Literary Humor

Mitford's most enduringly popular novel, The Pursuit of Love, is a classic comedy about growing up and falling in love among the privileged and eccentric. Mitford modeled her characters on her own famously unconventional family. We are introduced to the Radletts through the eyes of their cousin, Fanny, who stays with them at Alconleigh, their Gloucestershire estate. Uncle Matthew is the blustering patriarch; Aunt Sadie is the vague but doting mother; and the seven Radlett children, despite the delights of their unusual childhood, are recklessly eager to grow up.

As a shaky truce between suburban gangsters starts to unravel, schlubby civilian Scott Clark has other things on his mind: if he can't afford to buy out his ex-father-in-law, Scott's about to lose the only house he's ever called home. In the red-hot urban housing market, he doesn't have a chance - until he and his best friends take the desperate measure of staging a fake drive-by shooting on the property to push down the asking price. But then Scott's mobster-posturing stunt attracts the attention of the real criminals.

In the spring of 1926, the Soderbjerg brothers, Ray and Roy, plunge into radio by founding Station WLT (With Lettuce and Tomato) in order to rescue their failing restaurant and become the Sandwich Kings of South Minneapolis. For the next 25 years, the "Friendly Neighbor" station produces a dazzling array of shows and stars: Dad Benson, Wingo Beals, Slim Graves and his Blue Movers, chain-smoking child star Little Becky, and household-tips maven Lucille Larson (who repeatedly broadcasts in her underwear).

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort—a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny", and seem to move and speak as one. But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled "Smut Salon"....

"A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say 'Slum!' because he could see no more." But to its residents, this derelict corner of Trinidad's capital is a complete world, where everybody is quite different from everybody else. In this tender, funny early novel, V. S. Naipaul renders their lives (and the legends their neighbors construct around them) with Dickensian verve and Chekhovian compassion.

L.A. Woman is quintessential Babitz, the story of Sophie, a 20-something blonde Jim Morrison groupie gliding through a golden existence in L.A.; and Lola, a German immigrant who settles in Hollywood in the '20s to drive Pierce Arrows recklessly down Sunset Boulevard and who knows that Maybelline mascara cakes and that Rudolph Valentino is the essence of life. Sophie and Lola, like the many other women who move in and out of this electric saga, know that while L.A. is constantly changing, it is essentially eternal.

Numero Zero is the feverish and delightfully readable tale of a ghostwriter in Milan whose work pulls him into an underworld of media politics and murderous conspiracies (involving the cadaver of Mussolini's double, naturally). This novel is vintage Eco - corrupt newspapers, clandestine plots, imaginary histories - and will appeal to his many readers and earn him legions of new ones.

Best-selling author Gary Shteyngart’s exquisite fiction is met with a level of critical acclaim reserved for the very best in the field. In this startlingly provocative work, Russian immigrant Vladimir Girshkin searches for love and self-identity while interacting with a quirky set of acquaintances.

Dorothy Hare, the dutiful daughter of a rector in Suffolk, spends her days performing good works and cultivating good thoughts, pricking her arm with a pin when a bad thought arises. She does her best to reconcile her father’s fanciful view of his position in the world with such realities as the butcher’s bill. But even Dorothy’s strength has its limits, and one night, as she works feverishly on costumes for the church-school play, she blacks out. When she comes to, she finds herself on a London street, clad in a sleazy dress and unaware of her identity.

Return to America’s most beloved fictional hometown! Lake Wobegon is having a boom year thanks to millennial entrepreneurship—AuntMildred’s.com Gourmet Meatloaf, for example, or Universal Fire, makers of artisanal firewood seasoned with sea salt. Meanwhile, the author flies in to give eulogies at the funerals of five classmates, including a couple whom he disliked, and he finds a wave of narcissism crashing on the rocks of Lutheran stoicism.

This collection of short stories is a good example of early Wodehouse. It is here that Jeeves makes a brief first appearance with these unremarkable words: "Mrs. Gregson to see you, sir." Years later, when Jeeves became a household name, Wodehouse said he blushed to think of the off-hand way he had treated the man at their first encounter.

Isabel Walker has flown to Paris to offer moral support for Roxy, her pregnant stepsister. Roxy's husband, Charles-Henri, favorite son of a powerful French family, is having a love affair. Divorce seems imminent. When her entire family arrives to help with legal issues, Isabel feels intense pressure to keep everything from falling apart. And in the background, the unstable husband of Charles-Henri's lover lurks menacingly.

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.

Ensconced in a lovely tropical villa on idyllic Triggerfish Lane, Jim Davenport anticipates the good life to come. But this isn't living -- it's Florida, and the neighborhood is not quite what it seems. It's got overly aggressive Little League parents, drug-free Rastafarians, homicidal hookers, unnatural sex and casual violence. Oh, yes, and there's a psychopathic serial killer-cum-Sunshine-State folklorist named Serge A. Storms living directly across the street.

Topanga Canyon is home to two couples on a collision course. Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacker lead an ordered, sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: He is a sensitive nature writer, she an obsessive realtor. Mexican illegals Candido and America Rincon desperately cling to their vision of the American Dream as they fight off starvation in a makeshift camp deep in the ravine.

Months after the Waterless Flood pandemic has wiped out most of humanity, Toby and Ren have rescued their friend Amanda from the vicious Painballers. They return to the MaddAddamite cob house, newly fortified against man and giant pigoon alike. Accompanying them are the Crakers, the gentle, quasi-human species engineered by the brilliant but deceased Crake. Their reluctant prophet, Snowman-the-Jimmy, is recovering from a debilitating fever, so it's left to Toby to preach the Craker theology, with Crake as Creator.

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?

Workaholic attorney Samantha Sweeting has just done the unthinkable. She's made a mistake so huge, it'll wreck any chance of a partnership. Going into utter meltdown, she walks out of her London office, gets on a train, and ends up in the middle of nowhere. Asking for directions at a big, beautiful house, she's mistaken for an interviewee and finds herself being offered a job as housekeeper. Her employers have no idea they've hired a lawyer, and Samantha has no idea how to work the oven. She can't sew on a button, bake a potato, or get the #@%# ironing board to open.

Is it possible to write a sidesplitting novel about the breakup of the perfect marriage? If the writer is Nora Ephron, the answer is a resounding yes. For in this inspired confection of adultery, revenge, group therapy, and pot roast, the creator of Sleepless in Seattle reminds us that comedy depends on anguish as surely as a proper gravy depends on flour and butter.

A small Midwestern town is having an identity crisis: should they have a new techno-savvy name or a name honoring the freedmen who founded the town? Or is the current name just fine? They call in a professional naming consultant, famous for naming Apex bandages, guaranteed to match any skin color. But even he is losing his faith in monikers.