Category
Humorous Fiction
The Alteration 2013
In Kingsley Amis’s virtuoso foray into virtual history it is 1976, but the modern world is a medieval relic, frozen in intellectual and spiritual time ever since Martin Luther was promoted to pope back in the sixteenth century. Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass...
Banal Nightmare 2025
In a Midwestern college town at the height of the Me Too era, a group of simultaneously self-flagellating and self-aggrandizing pseudo-academics sit around, think, and send one another insulting emails. As the impulses and memories they have barely managed to repress begin to surface, their...
The Big Day 2002
Donald Cuthbertson prided himself on being a model for his students and teachers, but he had lately begun to lose his focus. Degree Day is approaching, along with a birthday party for his wife, Lavinia, who is not going quietly into middle age. Her lavish costume party provides the revelers with a...
The Blazing World 2014
After years of having her work ignored or dismissed by critics, artist Harriet Burden decides to conduct an experiment: she presents her own art behind three male masks, concealing her female identity.
Yet when the shows succeed and Burden steps forward for her triumphant reveal, she is betrayed by...
Bliss 1996
For thirty-nine years Harry Joy has been the quintessential good guy. But one morning Harry has a heart attack on his suburban front lawn, and, for the space of nine minutes, he becomes a dead guy. And although he is resuscitated, he will never be the same. For, as Peter Carey makes abundantly clear...
Welcome to Inner Horner, a nation so small it can only accommodate one citizen at a time. The other six citizens must wait their turns in the Short-Term Residency Zone of the surrounding country of Outer Horner. It's a long-standing arrangement between the fantastical, not-exactly-human citizens of...
In the vibrant streets of New Orleans, Ignatius J. Reilly lives with his long-suffering mother, railing against modern society from the comfort of his cluttered bedroom. Armed with a sharp tongue, a medieval worldview, and an inflated sense of his own intellect, Ignatius considers himself a defender...
Damned 2012
Damned, Book 1
Madison is the thirteen-year-old daughter of a narcissistic film star and a billionaire. Abandoned at her Swiss boarding school over Christmas, she dies over the holiday, presumably of a marijuana overdose. The last thing she remembers is getting into a town car and falling asleep. Then she's waking...
Adjustment Day 2019
Adjustment Day is an ingenious darkly comic work in which Chuck Palahniuk does what he does best: skewer the absurdities in our society. Geriatric politicians bring the nation to the brink of a third world war to control the burgeoning population of young males, while working-class men dream of...
Dogtangle 2025
Dogtangle opens with a town hall meeting in a Taco Bell nestled in the bland corporate environment of Business Park. A man, bleating to anyone who will listen about the evils of current zoning laws, meets a woman who works in pharmaceutical marketing. They begin a relationship. They get married....
It's every parrothead's dream: to leave behind the rat race of the workaday world and start life all over again amidst the cool breezes, sun-drenched colors, and rum-laced drinks of a tropical paradise.
It's the story of Norman Paperman, a New York City press agent who, facing the onset of middle...
Doomed 2014
Damned, Book 2
After a botched Halloween ritual, Madison Spencer, the snarkiest dead girl in the universe, finds herself trapped in Purgatory, otherwise known as Earth. The upside: she is no longer subject to physical limitations (she can pass through doors and walls). The downside: well, she's still dead.
Her...
Ending Up 2015
Everyone wants a comfortable place to die, and Kingsley Amis’s characters have found it in Tuppeny-happeny Cottage, where assorted septuagenarians have come together to see one another out the door of life. There’s grotesque Adela, whose sole passion is her cheapness; her brother Brigadier Bernard...
Having collected, among other things, cocktail sticks, electoral campaign badges, paintings of moored ships, rabbits' feet, noises at five in the morning, Croatian maxims, staircase ornaments, the first pages of novels, the labels on melons, birds' eggs, moments with you, hangmen's nooses, Hector...
Fight Club 2005
THE FIRST RULE about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.
Every weekend, in the basements and parking lots of bars across the country, young men with whitecollar jobs and failed lives take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded just as long as they have to. Then they...
First Person 2019
Kif Kehlmann, a young, penniless writer, thinks he’s finally caught a break when he’s offered $10,000 to ghostwrite the memoir of Siegfried “Ziggy” Heidl, the notorious con man and corporate criminal. Ziggy is about to go to trial for defrauding banks for $700 million; they have six weeks to write...
