Literary Humor

No one knows us quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts. Every office is a family of sorts, and the Chicago ad agency Joshua Ferris brilliantly depicts in his debut novel is family at its strangest and best. The characters in Then We Came to an End cope with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, secret romance, elaborate pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks.

The novel that set the stage for his modern classic, The Satanic Verses, Shame is Salman Rushdie's phantasmagoric epic of an unnamed country that is "not quite Pakistan". In this dazzling tale of an ongoing duel between the families of two men - one a celebrated wager of war, the other a debauched lover of pleasure - Rushdie brilliantly portrays a world caught between honor and humiliation.

Heroic bookseller Laurent Letellier comes across an abandoned handbag on a Parisian street. There's nothing in the bag to indicate who it belongs to, although there's all sorts of other things in it. Laurent feels a strong impulse to find the owner and tries to puzzle together who she might be from the contents of the bag. Especially a red notebook with her jottings, which really makes him want to meet her. Without even a name to go on, and only a few of her possessions to help him, how is he to find one woman in a city of millions?

Off the coast of Maine, Ruth Thomas is born into a feud fought for generations by two groups of local lobstermen over fishing rights for the waters that lie between their respective islands. At 18, she has returned from boarding school - smart as a whip, feisty, and irredeemably unromantic - determined to throw over her education and join the "stern men" working the lobster boats.

Everyone knows that if Scarlett O'Hara had an unlimited text-and-data plan, she'd constantly try to tempt Ashley away from Melanie with suggestive messages. If Mr. Rochester could text Jane Eyre, his ardent missives would obviously be in all-caps. And Daisy Buchanan would not only text while driving, she'd text you to pick her up after she totaled her car.

She'd heard the stories, seen the movies, read the books. But now police Chief Inspector Sigrid Ødegård has to leave her native Norway and actually go there - to that land across the Atlantic where her missing brother is implicated in the mysterious death of a prominent African-American academic. America. Sigrid is plunged into a United States where race and identity, politics and promise, reverberate in every aspect of daily life.

Tiller is an average American college student with a good heart but minimal aspirations. Pong Lou is a larger-than-life, wildly creative Chinese American entrepreneur who sees something intriguing in Tiller beyond his bored exterior and takes him under his wing. When Pong brings him along on a boisterous trip across Asia, Tiller is catapulted from ordinary young man to talented protégé, and pulled into a series of ever more extreme and eye-opening experiences that transform his view of the world, of Pong, and of himself.

Up the Down Staircase is the funny and touching story of a committed, idealistic teacher whose clash with school bureaucracy is a timeless lesson for students, teachers, parents – anyone concerned about public education. Bel Kaufman lets her characters speak for themselves through memos, letters, directives from the principal, comments by students, notes between teachers, and papers from desk drawers and wastebaskets, evoking a vivid picture of teachers fighting the good fight against all that stands in the way of good teaching.

A Friend of the Earth opens in the year 2025, as Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tidewater ekes out a bleak living in southern California, managing a rock star's private menagerie. Global warming is a reality. The biosphere has collapsed and most of the major mammalian species are extinct.

LOVE, DISHONOR, MARRY, DIE, CHERISH, PERISH leaps cities and decades as Rakoff sings the song of an America whose freedoms can be intoxicating, or brutal. The characters' lives are linked to each other by acts of generosity or cruelty.

Obsessed with the iconic '60s classic Easy Rider, encyclopedic Floridaphile, lovable serial killer, and movie buff extraordinaire Serge A. Storms devises his wildest plan yet: finish the journey begun by his freewheeling heroes, Captain America and Billy, tragically cut short by some shotgun-wielding rednecks.

The Bible offers some clues to God's personality - he's alternately been called vindictive and just, bloodthirsty and caring, all-powerful and impotent, capricious and foresighted, and loving and hateful. But no one has ever fully explored why God might be such a figure of contrasts. Nor has anyone ever satisfactorily explained what guides his relationship not just with angels, the devil, and his son, but also with all of creation.

It's 1939, in New York City. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdiniesque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat: smuggling himself out of Hitler's Prague. He's looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom. His cousin, Brooklyn's own Sammy Clay, is looking for a partner in creating the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book.

Elsie Bovary is a cow, and a pretty happy one at that—her long, lazy days are spent eating, napping, and chatting with her best friend, Mallory. One night, Elsie and Mallory sneak out of their pasture; but while Mallory is interested in flirting with the neighboring bulls, Elsie finds herself drawn to the farmhouse. Through the window, she sees the farmer's family gathered around a bright Box God—and what the Box God reveals about something called an "industrial meat farm" shakes Elsie's understanding of her world to its core.

L'homme est un lion pour l'homme. Et les lions ne s'embarrassent pas de délicatesse. Sûrs de leur bon droit, ils imposent leurs vues sans conscience de leur égocentrisme et de leur appétit excessif pour les rapports de force. Ces lions, nous les croisons tous les jours : automobiliste enragé, conjoint gentiment dénigrant, chef imbu de pouvoir, mère intransigeante qui sait mieux que nous ce qui est bon pour nous... C'est ce que Romane appelle : la "burnerie".

Continuously available in print since 1968, this novel has become embedded in progressive anti-racist culture with wide circulation of the book and hotly debated film. A literary classic, The Spook Who Sat by the Door is a strong comment on entrenched racial inequities in the United States in the late 1960s. With its focus on the “militancy” that characterized the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s, this is the story of one man’s reaction to ruling-class hypocrisy.

The house-party at Chateau Blissac, Brittany features a rather odd array of guests this year. Mr. J. Wellington Gedge is hoping for some peace and quiet while his wife takes herself off for a while. She, however, has invited numerous visitors to the chateau, to whom he will have to play reluctant host. Senator Opal and his daughter are expected, and so is the chateau's handsome owner Vicomte de Blissac.

Lady Cop Makes Trouble sets Constance loose on the streets of New York City and New Jersey - tracking down victims, trailing leads, and making friends with girl reporters and lawyers at a hotel for women. Cheering her on, and goading her, are her sisters, Norma and Fleurette - that is, when they aren't training pigeons for the war effort or fanning dreams of a life on the stage.

Laugh-out-loud funny and deeply touching, Beth Hoffman's sparkling debut is, as Kristin Hannah says, "packed full of Southern charm, strong women, wacky humor, and good old-fashioned heart." It is a novel that explores the indomitable strengths of female friendship and gives us the story of a young girl who loses one mother and finds many others.

In the dark waiting room of the ferry terminal in the sketchy Spanish port of Algeciras, two aging Irishmen - Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, longtime partners in the lucrative and dangerous enterprise of smuggling drugs - sit at night, none too patiently. It is October 23, 2018, and they are expecting Maurice's estranged daughter, Dilly, to either arrive on a boat coming from Tangier or depart on one heading there. This nocturnal vigil will initiate an extraordinary journey back in time to excavate their shared history of violence, romance, mutual betrayals, and serial exiles.