsettling novels I’ve ever read. It tells the story of a carny family whose mother and father breed their own exhibit of human oddities with the help of a variety of illicit drugs, insecticides, and radioisotopes. I’ve certainly felt freakish at times, but compared to the Binewski spawn—a boy with flippers, a hunchbacked albino dwarf, resplendent piano-playing Siamese twins, and Fortunato, the normal-looking baby who has telekinetic powers—I feel downright ordinary! The story is beautiful, shocking, repulsive, exhilarating, and deeply moving all at once, and might challenge your conceptions of what you consider weird, deformed, beautiful, ugly, normal, or socially acceptable. Surprisingly, the novel was a bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award in 1989. 

Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece is probably my favorite book in the whole world, and served as the model for my novel. The story takes you on an absurdist roller-coaster ride that is utterly unpredictable, a series of preposterous vignettes that are both silly and profound, meandering in a seemingly random fashion, yet managing to form a complete and satisfying whole. Alice forever changed the course of children’s literature. But the book is not just for kids. As The Annotated Alice makes clear, beneath all the nonsense and whimsy, we find mathematical concepts, clever wordplay, political satire, and a lesson on how to stay sane in a mad world.

As a child, I adored the picture books written and illustrated by Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. Although it’s tough to beat The Cat in the Hat, I think my favorite story was Horton Hatches the Egg, which combines classic absurdist humor with a heartfelt message. Horton may look ridiculous, perched on a bird’s nest in a tree, mocked by friends, and carted off to be humiliated at a zoo, but the faithful elephant is rewarded with a baby elephant-bird. As Lewis Carroll demonstrated, the best stories convey life lessons without browbeating readers with didactic, moralistic harangues. Along with its zany humor and hilarious illustrations, Horton makes the case for the paramount importance of loyalty and commitment, keeping one’s promises, and the transformative power of love.