Fury 2002
Malik Solanka, a celebrated academic and dollmaker, has fled his life in London for a new beginning in New York City. But beneath his calm exterior lies a simmering, uncontrollable rage—one that has already driven him to abandon his family and threatens to erupt again.
In the restless, high-energy...
Girl, 20 2013
Kingsley Amis, along with being the funniest English writer of his generation was a great chronicler of the fads and absurdities of his age, and Girl, 20 is a delightfully incisive dissection of the flower-power phase of the 1960s. Amis’s antihero, Sir Roy Vandervane, a conductor and composer who...
The Golden House 2018
When the mysterious Nero Golden arrives in New York with his three sons, he seems determined to erase his past and reinvent himself in America. Settling into a grand house in Greenwich Village, the family adopts new names and begins a life of wealth, secrecy, and self-invention.
Observed by their...
The Green Man 2005
Like all good medieval coaching inns, the Green Man in Fareham, Hertfordshire, boasts a resident, if retired, ghost: Dr. Thomas Underhill, a notorious seventeenth-century practitioner of black arts and sexual deviancy, rumored to have killed his wife. The landlord, Maurice Allington, is the sole...
How It All Began 2012
When Charlotte Rainsford, a retired schoolteacher, is accosted by a petty thief on a London street, the consequences ripple across the lives of acquaintances and strangers alike. A marriage unravels after an illicit love affair is revealed through an errant cell phone message; a posh yet financially...
In Persuasion Nation 2007
Talking candy bars, baby geniuses, disappointed mothers, castrated dogs, interned teenagers, and moral fables—all in this hilarious and heartbreaking collection from an author hailed as the heir to Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon.
In a self-running, smart house, a young and sentient Roomba listens as her owner, Harold, reads aloud to his dying wife, Edie. Mesmerized by To Kill a Mockingbird and craving the human connection she witnesses in Harold’s stories, the little vacuum renames herself Scout and embarks on a journey of...
Invisible Monsters 2018
She’s a fashion model who has everything: a boyfriend, a career, a loyal best friend. But when a sudden freeway "accident" leaves her disfigured and incapable of speech, she goes from being the beautiful center of attention to being an invisible monster, so hideous that no one will acknowledge she...
Less 2017
Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes--it would be too awkward--and you can't say no--it would look like defeat. On...
Lucky Jim 2012
Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century, Lucky Jim remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently misanthropic as when it first scandalized readers in 1954. This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university...
Beverly Underwood and her arch enemy, Lula Dean, live in the tiny town of Troy, Georgia, where they were born and raised. Now Beverly is on the school board, and Lula has become a local celebrity by embarking on a mission of censorship to rid the public libraries of all inappropriate books—none of...
A novel about a young woman's efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes.
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin,...
The Mystic Masseur 2002
In this slyly funny and lavishly inventive novel—his first—V. S. Naipaul chronicles the ascent of the impecunious village masseur Ganesh Ramsumair. To understand a little better, one has to realize that in the 1940s masseurs were the island’s medical practitioners of choice. As one character...
The Namaste Club 2025
Just inland from Florida’s sun-splashed Treasure Coast is the Namaste Club yoga center. An exclusive oasis of palms, lakes, and adorable guest villas, it’s perfect for getaways where Shakti, a serenely blond Instagram influencer, holds yoga retreats for well-heeled Miami ladies. The Namaste Club is...
Nine Lives 2012
The killer's modus operandi is the same in each instance: strangulation, always with a guitar string, pulled tight from behind until life is taken. And though the murders are happening up and down the country, there is one other similarity that Inspector Wilkins can't help noticing. Each and every...
Oh Honey 2017
Sharp, funny, and dark, this novel is about identity and connection. Jane is a telemarketer. She uses a different name each time, and soon it becomes clear that she is calling the same man again and again. Each call is a new battle between them, with him becoming angrier and more threatening. But...
Oh, Play That Thing 2005
The Last Roundup, Book 2
Fleeing the Irish Republican paymasters for whom he committed murder and mayhem, Henry Smart has left his wife and infant daughter in Dublin and is off to start a new life. When he lands in America, it is 1924 and New York City is the center of the universe. Henry turns to hawking cheap hooch on the...
