Literary Humor

You’ve never seen romance do this before. So brutally honest and breathtakingly perverse you’ll want to throw this book at the wall, but you’ll also want to know if it can possibly get any more disturbing (it can and it does). And as you start to wonder whether men and women were ever even meant to be together, a surprise ending brings the trilogy full circle and provides unexpected closure to an issue raised by a certain photographer's assistant in the first book. Eunuchs and Nymphomaniacs is about how we love today and how increasingly we try to avoid it altogether.

When Graham Cavanaugh divorced his first wife, it was to marry his girlfriend, Audra, a woman as irrepressible as she is spontaneous and fun. But, Graham learns, life with Audra can also be exhausting, constantly interrupted by chatty phone calls, picky-eater houseguests, and invitations to weddings of people he's never met. Audra firmly believes that through the sheer force of her personality, she can overcome the most socially challenging interactions.

Marnie MacGraw and Patrick Delaney have been in love for a few years now, enough to realize that they are imperfectly perfect together. Still, there are some things that maybe need a little attention. Marnie’s ebullient; he’s brooding. She thrives on change; he prefers stability. She sees marriage and parenthood in their future, but he can’t see beyond the shadow of an earlier tragedy. Then an eight-year-old surprise from Patrick’s past shows up on their doorstep, cartwheeling into their lives and spinning things in all directions.

Cinderella married the man of her dreams - the perfect ending she deserved after diligently following all the fairy-tale rules. Yet now, 13 and a half years later, things have gone badly wrong, and her life is far from perfect. One night, fed up and exhausted, she sneaks out of the palace to get help from the witch who, for a price, offers love potions to disgruntled housewives. But as the old hag flings the last ingredients into the cauldron, Cinderella doesn't ask for a love spell to win back her Prince Charming. Instead, she wants him dead.

Therapist Victoria Vick is contacted by a cryptic, unlikable man who insists his situation is unique and unfathomable. Vick becomes convinced that he suffers from a complex set of delusions: Y__, as she refers to him, claims to be a scientist who has stolen cloaking technology from an aborted government project in order to render himself nearly invisible. Unsure of his motives or honesty, Vick becomes obsessed with her patient....

Fifteen-year-old Jacob feels almost on the inside: almost smart, almost funny, almost good-looking, almost worthy of falling in love. His sister is too busy dating guys in Whitesnake jackets to notice, and his best friend is occupied with his own painful pubescent crisis. Jacob's mother has just started a curious (and rather un-Christian) holy war with the church across the street, while his father has secretly moved into the garage.

He can be any legally authorized fictional character or dead celebrity he wants for six to eight hours, simply by injecting a DNA-laced cocktail into his brainstem. It's called Big Egos and it's the ultimate role-playing fantasy from Engineering Genetics Organization and Systems (a.k.a. EGOS). And, as one of the quality controllers for EGOS, he's the ultimate ego-tripper, taking on more artificial identities than advisable - and having a hell of a time doing it. Problem is, he's starting to lose the ability to separate fact from fiction.

Shelly Means, a stay-at-home mom and disgraced former PTA president, is poised to get the one thing in life she really wants: a beach house in the Hamptons. Surely, once she has her beach house, Shelly will at last feel at peace, in control, and content. It might be a very small house, and it might be in the least-fancy part of the Hamptons, but Shelly is hell-bent on achieving this idea of paradise.

Objects for sale at the Nakano Thrift Shop appear as commonplace as the staff and customers that handle them. But like those same customers and staff, they hold many secrets. If examined carefully, they show the signs of innumerable extravagancies, of immeasurable pleasure and pain, and of the deep mysteries of the human heart.

Alors qu’un typhon menace la baie de Hong Kong, la brigade policière de Jackie Thran encercle la cave à vin la plus sécurisée du monde, installée dans d’anciens bunkers de l’armée britannique. Un trio de braqueuses, aux agissements excentriques, s’y est infiltré et retient en otage l’impressionnant stock de M. Coetzer, estimé à trois cent cinquante millions de dollars…Revisitant avec brio les codes du film de braquage, Céline Minard signe un roman drôle et explosif, où la subversion se mêle à l’ivresse.

