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Reading List · Absurdist FictionThe Best Absurdist Authors to Read
Absurdist literature puts people in situations that refuse to make sense: a clerk wakes up as an insect, two tramps wait for someone who never comes, a whole town turns into rhinoceroses. Albert Camus described the absurd as the clash between the human need for meaning and a world that offers none. The writers here treat that clash as material for comedy, dread and, often, a strange kind of consolation.
The twelve writers below are ordered chronologically by year of birth, from a nineteenth-century precursor to two living authors. Each was chosen because their work is widely described as absurdist or as a direct forerunner of it, and each has at least one book available in English. For every writer there is one suggested place to start.
Twelve absurdist authors, and where to start with each
Nikolai Gogol
1809–1852 · Sorochyntsi, Poltava Governorate (now Ukraine)
Gogol wrote comic, grotesque stories about clerks, officials and minor landowners in the Russian Empire, in which bureaucratic logic slides into nonsense. In The Nose a civil servant’s nose leaves his face and walks around St Petersburg dressed as a state councillor, and nobody in authority will take the problem seriously.
The novelist and critic Andrey Bely saw Gogol as a forerunner of absurdism, and Vsevolod Meyerhold staged The Government Inspector in 1926 as a comedy of the absurd situation. Reading him first shows where many of the later writers on this list come from. His stories are available in several English translations.
Read Gogol if you want to see where the literary absurd began, in short and very funny stories.
Start with The Nose (1836). A St Petersburg official wakes to find his nose missing, then meets it in the street wearing a uniform of higher rank than his own. Or Dead Souls (1842). A swindler travels the provinces buying up the paperwork for serfs who have already died.
All Nikolai Gogol books →Franz Kafka
1883–1924 · Prague, Austria-Hungary
Kafka wrote in German about individuals caught in systems they cannot understand or escape: a travelling salesman turned into an insect, a bank clerk arrested for an offence nobody names, a land surveyor who can never reach the castle that employs him. His prose is precise and matter-of-fact, which makes the impossible events more unsettling.
Camus wrote an essay on hope and the absurd in Kafka’s work, and his name has become shorthand for nightmarish bureaucracy. The Trial and The Castle were published after his death in 1924. His books are widely available in English.
Read Kafka if you want the writer whose name became an adjective for absurd systems.
Start with The Metamorphosis (1915). Gregor Samsa wakes up transformed into a giant insect and his family must decide what to do with him. Or The Trial (1925). Josef K. is arrested one morning and spends the novel trying to find out what he is accused of.
All Franz Kafka books →Daniil Kharms
1905–1942 · Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire
Kharms wrote very short prose pieces in 1930s Soviet Russia in which people fall out of windows, die without explanation or trip over each other for no reason. The stories often break off with a shrug. In 1928 he founded the avant-garde group OBERIU, and his play Elizaveta Bam (1927) is often seen as foreshadowing the Theatre of the Absurd.
Little of his adult work was published in his lifetime. He died of starvation in a prison psychiatric ward during the siege of Leningrad in 1942. The English selection Today I Wrote Nothing, translated by Matvei Yankelevich, is a good way in.
Read Kharms if you like absurd humour in very small, very dark doses.
Start with Today I Wrote Nothing (2007). An English selection of Kharms’s stories, poems and plays, translated and edited by Matvei Yankelevich.
Samuel Beckett
1906–1989 · Foxrock, Dublin, Ireland
Beckett wrote in both French and English, mostly about people who keep going without knowing why: two men waiting by a tree for someone called Godot, a blind master who cannot stand and his servant in a bare room in Endgame. His work strips plot and setting down to repetition, routine and talk, which is often bleak and often funny.
Waiting for Godot premiered in Paris in 1953 and in English in London in 1955. Martin Esslin made Beckett central to his book The Theatre of the Absurd, and he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969.
Read Beckett if you want the defining playwright of the Theatre of the Absurd.
Start with Waiting for Godot (1953). Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait on a country road for a man named Godot who never arrives. Or Molloy (1951). The first novel of Beckett’s trilogy, narrated by Molloy, who sets out to find his mother, and by Moran, who is sent to track Molloy down.
