Literary Humor

On the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration, an enigmatic billionaire from foreign shores takes up residence in the architectural jewel of “the Gardens,” a cloistered community in New York’s Greenwich Village. The neighborhood is a bubble within a bubble, and the residents are immediately intrigued by the eccentric newcomer and his family.

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?

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.

Is this what's in store? June 12, 2030, started out like any other day in memory---and by then, memories were long. Since cancer had been cured fifteen years before, America's population was aging rapidly. That sounds like good news, but consider this: millions of baby boomers, with a big natural predator picked off, were sucking dry benefits and resources that were never meant to hold them into their eighties and beyond.

It's been years since Swenson, a professor in a New England creative-writing program, has published a novel. It's been even longer since any of his students have shown promise. Enter Angela Argo, a pierced, tattooed student with a rare talent for writing. Angela is just the thing Swenson needs. Better yet, she wants his help. But, as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions....

Eloise Foley, known to her friends as Weezie, has been through the divorce from hell. Her ex-husband Tal (aka Talmadge Evans III) was awarded their house in Savannah's historic district, the house that Weezie had spent years painstakingly restoring to its original splendor. Weezie was awarded the two-bedroom carriage house on the same property. Each was sure the other would sell.

Fetherhoughton is a dreary town in 1950s northern England. Father Angwin has lost his faith. Sister Philomena strains against convent life. The inhabitants of the town go about their lives in a haze. Then a stranger appears, bringing with him the hint of something new. But who is Fludd? An angel come to shake the dwellers from their stupor, or is he the devil himself, a wanderer of the darkest places in the human heart?

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.

As he did in the award-winning One Part Woman, in his newest novel, The Story of a Goat, Perumal Murugan explores a side of India that is rarely considered in the West: the rural lives of the country’s farming community. He paints a bucolic yet sometimes menacing portrait, showing movingly how danger and deception can threaten the lives of the weakest through the story of a helpless young animal lost in a world it naively misunderstands.

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.

In her best-selling debut, Commencement, J. Courtney Sullivan explored the complicated and contradictory landscape of female friendship. Now, in her highly anticipated second novel, Sullivan takes us into even richer territory. For the Kellehers, Maine is a place where children run in packs, showers are taken outdoors, and old Irish songs are sung around a piano. By turns wickedly funny and achingly sad, Maine unveils the sibling rivalry, alcoholism, social climbing, and Catholic guilt at the center of one family, along with the abiding, often irrational love that keeps them coming back....

Alan Blair, the hero of Wake Up, Sir!, is a young, loony writer with numerous problems of the mental, emotional, sexual, spiritual, and physical variety. He's very good at problems. But luckily for Alan, he has a personal valet named Jeeves, who does his best to sort things out for his troubled master. And Alan does find trouble wherever he goes.

The Cows is a powerful novel about three women. In all the noise of modern life, each needs to find her own voice. It's about friendship and being female. It's bold and brilliant. It's searingly perceptive. It's about never following the herd. And everyone is going to be talking about it.

One of Faulkner's comic masterpieces, The Reivers is a picaresque story that tells of three unlikely car thieves from rural Mississippi. Eleven-year-old Lucas Priest is persuaded by Boon Hogganbeck, one of his family's retainers, to steal his grandfather's car and make a trip to Memphis. The priests' black coachman, Ned McCaslin, stows away, and the three of them are off on a heroic odyssey.

The Story of My Life by Jay McInerney is a hilarious, sobering portrait of 1980s New York City featuring 20-something actress Alison Poole and her coterie of club-hopping, coke-addicted friends. In this breathlessly paced novel, McInerney revisits the nocturnal New York of Bright Lights, Big City. Alison Poole is a budding actress already fatally well versed in hopping the clubs, shopping Chanel, falling in and out of lust, and abusing other people's credit cards.

In Lionel Shriver's entertaining send-up of today's cult of exercise - which not only encourages better health, but now like all religions also seems to promise meaning, social superiority, and eternal life - an aging husband's sudden obsession with extreme sport makes him unbearable.

The Waiter takes place entirely in a restaurant where everything from the menu to the cutlery is carefully thought out. Our narrator is a middle-aged waiter who takes pride in the classic and unchangeable aspects of his job....

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 .

Hear Dickens' gift for social commentary in this classic story of the poor orphan, Oliver. In this time-tested classic, Dickens aimed to expose the filth of the London underworld as well as attack the inhumanity of the New Poor Law of 1834. This audiobook is a stunning performance by the award-winning Miriam Margolyes, who is considered one of the most knowledgeable and brilliant actors and interpreters of Dickens.

In late 2007, as the world’s economy crumbles, the remarkably unremarkable Milton Ontario - not to be confused with Milton, Ontario - leaves his parent’s basement in Saskatchewan and sets forth to find fame, fortune, and love in the electric sexuality of Montreal, to bask in endless Millennial adolescence, to escape the infinite flatness of Saskatchewan, and to find his messiah: Leonard Cohen.