Satire Comedy

As a police launch speeds across Miami's Biscayne Bay - with officer Nestor Camacho on board - Tom Wolfe is off and running. Here is a big, panoramic story of the new America, as told by our master chronicler of the way we live now. Based on the same sort of detailed, on-scene, high-energy reporting that powered Tom Wolfe's previous best-selling novels, Back to Blood is another brilliant, spot-on, scrupulous, and often hilarious reckoning with our times.

After a botched Halloween ritual, Madison Spencer, the snarkiest dead girl in the universe, finds herself trapped in Purgatory, otherwise known as Earth. The upside: She is no longer subject to physical limitations (she can pass through doors and walls). The downside: Well, she’s still dead.

When the body of a mysterious woman is found to be carrying the phone number of James Bond, Bond is called in by M to help the investigation. But before he can even reach headquarters he is nearly run off the road in a high-speed motorway chase. Someone wants Bond dead.

The Importance of Being Earnest is a very popular play written by Oscar Wilde. In the satire, Algernon and Jack are two young members of the English gentry who pursue their romantic desires dishonestly. Both men want to adopt the name "Ernest," who is Jack's imaginary younger brother. The idea of name changing comes about when Algernon wants to marry Cecily, and Jack wants to marry Gwendolen. However, it just so happens that Cecily and Gwendolen are only interested in marrying men named Ernest!

I was an out-of-work rugby coach who was soon to be divorced. My old dear was sliding away in a nursing home in a certain suburb of West Dublin. And my old man had brought the country to the verge of, like, nuclear annihilation. And if that wasn’t bad enough, my teenage daughter was in love again. My sister-in-law was about to give birth to a baby that was possibly mine. And Castlerock College was about to go – I can’t even say the word – co-ed.

Mr. Mani is a deeply affecting six-generation family saga, extending from 19th-century Greece and Poland to British-occupied Palestine to German-occupied Crete and ultimately to modern Israel. The narrative moves through time and is told in five conversations about the Mani family. It ends in Athens in 1848 with Avraham Mani's powerful tale about the death of his young son in Jerusalem. A profoundly human novel, rich in drama, irony, and wit.

On Battersea Reach, a mixed bag of the temporarily lost and the patently eccentric live on houseboats, rising and falling with the tide of the Thames. There is good-natured Maurice, by occupation a male prostitute, by chance a receiver of stolen goods. And Richard, an ex-navy man whose boat, much like its owner, dominates the Reach.

On a flight to New York at the end of her first book tour, up-and-coming writer Agnes Oliver meets Jack Verity, the handsome filmmaker and ex-husband of Geia Stone, a famous actress turned wellness guru, whose popular lifestyle brand Goddess promotes controversial therapies and expensive beauty tools in the name of self-care and inner nourishment. Jack invites Agnes to a party in the Hamptons, where she meets Geia and finds herself welcomed into the guru's inner circle.

In the wake of her parents’ death, Aretha, a habitually single Black lawyer, has had only one obsession in life—success—until she falls for Aaron, a coffee entrepreneur. Moving into his Brooklyn brownstone to live along with his Hurricane Sandy-traumatized, illegal-gun-stockpiling, optimized-soy-protein-eating, bunker-building roommates, Aretha finds that her dreams of making partner are slipping away, replaced by an underground world, one of selling guns and training for a doomsday that’s maybe just around the corner.

Behold the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM), today’s fastest growing carbohydrate-based religion. According to church founder Bobby Henderson, the universe and all life within it were created by a mystical and divine being: the Flying Spaghetti Monster. What drives the FSM's devout followers, a.k.a. Pastafarians? Some say it’s the assuring touch from the FSM’s “noodly appendage”. Then there are those who love the worship service, which is conducted in pirate talk and attended by congregants in dashing buccaneer garb.

Ever meet a hot billionaire while your hand's in a toilet in the men's room of one of his stores? No? So it really is just me. Hmm. When you're a mystery shopper, you get paid to humiliate yourself, all in the name of improving customer service. Romance isn't in my job description. But the day I met Declan McCormick it was love at first flush. Until I nearly castrated him with my EpiPen. How Hot Guy and Toilet Girl became an item involves my crazy mom, a trip to the ER, my homicidal cat, my fake wife, and true love.

In The Time Seller, AG and his family live in a smallish apartment with a not-so-smallish debt to the bank. But AG dreams of a different life and steps onto a path of exhilarating uncertainty.

Ever since his girlfriend ended things, Thomas’s life has been on a downward spiral. A gifted medical student, he has spent his entire adulthood struggling to escape the legacy of his father, an esteemed psychiatrist who used him as a test subject when he was a boy. Thomas lived his entire childhood watched over by researchers lurking behind one-way glass. But now the tables have turned. Thomas is the researcher, and he’s convinced an experiment he has concocted will cure three homeless men of their delusional claims. Then the experiment careens out of control....

More than three decades have passed since the events described in John Updike's The Witches of Eastwick. The three divorcées - Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie - have left town, remarried, and become widows. They cope with their grief and solitude as widows do: they travel the world, to such foreign lands as Canada, Egypt, and China, and renew old acquaintance. Why not, Sukie and Jane ask Alexandra, go back to Eastwick for the summer?

Meet twenty-two-year-old Cherry Pye (née Cheryl Bunterman), a pop star since she was fourteen—and about to attempt a comeback from her latest drug-and-alcohol disaster.

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.

Honey Santana, impassioned, willful, possibly bipolar, self-proclaimed "queen of lost causes", has a scheme to help rid the world of irresponsibility, indifference, and dinnertime sales calls. She's taking rude, gullible Relentless, Inc., telemarketer Boyd Shreave and his less-than-enthusiastic mistress, Eugenie, into the wilderness of Florida's Ten Thousand Islands for a gentle lesson in civility. What she doesn't know is that she's being followed by her Honey-obsessed former employer.

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.

It was just supposed to be a quick trip to the pet store for some cat food, but the universe had other plans for Florence Valentine. Good for nothing kids and some annoying store employees were giving her a hard time, and then things got worse when she was killed by a delivery truck. Instead of angels, pearly gates, and eternal rewards, a voice in her head keeps telling her that she’s become a dungeon core, whatever that is.

Interstellar con man Rex Nihilo has a price tag on his head. Railroaded into smuggling a shipment of contraband corn to a planet short on food, Rex finds himself on the run from an insidious corporation named Ubiqorp, which reaps obscene profits by keeping the planet dependent on shipments of synthetic rations. When Rex and his long-suffering robot companion Sasha are sentenced to work as slave labor on a massive Ubiqorp plantation, they learn the terrible secret behind the corporation's products.