The nine stories and one poem in this volume formed the basis for the astonishingly original film Short Cuts, directed by Robert Altman. Collected altogether in this volume, these stories form a searing and indelible portrait of American innocence and loss. With deadpan humor and enormous tenderness, this is the work of "one of the true contemporary masters" ( The New York Review of Books).

Jane falls in love with Duncan easily. He is charming, good-natured, and handsome, but unfortunately, he has also slept with nearly every woman in Boyne City, Michigan. Jane sees Duncan's old girlfriends everywhere—at restaurants, at the grocery store, even three towns away. While Jane may be able to come to terms with dating the world's most prolific seducer of women, she wishes she did not have to share him quite so widely.

When the university merged his Department of Linguistics with English, Professor Desmond Bates took early retirement, but he is not enjoying it. But his daily discontent is nothing compared to the affliction of hearing loss, which is a constant source of domestic friction and social embarrassment. In the popular imagination, he observes, deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic, but for the deaf person himself it is no joke.

Shandee finds a friendly arm at a granite quarry. Ned drops down a hole in a golf course. Luna meets a man made of light bulbs at a tanning parlor. So begins Nicholson Baker's fuse-blowing, sex-positive escapade, House of Holes. Baker returns to erotic territory with a gleefully over-the-top novel set in a pleasure resort, where normal rules don't apply. Brimful of good-nature, wit, and surreal sexual vocabulary, this is a modern-day Hieronymous Boschian bacchanal that is sure to surprise, amuse, and arouse.

Wise-cracking Kerry Salter has spent her adulthood avoiding two things: her hometown and prison. A tough, generous, reckless woman accused of having too much lip, Kerry uses anger to fight the avalanche of bullshit the world spews. But now her Pop is dying and she's an inch away from the lockup, so she heads south on a stolen Harley for one last visit. She quickly discovers that Bundjalung country has a funny way of latching on to people—not to mention her chaotic family and the threat of a proposal to develop a prison on Granny Ava’s Island, the family’s spiritual home.

Kody Rawlee Green is stuck in juvie. Tella “Teal Cartwheels” Carticelli is packing her bags for Rome—on the orders of her parents, who want her as far from Kody as possible. But teenage love is too strong a force for the obstacles of reality. And the highway beckons.

In late 2007, as the world’s economy crumbles, the remarkably unremarkable Milton Ontario - not to be confused with Milton, Ontario - leaves his parent’s basement in Saskatchewan and sets forth to find fame, fortune, and love in the electric sexuality of Montreal, to bask in endless Millennial adolescence, to escape the infinite flatness of Saskatchewan, and to find his messiah: Leonard Cohen.

Eighteen years old, pregnant, and working as a pizza delivery girl in suburban Los Angeles, our charmingly dysfunctional heroine is deeply lost and in complete denial. She's grieving the death of her father, avoiding her supportive mom and loving boyfriend, and flagrantly ignoring her future.

In this masterful debut, Martin Clark proves to be the heir apparent of great Southern raconteurs and the envy of more seasoned novelists as he takes us on a frantic tour of the modern South. Hung over, beaten by the unforgiving sun, bitter at his estranged wife, and dreading the day's docket of petty criminal cases, Judge Evers Wheeling is in need of something on the morning he's accosted by Ruth Esther English.

In these eight masterful stories, Lorrie Moore, in a perfect blend of craft and bewitched spirit, explores the passage of time and summons up its inevitable sorrows and hilarious pitfalls to reveal her own exquisite, singular wisdom...Gimlet-eyed social observation, the public and private absurdities of American life, dramatic irony, and enduring half-cracked love wend their way through each of these narratives in a heartrending mash-up of the tragic and the laugh-out-loud - the hallmark of Lorrie Moore - land.