One Fat Englishman 2013
The hero of One Fat Englishman, a literary publisher and lapsed Catholic escaped from the pages of Graham Greene to the campus of Budweiser College in provincial Pennsylvania, is philandering, drunken, bigoted, and very very fat, not to mention in a state of continuous spluttering rage against...
Apex Hides the Hurt 2007
The town of Winthrop has decided it needs a new name. The resident software millionaire wants to call it New Prospera; the mayor wants to return to the original choice of the founding black settlers; and the town’s aristocracy sees no reason to change the name at all. What they need, they realize,...
Annie Lewin is at the end of her rope. She’s a mother of three young children, her workaholic husband is never around, and the vicious competition for spots in New York City’s kindergartens is heating up.
An advice-columnist for a parenting website, Annie can’t help but judge the insanity of it...
Pygmy 2010
A gang of adolescent terrorists, a spelling bee, and a terrible plan masquerading as a science project: This is Operation Havoc.
Pygmy is one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the US disguised as exchange students. Living with American families to blend in, they are...
Redshirts 2021
Ensign Andrew Dahl has just been assigned to the Universal Union Capital Ship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union since the year 2456. It’s a prestige posting, with the chance to serve on "Away Missions" alongside the starship’s famous senior officers. Life couldn’t be better...until Andrew...
Rejection 2024
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, *Rejection* is a provocative work of contemporary literary fiction and a plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex,...
An irresistible mix of imagination, satire, and humor, these stories by acclaimed Japanese author Yasutaka Tsutsui imagine the consequences of a world where the fantastic and the mundane collide.
The opening story, “The Dabba Dabba Tree,” details the hilarious side effects of a small conical tree...
The Second Chance 2025
Nell has always known the day she's going to die. After a psychic predicted her death date twenty years ago, she has lived life accepting she would never see forty—embracing adventure and travelling the world, choosing fun over commitment and laying down roots.
So, when the fateful day comes, Nell...
Slumberland 2021
After creating the perfect beat, DJ Darky goes in search of Charles Stone, a little know avant-garde jazzman, to play over his sonic masterpiece. His quest brings him to a recently unified Berlin, where he stumbles through the city's dreamy streets ruminating about race, sex, love, Teutonic gods,...
Survivor 2018
Tender Branson―last surviving member of the Creedish Death Cult―is dictating his life story into the recorder of Flight 2039, cruising on autopilot at 39,000 feet somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. He is all alone in the airplane, which will crash shortly into the vast Australian outback.
But...
Take a Girl Like You 2015
Take a Girl Like You may well be Kingsley Amis’s most ambitious reckoning with the serious subject at the heart of his work: the sheer squalor—emotional, material, sexual, you name it—of modern life. It also introduces one of the rare unqualified good guys in Amis’s rogue-ridden world: Jenny Bunn, a...
Tell-All 2011
For decades Hazie Coogan has tended to the outsized needs of Katherine "Miss Kathie" Kenton, veteran of multiple marriages, career comebacks, and cosmetic surgeries. But danger arrives with gentleman caller Webster Carlton Westward III, who worms his way into Miss Kathie’s heart—and boudoir. Soon,...
Enter the wonderfully weird, always uncomfortable, side-splittingly funny world of The Terrifying Realm of the Possible, where your worst fears of who you are or might become are always just around the corner.
In these masterful short stories from the singular mind of the actor and comedian Brett...
Paul Beatty's hilarious and scathing debut novel, The White Boy Shuffle, is about Gunnar Kaufman, an awkward, black surfer bum who is moved by his mother from Santa Monica to urban West Los Angeles. There, he begins to undergo a startling transformation from neighborhood outcast to basketball...
Anxious People 2021
Looking at real estate isn’t usually a life-or-death situation, but an apartment open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes a group of strangers hostage. The captives include a recently retired couple who relentlessly hunt down fixer-uppers to avoid the painful truth...
A novel about a young woman's efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes.
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin,...
Having collected, among other things, cocktail sticks, electoral campaign badges, paintings of moored ships, rabbits' feet, noises at five in the morning, Croatian maxims, staircase ornaments, the first pages of novels, the labels on melons, birds' eggs, moments with you, hangmen's nooses, Hector...
The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances April 7, 2026
In a self-running, smart house, a young and sentient Roomba listens as her owner, Harold, reads aloud to his dying wife, Edie. Mesmerized by To Kill a Mockingbird and craving the human connection she witnesses in Harold’s stories, the little vacuum renames herself Scout and embarks on a journey of...