All Samuel Beckett books →Eugène Ionesco
1909–1994 · Slatina, Romania
Ionesco was a Romanian-born playwright who wrote in French. His early plays turn ordinary conversation into nonsense: in The Bald Soprano, inspired by the stilted dialogues of an English-language course, two middle-class couples make small talk until it collapses. In Rhinoceros the inhabitants of a small town turn into rhinoceroses one by one.
The Bald Soprano, first performed in 1950, helped start the movement Martin Esslin later called the Theatre of the Absurd. Ionesco was elected to the Académie française in 1970. Grove Press publishes Rhinoceros and Other Plays in English.
Read Ionesco if you like absurd theatre that is also sharp political satire.
Start with Rhinoceros (1959). A rhinoceros appears in a small town and the townspeople gradually turn into rhinoceroses themselves, leaving one man holding out. Or The Bald Soprano (1950). The Smiths host the Martins for an evening in an English middle-class home, and their conversation collapses into nonsense.
Flann O’Brien
1911–1966 · Strabane, County Tyrone, Ireland
Flann O’Brien was the pen name of Brian O’Nolan, who also wrote newspaper columns as Myles na gCopaleen. His novels play games with logic and form: At Swim-Two-Birds features characters who rebel against their author, while The Third Policeman follows a murderer into a police barracks where the officers talk in non sequiturs and are obsessed with bicycles.
The Third Policeman was written in 1939–40 but rejected, and only published in 1967, after his death. Some critics read it as literary nonsense. He wrote mainly in English, and his Irish-language novel An Béal Bocht is available as The Poor Mouth.
Read O’Brien if you want absurdism that is playful, Irish and full of wordplay.
Start with The Third Policeman (1967). After taking part in a robbery and murder, the narrator goes looking for a missing cash box and ends up in a strange police barracks run by men obsessed with bicycles. Or At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). A Dublin student writes a novel about a novelist, Dermot Trellis, whose characters plot against him, alongside comic retellings of Irish legend.
Albert Camus
1913–1960 · Mondovi, French Algeria
Camus gave the absurd its best-known definition: the clash between the human need for meaning and a universe that gives no answer. He set out the idea in the essay The Myth of Sisyphus and dramatised it in The Stranger, about a man who kills someone on a beach in Algiers and is condemned as much for his indifference as for the crime.
Camus argued that people should live with the absurd rather than escape it through suicide or nihilism. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 and died in a car crash in 1960. The Stranger is also published in English as The Outsider.
Read Camus if you want the philosophy of the absurd as well as the fiction.
Start with The Stranger (1942). Meursault, a clerk in Algiers, attends his mother’s funeral, kills a man on a beach and faces trial. Or The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). An essay on the absurd that asks whether life is worth living without ultimate meaning.
All Albert Camus books →Joseph Heller
1923–1999 · Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York
Heller wrote satire and black comedy about war, business and middle-class American life. Catch-22 follows a US bomber squadron in Italy during the Second World War, where the rules are designed so that nobody can ever be sent home. Its title has become a common phrase for an absurd, contradictory choice.
Heller drew on his own wartime service: he flew 60 combat missions as a B-25 bombardier on the Italian front. Later novels such as Something Happened (1974) turn the same absurd logic on office life.
Read Heller if you want absurdism as war satire with a lot of jokes.
Start with Catch-22 (1961). Bombardier Yossarian tries to escape combat duty but is trapped by a rule that makes escape impossible. Or Something Happened (1974). A corporate employee narrates his anxieties about work, family and status in long, circling monologues.
All Joseph Heller books →Kōbō Abe
1924–1993 · Tokyo, Japan
Abe wrote surreal, often nightmarish novels about individuals in contemporary society, from a schoolteacher trapped in a sand pit to the anonymous figures of his later books. Critics often compare him to Kafka for his modernist sensibility and the way his characters are caught in situations they cannot leave.
He won the Akutagawa Prize in 1951. The Woman in the Dunes won the Yomiuri Prize and was filmed by Hiroshi Teshigahara in 1964. His main novels are available in English in translations by E. Dale Saunders.
Read Abe if you like Kafka and want a Japanese post-war version.
Start with The Woman in the Dunes (1962). A Tokyo schoolteacher collecting insects by the sea is trapped by villagers in a house at the bottom of a sand pit. Or The Face of Another (1964). A later novel, also translated into English by E. Dale Saunders.
