The story opens with the narrator wandering the streets of St. Peters burg. He is contemplating the ridiculousness of his own life, and his recent realisation that nothing matters to him any more. It is this revelation that leads him to the idea of suicide. He reveals that, some months before, he had bought a revolver with the intent of shooting himself in the head.Despite a dismal night, the narrator looks up to the sky and views a solitary star. Shortly after seeing the star, a little girl comes running towards him. The narrator surmises that something is wrong with the girl's mother. He shakes the girl away and continues on to his apartment.Once in his apartment, he sinks into a chair and places the gun on a table next to him. He hesitates to shoot himself because of a nagging feeling of guilt that has plagued him ever since he shunned the girl. The narrator grapples with internal questions for a few hours before falling asleep in the chair.He descends into a vivid dream. In the dream, he shoots himself in the heart. He dies but is still aware of his surroundings. He gathers that there is a funeral and that it is he who is being buried. After an indeterminate amount of time in his cold grave, water begins to drip down onto his eyelids.

Dostoyevsky was never shy to play with the issues of human mind in his work. A funny man's dream is one of his shorter pieces that, nevertheless, lacks none of the profundity or the mind-bending power of his larger works.

Mad – Foolish – Ridiculous – I've been called many things. On an uneventful Wednesday in a drab Borough of East London, an ordinary man has a startling revelation: life is an unhappy accident in a meaningless universe. He gets himself a gun. But before he can use it, he dreams of an innocent, alternative earth, where people live in harmony with nature and each other. Elated, he sets out to tell the world about his dream and share his new vision of a happy planet. Dostoevsky's tragic-comic adventure The Dream of a Ridiculous Man is transported to 21st-century London in a one-person tale of wonder with an urgent warning for our world, adapted by Laurence Boswell. A funny and serious story of hope, that with love and trust we can build a better world. Maybe. This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at London's Marylebone Theatre in March 2024.

Had she finally met the man she longed for...or was she dreaming? Marlie Keen was trying to lead a quiet, ordinary life. She thought the knowing -- the clairvoyance that allowed her to witness crimes as they happened -- had been destroyed in the nightmare of her past. Then one night it returned with a vengeance, and she desperately needed to find someone to make it stop. Detective Dane Hollister of the Orlando police department had never met anyone like Marlie. He had doubts about her clairvoyance, but there was no doubt how much he desired her. Her soft, sweet scent set his blood afire, and he wanted to wrap her in his arms and chase the sadness from her eyes. To Marlie, Dane was all heat and hard muscle, and he made her body come alive as it never had before. But not even she could foresee where their passion would lead: a hungry quest for the elusive, dreamy ecstasies of love...and a dangerous journey into the twisted mind of a madman who would threaten their happiness and their lives....

The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.

A visceral, stark, and deadpan collection of stories that brilliantly fuse humor with horror Horses Dream of Money is a daring collection of tales, darkly humorous, that eerily channels the surreal and sinister mood of the times. Preoccupied with the fault lines between life and death, and veering often into horror, Angela Buck brings a raw energy and witty sobriety to these accounts of human life and connection with the intimacy of fireside-storytelling, gimlet-eyed revelry in bloodletting, and a masterful sleight of hand between the fantastical and the quotidian. “The Solicitor” reinvents the coming-of-age story as a romance-for-hire between a girl and her “solicitor,” a man whose services are demanded by her mother and enforced by a cruel master. “Coffin-Testament” is a fabulous futuristic account of the extinction of human life on earth written 1,667 years later by a group of lady robots channeling Sir Thomas Browne to muse on their own mortality. “The Bears at Bedtime” documents a compound of cuddly kind worker-bears and their ruthless doings. “Bisquit” imagines today’s precariat as a lovable horse who is traded from one master to another until a horse race brings his maddeningly repetitive adventures to a violent conclusion.