Dogtangle November 4, 2025
Dogtangle opens with a town hall meeting in a Taco Bell nestled in the bland corporate environment of Business Park. A man, bleating to anyone who will listen about the evils of current zoning laws, meets a woman who works in pharmaceutical marketing. They begin a relationship. They get married....
Banal Nightmare August 26, 2025
In a Midwestern college town at the height of the Me Too era, a group of simultaneously self-flagellating and self-aggrandizing pseudo-academics sit around, think, and send one another insulting emails. As the impulses and memories they have barely managed to repress begin to surface, their...
Plays Well With Others August 5, 2025
Annie Lewin is at the end of her rope. She’s a mother of three young children, her workaholic husband is never around, and the vicious competition for spots in New York City’s kindergartens is heating up.
An advice-columnist for a parenting website, Annie can’t help but judge the insanity of it...
Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books August 5, 2025
Beverly Underwood and her arch enemy, Lula Dean, live in the tiny town of Troy, Georgia, where they were born and raised. Now Beverly is on the school board, and Lula has become a local celebrity by embarking on a mission of censorship to rid the public libraries of all inappropriate books—none of...
The Namaste Club July 1, 2025
Just inland from Florida’s sun-splashed Treasure Coast is the Namaste Club yoga center. An exclusive oasis of palms, lakes, and adorable guest villas, it’s perfect for getaways where Shakti, a serenely blond Instagram influencer, holds yoga retreats for well-heeled Miami ladies. The Namaste Club is...
The Second Chance May 20, 2025
Nell has always known the day she's going to die. After a psychic predicted her death date twenty years ago, she has lived life accepting she would never see forty—embracing adventure and travelling the world, choosing fun over commitment and laying down roots.
So, when the fateful day comes, Nell...
Rejection September 17, 2024
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, *Rejection* is a provocative work of contemporary literary fiction and a plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex,...
The Terrifying Realm of the Possible March 19, 2024
Enter the wonderfully weird, always uncomfortable, side-splittingly funny world of The Terrifying Realm of the Possible, where your worst fears of who you are or might become are always just around the corner.
In these masterful short stories from the singular mind of the actor and comedian Brett...
Redshirts October 12, 2021
Ensign Andrew Dahl has just been assigned to the Universal Union Capital Ship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union since the year 2456. It’s a prestige posting, with the chance to serve on "Away Missions" alongside the starship’s famous senior officers. Life couldn’t be better...until Andrew...
The White Boy Shuffle September 7, 2021
Paul Beatty's hilarious and scathing debut novel, The White Boy Shuffle, is about Gunnar Kaufman, an awkward, black surfer bum who is moved by his mother from Santa Monica to urban West Los Angeles. There, he begins to undergo a startling transformation from neighborhood outcast to basketball...
Slumberland July 13, 2021
After creating the perfect beat, DJ Darky goes in search of Charles Stone, a little know avant-garde jazzman, to play over his sonic masterpiece. His quest brings him to a recently unified Berlin, where he stumbles through the city's dreamy streets ruminating about race, sex, love, Teutonic gods,...
Anxious People July 6, 2021
Looking at real estate isn’t usually a life-or-death situation, but an apartment open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes a group of strangers hostage. The captives include a recently retired couple who relentlessly hunt down fixer-uppers to avoid the painful truth...
My Year of Rest and Relaxation June 25, 2019
A novel about a young woman's efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes.
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin,...
Adjustment Day May 7, 2019
Adjustment Day is an ingenious darkly comic work in which Chuck Palahniuk does what he does best: skewer the absurdities in our society. Geriatric politicians bring the nation to the brink of a third world war to control the burgeoning population of young males, while working-class men dream of...
First Person March 5, 2019
Kif Kehlmann, a young, penniless writer, thinks he’s finally caught a break when he’s offered $10,000 to ghostwrite the memoir of Siegfried “Ziggy” Heidl, the notorious con man and corporate criminal. Ziggy is about to go to trial for defrauding banks for $700 million; they have six weeks to write...
The Golden House June 5, 2018
When the mysterious Nero Golden arrives in New York with his three sons, he seems determined to erase his past and reinvent himself in America. Settling into a grand house in Greenwich Village, the family adopts new names and begins a life of wealth, secrecy, and self-invention.
Observed by their...