All Kōbō Abe books →Tom Stoppard
1937–2025 · Zlín, Czechoslovakia
Stoppard, born Tomáš Sträussler, became one of Britain’s best-known playwrights. His breakthrough, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, is an absurdist, existential tragicomedy that follows two minor characters from Hamlet as they wander around the edges of a play they do not understand, tossing coins and arguing.
The play echoes Beckett in its double act and wordplay, and Stoppard acknowledged the influence of Polish and Czech absurdists. It was first staged at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1966 and at the National Theatre in 1967. He died in 2025.
Read Stoppard if you like Waiting for Godot and know your Shakespeare.
Start with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966). Two minor courtiers from Hamlet try to work out what is happening to them while the main play goes on around them.
László Krasznahorkai
Born 1954 · Gyula, Hungary
Krasznahorkai writes long, winding sentences about decaying villages and towns where people wait for salvation, swindlers and catastrophes. His style has been described as absurdist and grotesquely excessive, and he is often placed in the Central European tradition of Kafka and Thomas Bernhard. Susan Sontag called him the contemporary Hungarian master of apocalypse.
He won the Man Booker International Prize in 2015 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2025. Most of his novels are available in English, many translated by George Szirtes or Ottilie Mulzet.
Read Krasznahorkai if you are ready for dense, dark absurdism from the 2025 Nobel laureate.
Start with Satantango (1985). When a collective farm collapses, the villagers hear that Irimiás, a manipulative former colleague presumed dead, is coming back, and he talks them out of their savings. English translation by George Szirtes, 2012. Or The Melancholy of Resistance (1989). A mysterious circus displaying a stuffed whale arrives in a restless town and deepens its apocalyptic mood.
Etgar Keret
Born 1967 · Ramat Gan, Israel
Keret writes very short stories in Hebrew in which everyday life tips into the impossible; in the novella Kneller’s Happy Campers, a young man who has taken his own life searches for love in the afterlife. Reviewers have described his work as comic and absurd, with touches of Kafkaesque absurdity and magical realism.
His stories are short, colloquial and easy to read in a single sitting. Fly Already won the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction in 2019. His collections are available in English from several translators, including Nathan Englander and Sondra Silverston.
Read Keret if you want absurd fiction in very short, contemporary stories.
Start with Suddenly, a Knock on the Door (2012). A collection of flash fiction and short stories in which ordinary scenes turn strange; English translation by Miriam Shlesinger, Sondra Silverston and Nathan Englander. Or Fly Already (2019). A later English collection of comic, absurd and sometimes dystopian stories.
Which absurdist author should you read first?
The best starting point depends on what you want from a book.
- For a first taste of the absurd — Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (1915)
- For the philosophy behind it — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)
- For the stage — Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1953)
- For laughing out loud — Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)
- For something very short — Etgar Keret, Suddenly, a Knock on the Door (2012)
- For a long, immersive novel — László Krasznahorkai, Satantango (1985)
Where to go next
Frequently asked questions
What is absurdist fiction?
Absurdist fiction shows characters in situations that have no rational explanation, often treated with deadpan calm. It draws on the idea, set out by Albert Camus, that humans look for meaning in a world that offers none.
Who is the most famous absurdist writer?
Franz Kafka, Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett are the names most often linked with the absurd. Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is the central play of what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd.
Where should I start with absurdist literature?
Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Camus’s The Stranger are both short and widely available in English. For theatre, start with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot or Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.
Is Camus an existentialist or an absurdist?
Camus is usually associated with existentialism, but his own central idea was the absurd: the clash between our need for meaning and a silent universe. He argued for living with that condition rather than escaping it.
What is the Theatre of the Absurd?
It is the name critic Martin Esslin gave to plays by Beckett, Ionesco and others written mainly in the 1950s. These plays use repetition, nonsense dialogue and circular plots to show a world without clear meaning.
Are there contemporary absurdist writers?
Yes. László Krasznahorkai, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2025, writes in a style described as absurdist, and Etgar Keret’s very short stories are often called comic and absurd.
Start with the author whose questions interest you most. The book you remember longest may not be the one with the clearest answers, but the one that changes how you see something familiar.
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