Literary Humor

Lucy and Owen, ambitious, thoroughly-therapized New Yorkers, have taken the plunge, trading in their crazy life in a cramped apartment for Beekman, a bucolic Hudson Valley exurb. They've got a 200-year-old house, an autistic son obsessed with the Titanic, and 17 chickens, at last count. It's the kind of paradise where stay-at-home moms team up to cook the school's "hot lunch", dads grill grass-fed burgers, and, as Lucy observes, "chopping kale has become a certain kind of American housewife's version of chopping wood".

Livy Kowalski has no time for idiots. When you shapeshift into a honey badger, getting through life's irritants is a finely honed skill. Until she gets stuck housing her nutso cousin and dealing with her dad's untimely and unexplained demise. That's where Vic Barinov comes in-or his house does. Vic can't step outside without coming back to find Livy devouring his honey stash and getting the TV remote sticky. It gets his animal instincts all riled up. But he'll have to woo her at high speed: All hell is breaking loose, and Livy is leading the charge…

This latest book - a love letter to listeners young and old about the vagaries of real life - longtime fans and new listeners alike will experience Snicket's distinctive voice in a new way. This true story - as true as Lemony Snicket himself - begins with a puzzling note under his door: You had poison for breakfast. Following a winding trail of clues to solve the mystery of his own demise, Snicket takes us on a thought-provoking tour of his predilections.

Racer McKay is a broody bastard. From the moment I met him, he's been rude, irritable, and unbearable. And worse? He's broke. A contractor working to remodel my parents pool house for extra cash, he stomps around in those clunky construction boots with his tool belt wrapped around his narrow waist, and a chip on his shoulder. Racer McKay is also infuriatingly...sexy as hell. I want to take that pencil tucked behind his ear, and draw lazy lines slowly up and down his body all the while wanting to strangle him at the same time.

Anthony Trollope's classic novel centers on Mr. Harding, a clergyman of great personal integrity whose charitable income far exceeds the purpose for which it was intended. On discovering this, young John Bold turns his reforming zeal toward exposing what he regards as an abuse of privilege, despite the fact that he is in love with Mr. Harding's daughter, Eleanor.

Morgan Beale is a pop icon - and hates every second of it. He begins adapting the latest best seller, The Chihuahua in the Blue Prada Bag, into a blockbuster movie just before his celebutante wife starts remodeling their Hollywood home, driving Beale to a hotel. Dodging the paparazzi one morning on his way to Starbucks, he spots his writing partner, Luke, who has been dead for over a decade, and who is staring into a mysterious hole in the ground....

Uncle Fred, or to give him his full title: Fredrick Altamont Cornwallis Twistleton, fifth Earl of Ickenham, is considered by some as a "splendid gentleman, a sportsman to his fingertips". Mr Twistleton, nephew to Earl, and otherwise known as "Pongo" to his friends, has a differing view. He simply describes his uncle as "being loopy to the tonsils".

The holiday film A Christmas Story, first released in 1983, has become a bona fide Christmas perennial, gaining in stature and fame with each succeeding year. Its affectionate, wacky, and wryly realistic portrayal of an American family's typical Christmas joys and travails in small-town Depression-era Indiana has entered our imagination and our hearts with a force equal to It's a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street.

When Inspector Peter Glebsky arrives at a remote ski chalet on vacation, the last thing he intends to do is get involved in any police work. He's there to ski, drink brandy, and loaf around in blissful solitude. But he hadn't counted on the other vacationers, an eccentric bunch, including a famous hypnotist, a physicist with a penchant for gymnastic feats, a sulky teenager of indeterminate gender, and the mysterious Mr. and Mrs. Moses.

Morris Duckworth teaches English to the pampered rich of Verona, and Morris is not pleased. Living a meager existence in a squalid apartment, he regards his privileged students with envy and disdain, first wreaking revenge by petty theft and then, like all good criminals, graduating to grander larceny. When one of those students, a beautiful but vapid heiress named Massimina, falls in love with him, Morris can almost smell upward mobility.

Meet Psmith, with a silent 'P' as in psychic. A gallant, charming individual, Psmith has a gift for getting into awful scrapes, and when he takes over a gentile journal known as Cosy Moments with the aid of Billy Windsor, its sub-editor, he turns it into a radical publication...with alarming and hilarious results.

During an early morning feeding for her four-month-old twins, Meg Langslow hears an odd noise and goes downstairs to find her living room filled with dozens of animals. She soon learns that financial woes have caused the local animal shelter to repeal its no-kill policy. Her kind-hearted father, her zoologist grandfather, and other like-minded citizens have stolen all the shelter animals, both as a gesture of protest and to protect them until the hated policy can be repealed. But the volunteer who was transporting animals to new homes has been murdered.

Opening with the exotic Lady Death entering the gumshoe-writer's seedy office in pursuit of a writer named Celine, this novel demonstrates Bukowski's own brand of humour and realism, opening up a landscape of seamy Los Angeles.

Reclusive literary legend M. M. "Mimi" Banning has been holed up in her Bel Air mansion for years. But after falling prey to a Bernie Madoff-style Ponzi scheme, she's flat broke. Now Mimi must write a new book for the first time in decades, and to ensure the timely delivery of her manuscript, her New York publisher sends an assistant to monitor her progress. The prickly Mimi reluctantly complies - with a few stipulations: no Ivy Leaguers or English majors. Must drive, cook, tidy. Computer whiz. Good with kids.

Jason Fitger is a beleaguered professor of creative writing and literature at Payne University, a small and not very distinguished liberal arts college in the midwest. His department is facing draconian cuts and squalid quarters, while one floor above them the Economics Department is getting lavishly remodeled offices. His once-promising writing career is in the doldrums, as is his romantic life, in part as the result of his unwise use of his private affairs for his novels.

Baker has written a novel that remaps the territory of sex--solitary and telephonic, lyrical and profane, comfortable and dangerous. Written in the form of a phone conversation between two strangers, Vox is an erotic classic that places the author in the first rank of America's major writers.

Renowned cookbook writer Paul Stuart, renewed and refreshed from his time in Tuscany, has returned to Scotland to work on his new book. Writing, though, is complicated by Paul's changed domestic circumstances. His editor and new girlfriend, Gloria, has moved in with him despite not being specifically invited, and she's brought her two rather demanding Siamese cats. When Paul's cousin, Chloe, suggests Paul visit her in the French countryside, Paul jumps at the chance. However, once he arrives, he finds his fortunes tangled up with the infamous local restaurant.

The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century - a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes. Richly realistic, darkly hilarious, deeply humane, it confirms Jonathan Franzen as one of our most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul.

Susan Frobisher and Julie Wickham are turning 60. They live in a small Dorset town and have been friends since school. On the surface Susan has it all - a lovely house and a long marriage to accountant Barry. Life has not been so kind to Julie, but now, with several failed businesses and bad relationships behind her, she has found stability: living in a council flat and working in an old people's home.

The time is the early '80s. The characters go to the same schools and eat at the same restaurants. Their voices enfold us as seamlessly as those of DJs heard over a car radio. They have sex with the same boys and girls and buy from the same dealers. In short, they are connected in the only way people can be in that city.