Literary Humor

Times are tough for young Jack McGreary in the American dust bowl. Living with his father, Jack is only getting by thanks to a solid repertoire of cons and scams. Everything gets shaken up, though, when shysters Virgil Ray and Miss Rose roll into town. Recognizing them as first-class scam artists, Jack gleefully joins their criminal band. Soon a budding romance between Jack and Miss Rose begins to bloom, but is it on the up-and-up?

Thirty-two-year-old actor Stephen C. McQueen (no, not that Steve McQueen) is waiting for his big break. His only screen credits so far are playing dead bodies on cop and doctor shows. At the moment, he's paying the rent by understudying hot movie star Josh Harper, who's trying to gain dramatic credibility in a West End play. If only Josh would miss a performance, Stephen-with-a-P-H could prove his talent and redeem himself in the eyes of his disapproving ex-wife and their precocious seven-year-old daughter.

Amid the cactus wilds some two hundred miles from Hollywood lies a privileged oasis called Desert D'Or. It is a place for starlets and would-be starlets, directors, studio execs, and the well-groomed lowlifes who cater to them. And, as imagined by Norman Mailer in this blistering classic of 1950s Hollywood, Desert D'Or is a moral proving ground, where men and women discover what they really want - and how far they are willing to go to get it.

In the latest entertaining and hilarious Professor Dr. Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld novel, our hopelessly out-of-touch hero is forced to confront uppity librarians, the rector of the university, and a possible hostile takeover, all while trying to remain studiously above it all.

A foundling of mysterious parentage, Tom Jones is brought up by the benevolent and wealthy Squire Allworthy as his own son. Tom falls in love with the beautiful and unattainable Sophia Western, a neighbor’s daughter, whose marriage has already been arranged. When Tom’s sexual misadventures around the countryside get him banished, he sets out to make his fortune and find his true identity.

A tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition, Nazi Literature in the Americas presents itself as a biographical dictionary of writers who espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Sam Bagshott, son of the late Boko Bagshott, had been at Blandings Castle only a short while, but long enough to know that anyone enjoying its hospitality must get the occasional shock. Sam braced himself as the possibilities flitted through his mind. The house was on fire? Empress of Blandings had taken to the bottle again? Constable Evans had arrived with a search warrant?

Elizabeth Hay's runaway national best seller is a funny, sad-eyed, deliciously entertaining novel about a woman caught in a tug of war between real life and the films of the past. Inflamed by the movies she was deprived of as a child, Harriet Browning forms a Friday-night movie club with three companions-of-the-screen: a boy who loves Frank Sinatra, a girl with Bette Davis eyes, and an earthy sidekick named after Dinah Shore. Into this idiosyncratic world come two refugees from Hollywood.

Glue is the story of four boys growing up in the Edinburgh schemes, and about the loyalties, the experiences, and the secrets that hold them together into their 30s. Four boys becoming men: Juice Terry, the work-shy fanny-merchant, with corkscrew curls and sticky fingers; Billy the boxer, driven, controlled, playing to his strengths; Carl, the Milky Bar Kid, drifting along to his own soundtrack; and the doomed Gally, who seems to find catastrophe at every corner.

Guy Grand, an eccentric billionaire prankster, is rich enough to do whatever he likes. And what he likes is to carefully execute projects where he can cauterize by ridicule what the rest of the world ignores: Complacency, greed, corruption, and idiocy. Determined to "make it hot for people," Grand spends his billions staging a series of hilarious, sometimes bewildering stunts, lampooning along the way the American holy cows of money, status, power, beauty, media, and stardom.

Tax cheats, beware: The Treasury Department's Criminal Investigations Division has a new special agent on its payroll. A recovering tomboy with a head for numbers, Tara's fast becoming the Annie Oakley of the IRS-kicking ass, taking social security numbers, and keeping the world safe for honest taxpayers. Or else. Tara's latest mission finds her in hot pursuit of ice-cream vendor Joseph "Joe Cool" Cullen. Along with frozen treats he's selling narcotics-and failing to report his ill-gotten gains on his tax returns. Over Tara's dead body.

Paige Moresco found her true love in eighth grade - and lost him two years ago. Since his death, she’s been sleepwalking through life, barely holding on for the sake of her teenage son. Her house is a wreck, the grass is overrun with weeds, and she’s at risk of losing her job. As Paige stares at her neglected lawn, she knows she’s hit rock bottom. So she does something entirely unexpected: she begins to dig.

Sarina Mahler thinks she has her life all nailed down: a growing architecture practice in Austin, Texas, and an any-day-now proposal from her loving boyfriend, Noah. She's well on her way to having the family she's hoped for since her mother's death 10 years ago. But with Noah on a temporary assignment abroad and retired Olympic swimmer - and former flame - Eamon Roy back in town asking her to renovate his new fixer-upper, Sarina's life takes an unexpected turn

Narcissistic, hilariously self-deluded, and divorced from the real world as most of us know it, hedge-fund manager Barry Cohen oversees $2.4 billion in assets. Deeply stressed by an SEC investigation and by his three-year-old son’s diagnosis of autism, he flees New York on a Greyhound bus in search of a simpler, more romantic life with his old college sweetheart. Meanwhile, his super-smart wife, Seema - a driven first-generation American who craved the picture-perfect life that comes with wealth - has her own demons to face.

In this witty, charming follow-up to the acclaimed Crooked Heart, the life of lies a small time scammer and her adopted son have constructed in London becomes endangered during the tumultuous final months of World War II.

Gary Shteyngart, author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, creates a compelling reality in this tale about an illiterate America in the not-too-distant future. Lenny Abramov may just be penning the world’s last diary. Which is good, because while falling in love with a rather unpleasant woman and witnessing the fall of a great empire, Lenny has a lot to write about.

May We Be Forgiven, a darkly comic novel of 21st-century domestic life, stars Harold Silver, a historian who's always been jealous of his successful brother, George. But when the hot-tempered George is institutionalized for committing a violent act, Harold finds himself comforting his brother's wife and children. What follows is a scathing examination of a family so fractured it may never be whole again.

A year has passed, and in this third novel of the Pop Larkin series, Pop Larkin is preparing to build the bungalow he promised Charley and Mariette upon their engagement. He buys a country home slated for demolition, intending to convert it for the two, but it is not long before a London couple persuade him to sell it. Pop, ever the trickster, sells it for an extortionate price, as the two social climbers know little about country life.

Samuel Pickwick, founder and chairman of the Pickwick Club, engages three fellow members to accompany him on a journey. By coach they’ll travel to the outreaches of London to explore, observe, and report back on the quaint wonders of the English countryside. What transpires is a picaresque romp of misadventures, hair-raising challenges, and romantic follies entangling the fates of a riot of colorful characters - a passel of villains, spinsters, poets, and sportsmen - and the unworldly Pickwick himself, who has much to learn about life outside his gentleman’s club.

Millie, 30, just can't pull it together. Misanthropic and morose, she spends her days killing time at a thankless temp job until she can return home to her empty apartment, where she oscillates between self-recrimination and mild delusion, fixating on all the little ways she might change her life. Then she watches TV until she drops off to sleep, and the cycle begins again. When the possibility of a full-time job offer arises, it seems to bring the better life she's envisioning within reach. But with it also comes the paralyzing realization of just how hollow that vision has become.