Literary Humor

Academy Award winner Dustin Hoffman gives an understated and exemplary performance of this satiric look at the unreality of American media culture. Chance, the enigmatic gardener, becomes Chauncey Gardiner after getting hit by a limo belonging to a Wall Street tycoon. The whirlwind that follows brings Chance to his new status of political policy advisor and possible vice presidential candidate. His garden-variety political responses, inspired by television, become heralded as visionary, and he is soon a media icon.

A spellbinding saga about the inhabitants and inheritors of one rural community, by one of Iceland's most beloved novelists. A man comes to awareness in a cold church in the Icelandic countryside, not knowing who he is, why he's there, or how he arrived, with a stranger staring mockingly from a few pews back. Startled by the man's cryptic questions, he leaves—and plunges into a history spanning centuries, a past pressed into his genes that sinks him closer to some knowledge of himself.

A man with a borrowed name steps from a flashy red sports car—also borrowed—onto the estate of his youth. But all is not as it seems. There is a new family living in the drafty old house: the Godleys, descendants of the late, world-famous scientist Adam Godley, whose theory of existence threw the universe into chaos. And this mystery man, who has just completed a prison sentence, feels as if time has stopped, or was torn, or was opened in new and strange ways. He must now vie with the idiosyncratic Godley family, and with a woman from his past who comes bearing an unusual request.

Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn 50. 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 your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world. Question: How do you arrange to skip town? Answer: You accept them all. What would possibly go wrong?

Roland Merullo's playful, eloquent, and life-affirming novel finds the Pope and the Dalai Lama teaming up for an unsanctioned road trip through the Italian countryside to rediscover the everyday joys of life that can seem, even for the two holiest men in the world, unattainable.

Severely lacking in sleep from a recent bout of marathon investigative work, all Flynn wants is a proper night's rest. Unfortunately, at the early morning summons of his frantic daughter, he's off to the cemetery to rescue her young friend who's in quite a peculiar bind. And as the day progresses, a curious collection of puzzling cases fall into Flynn's lap, each one stranger and more urgent than the last. Buried secrets and dark motives come to light as he races to solve each crime and bring these seemingly disconnected matters to a full and complete case closed.

“Begins here first account of operative me, agent number 67 on arrival Midwestern American airport greater _____ area. Flight _____. Date _____. Priority mission top success to complete. Code name: Operation Havoc.” Thus speaks Pygmy, one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the United States, disguised as exchange students, to live with typical American families and blend in, all the while planning an unspecified act of massive terrorism.

When Daphne arrives in Berlin, the last thing she expects is to run into more drama than she left behind. Of course, she knew she'd need to do the usual: make friends, acquire lovers, grapple with German and a whole new way of life. She even expected the long nights gorging alone on family-sized jars of Nutella, and the pitfalls of online dating in another language. The paranoia, the second-guessing of her every choice, the covert behaviors? Probably come with the territory. But one night, when Daphne is alone in her apartment, something strange, unnerving and entirely unexpected intervenes.

Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television who falls in impossible love with a TV star. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where “Anything-Can-Happen.” Meanwhile his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own.

Felix is at the top of his game as artistic director of the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival. His productions have amazed and confounded. Now he's staging a Tempest like no other: Not only will it boost his reputation, it will heal emotional wounds. Or that was the plan. Instead, after an act of unforeseen treachery, Felix is living in exile in a backwoods hovel, haunted by memories of his beloved lost daughter, Miranda. And brewing revenge.

Lionel Asbo, a terrifying yet weirdly loyal thug (self-named after England's notorious "Anti-Social Behaviour Order"), has always looked out for his ward and nephew, the orphaned Desmond Pepperdine. He provides him with fatherly career advice (always carry a knife, for example) and is determined they should share the joys of pit bulls (fed with lots of Tabasco sauce), Internet porn, and all manner of more serious criminality. Des, on the other hand, desires nothing more than books to read and a girl to love .

Bret Ellis, the narrator of Lunar Park, is the bestselling writer whose first novel Less Than Zero catapulted him to international stardom while he was still in college. In the years that followed he found himself adrift in a world of wealth, drugs, and fame, as well as dealing with the unexpected death of his abusive father.

This deliciously sharp novel captures the relentless ambitions and fears that animate parents and their children in modern America, exploring the conflicts between achievement and potential, talent and privilege. Set in the fictional town of Crystal, Colorado, The Gifted School is a keenly entertaining novel that observes the drama within a community of friends and parents as good intentions and high ambitions collide in a pile-up with long-held secrets and lies.

In midcentury America, one man is determined to take over the airwaves with a program as audacious as it is entertaining. Bald, bombastic, and irresistible, Golk is his name and You're on Camera is his show. To "golk" someone is to trick her, on camera, into betraying her true nature.

Qualityland, Marc-Uwe Kling's first book to be translated into English, is a brilliantly clever, illuminating satire in the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, and George Orwell that offers a visionary, frightening, and all-too funny glimpse at a near future we may be hurtling toward faster than it's at all comfortable to admit. So why delay any longer? TheShop already knows you're going to love this book. You may as well head to the cash register, crack the covers, and see why that is for yourself.

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".

Irreverently juggling magical realism, film noir, hip hop, and chicanismo, Tropic of Orange takes place in a Los Angeles where the homeless, gangsters, infant organ entrepreneurs, and Hollywood collide on a stretch of the Harbor Freeway. Hemmed in by wildfires, it's a symphony conducted from an overpass, grandiose, comic, and as diverse as the city itself - from an author who has received the California Book Award and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award, among other literary honors.

Contemptuous of their parents, who pass their days in a stupor of liquor, drugs, and sex, the children feel neglected and suffocated at the same time. When a destructive storm descends on the summer estate, the group's ringleaders - including Eve, who narrates the story - decide to run away, leading the younger ones on a dangerous foray into the apocalyptic chaos outside.

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.

Broke English teacher Penelope Schleeman is as surprised as anyone when her feminist, eco-warrior novel American Mermaid becomes a best-seller. But when Hollywood insists she convert her fierce, androgynous protagonist into to a teen sex object in a clamshell bra, strange things start to happen. Is Penelope losing her mind, or has her fictional mermaid come to life, enacting revenge against society’s limited view of what a woman can and should be?