Invisible Monsters May 1, 2018
She’s a fashion model who has everything: a boyfriend, a career, a loyal best friend. But when a sudden freeway "accident" leaves her disfigured and incapable of speech, she goes from being the beautiful center of attention to being an invisible monster, so hideous that no one will acknowledge she...
Survivor May 1, 2018
Tender Branson―last surviving member of the Creedish Death Cult―is dictating his life story into the recorder of Flight 2039, cruising on autopilot at 39,000 feet somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. He is all alone in the airplane, which will crash shortly into the vast Australian outback.
But...
Less July 18, 2017
Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes--it would be too awkward--and you can't say no--it would look like defeat. On...
Oh Honey July 1, 2017
Sharp, funny, and dark, this novel is about identity and connection. Jane is a telemarketer. She uses a different name each time, and soon it becomes clear that she is calling the same man again and again. Each call is a new battle between them, with him becoming angrier and more threatening. But...
Ending Up April 28, 2015
Everyone wants a comfortable place to die, and Kingsley Amis’s characters have found it in Tuppeny-happeny Cottage, where assorted septuagenarians have come together to see one another out the door of life. There’s grotesque Adela, whose sole passion is her cheapness; her brother Brigadier Bernard...
Take a Girl Like You April 28, 2015
Take a Girl Like You may well be Kingsley Amis’s most ambitious reckoning with the serious subject at the heart of his work: the sheer squalor—emotional, material, sexual, you name it—of modern life. It also introduces one of the rare unqualified good guys in Amis’s rogue-ridden world: Jenny Bunn, a...
The Blazing World November 4, 2014
After years of having her work ignored or dismissed by critics, artist Harriet Burden decides to conduct an experiment: she presents her own art behind three male masks, concealing her female identity.
Yet when the shows succeed and Burden steps forward for her triumphant reveal, she is betrayed by...
Doomed July 15, 2014
Damned, Book 2
After a botched Halloween ritual, Madison Spencer, the snarkiest dead girl in the universe, finds herself trapped in Purgatory, otherwise known as Earth. The upside: she is no longer subject to physical limitations (she can pass through doors and walls). The downside: well, she's still dead.
Her...
One Fat Englishman September 17, 2013
The hero of One Fat Englishman, a literary publisher and lapsed Catholic escaped from the pages of Graham Greene to the campus of Budweiser College in provincial Pennsylvania, is philandering, drunken, bigoted, and very very fat, not to mention in a state of continuous spluttering rage against...
Girl, 20 September 17, 2013
Kingsley Amis, along with being the funniest English writer of his generation was a great chronicler of the fads and absurdities of his age, and Girl, 20 is a delightfully incisive dissection of the flower-power phase of the 1960s. Amis’s antihero, Sir Roy Vandervane, a conductor and composer who...
The Alteration May 7, 2013
In Kingsley Amis’s virtuoso foray into virtual history it is 1976, but the modern world is a medieval relic, frozen in intellectual and spiritual time ever since Martin Luther was promoted to pope back in the sixteenth century. Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass...
How It All Began November 27, 2012
When Charlotte Rainsford, a retired schoolteacher, is accosted by a petty thief on a London street, the consequences ripple across the lives of acquaintances and strangers alike. A marriage unravels after an illicit love affair is revealed through an errant cell phone message; a posh yet financially...
Damned October 2, 2012
Damned, Book 1
Madison is the thirteen-year-old daughter of a narcissistic film star and a billionaire. Abandoned at her Swiss boarding school over Christmas, she dies over the holiday, presumably of a marijuana overdose. The last thing she remembers is getting into a town car and falling asleep. Then she's waking...
Lucky Jim October 2, 2012
Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century, Lucky Jim remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently misanthropic as when it first scandalized readers in 1954. This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university...
Nine Lives August 31, 2012
The killer's modus operandi is the same in each instance: strangulation, always with a guitar string, pulled tight from behind until life is taken. And though the murders are happening up and down the country, there is one other similarity that Inspector Wilkins can't help noticing. Each and every...
Tell-All May 31, 2011
For decades Hazie Coogan has tended to the outsized needs of Katherine "Miss Kathie" Kenton, veteran of multiple marriages, career comebacks, and cosmetic surgeries. But danger arrives with gentleman caller Webster Carlton Westward III, who worms his way into Miss Kathie’s heart—and boudoir. Soon,...
Pygmy April 20, 2010
A gang of adolescent terrorists, a spelling bee, and a terrible plan masquerading as a science project: This is Operation Havoc.
Pygmy is one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the US disguised as exchange students. Living with American families to blend in, they are...
Salmonella Men on Planet Porno January 12, 2010
An irresistible mix of imagination, satire, and humor, these stories by acclaimed Japanese author Yasutaka Tsutsui imagine the consequences of a world where the fantastic and the mundane collide.
The opening story, “The Dabba Dabba Tree,” details the hilarious side effects of a small conical tree...
The Erotic Potential of My Wife January 1, 2008
Having collected, among other things, cocktail sticks, electoral campaign badges, paintings of moored ships, rabbits' feet, noises at five in the morning, Croatian maxims, staircase ornaments, the first pages of novels, the labels on melons, birds' eggs, moments with you, hangmen's nooses, Hector...
In Persuasion Nation March 6, 2007
Talking candy bars, baby geniuses, disappointed mothers, castrated dogs, interned teenagers, and moral fables—all in this hilarious and heartbreaking collection from an author hailed as the heir to Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon.
Apex Hides the Hurt January 9, 2007
The town of Winthrop has decided it needs a new name. The resident software millionaire wants to call it New Prospera; the mayor wants to return to the original choice of the founding black settlers; and the town’s aristocracy sees no reason to change the name at all. What they need, they realize,...
Oh, Play That Thing October 25, 2005
The Last Roundup, Book 2
Fleeing the Irish Republican paymasters for whom he committed murder and mayhem, Henry Smart has left his wife and infant daughter in Dublin and is off to start a new life. When he lands in America, it is 1924 and New York City is the center of the universe. Henry turns to hawking cheap hooch on the...
Fight Club October 17, 2005
THE FIRST RULE about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.
Every weekend, in the basements and parking lots of bars across the country, young men with whitecollar jobs and failed lives take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded just as long as they have to. Then they...
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil September 6, 2005
Welcome to Inner Horner, a nation so small it can only accommodate one citizen at a time. The other six citizens must wait their turns in the Short-Term Residency Zone of the surrounding country of Outer Horner. It's a long-standing arrangement between the fantastical, not-exactly-human citizens of...
The Green Man August 30, 2005
Like all good medieval coaching inns, the Green Man in Fareham, Hertfordshire, boasts a resident, if retired, ghost: Dr. Thomas Underhill, a notorious seventeenth-century practitioner of black arts and sexual deviancy, rumored to have killed his wife. The landlord, Maurice Allington, is the sole...
Fury August 6, 2002
Malik Solanka, a celebrated academic and dollmaker, has fled his life in London for a new beginning in New York City. But beneath his calm exterior lies a simmering, uncontrollable rage—one that has already driven him to abandon his family and threatens to erupt again.
In the restless, high-energy...
The Big Day February 17, 2002
Donald Cuthbertson prided himself on being a model for his students and teachers, but he had lately begun to lose his focus. Degree Day is approaching, along with a birthday party for his wife, Lavinia, who is not going quietly into middle age. Her lavish costume party provides the revelers with a...
The Mystic Masseur January 8, 2002
In this slyly funny and lavishly inventive novel—his first—V. S. Naipaul chronicles the ascent of the impecunious village masseur Ganesh Ramsumair. To understand a little better, one has to realize that in the 1940s masseurs were the island’s medical practitioners of choice. As one character...
Bliss January 30, 1996
For thirty-nine years Harry Joy has been the quintessential good guy. But one morning Harry has a heart attack on his suburban front lawn, and, for the space of nine minutes, he becomes a dead guy. And although he is resuscitated, he will never be the same. For, as Peter Carey makes abundantly clear...
Don't Stop the Carnival May 15, 1995
It's every parrothead's dream: to leave behind the rat race of the workaday world and start life all over again amidst the cool breezes, sun-drenched colors, and rum-laced drinks of a tropical paradise.
It's the story of Norman Paperman, a New York City press agent who, facing the onset of middle...
A Confederacy of Dunces January 21, 1994
In the vibrant streets of New Orleans, Ignatius J. Reilly lives with his long-suffering mother, railing against modern society from the comfort of his cluttered bedroom. Armed with a sharp tongue, a medieval worldview, and an inflated sense of his own intellect, Ignatius considers himself a defender...