Category
Humorous Fiction
The Alteration 2013
In Kingsley Amis’s virtuoso foray into virtual history it is 1976, but the modern world is a medieval relic, frozen in intellectual and spiritual time ever since Martin Luther was promoted to pope back in the sixteenth century. Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass...
The Anatomy Lesson 1996
At forty, the writer Nathan Zuckerman comes down with a terrible pain, beginning in his neck and shoulders, invading his torso, and taking possession of his spirit. Zuckerman, whose work was his life, is unable to write a line. Now his work is trekking from one doctor to another, but none can find a...
Banal Nightmare 2025
In a Midwestern college town at the height of the Me Too era, a group of simultaneously self-flagellating and self-aggrandizing pseudo-academics sit around, think, and send one another insulting emails. As the impulses and memories they have barely managed to repress begin to surface, their...
Sterling Lung has spent years trying to distance himself from his immigrant upbringing and build a successful life in America. But when his aging father arrives unexpectedly and begins inserting himself into every aspect of Sterling's carefully constructed world, old tensions and unresolved...
The Big Day 2002
Donald Cuthbertson prided himself on being a model for his students and teachers, but he had lately begun to lose his focus. Degree Day is approaching, along with a birthday party for his wife, Lavinia, who is not going quietly into middle age. Her lavish costume party provides the revelers with a...
The Blazing World 2014
After years of having her work ignored or dismissed by critics, artist Harriet Burden decides to conduct an experiment: she presents her own art behind three male masks, concealing her female identity.
Yet when the shows succeed and Burden steps forward for her triumphant reveal, she is betrayed by...
Bliss 1996
For thirty-nine years Harry Joy has been the quintessential good guy. But one morning Harry has a heart attack on his suburban front lawn, and, for the space of nine minutes, he becomes a dead guy. And although he is resuscitated, he will never be the same. For, as Peter Carey makes abundantly clear...
Blue Skies 2023
Here Boyle, one of the most inventive voices in contemporary fiction, transports us to water-logged and heat-ravaged coastal America, where Cat and her hapless, nature-loving family—including her eco-warrior parents, Ottilie and Frank; her brother, Cooper, an entomologist; and her...
Welcome to Inner Horner, a nation so small it can only accommodate one citizen at a time. The other six citizens must wait their turns in the Short-Term Residency Zone of the surrounding country of Outer Horner. It's a long-standing arrangement between the fantastical, not-exactly-human citizens of...
Budding Prospects 1990
All Felix Nasmyth and friends have to do is harvest a crop of Cannabis sativa and half a million tax-free dollars will be theirs. But they haven’t reckoned on nosy Northern California–style neighbors, torrential rain, demands of the flesh, and Felix’s improbable new love, a wayward sculptress on...
When the decorated Captain of a great ship descends the gangplank for the final time, a new leader, a man with a yellow feather in his hair, vows to step forward. Though he has no experience, no knowledge of nautical navigation or maritime law, and though he has often remarked he doesn't much like...
In the vibrant streets of New Orleans, Ignatius J. Reilly lives with his long-suffering mother, railing against modern society from the comfort of his cluttered bedroom. Armed with a sharp tongue, a medieval worldview, and an inflated sense of his own intellect, Ignatius considers himself a defender...
Cosmopolis 2004
It is an April day in the year 2000 and an era is about to end. The booming times of market optimism—when the culture boiled with money and corporations seemed more vital and influential than governments— are poised to crash. Eric Packer, a billionaire asset manager at age twenty-eight, emerges from...
Damned 2012
Damned, Book 1
Madison is the thirteen-year-old daughter of a narcissistic film star and a billionaire. Abandoned at her Swiss boarding school over Christmas, she dies over the holiday, presumably of a marijuana overdose. The last thing she remembers is getting into a town car and falling asleep. Then she's waking...
Adjustment Day 2019
Adjustment Day is an ingenious darkly comic work in which Chuck Palahniuk does what he does best: skewer the absurdities in our society. Geriatric politicians bring the nation to the brink of a third world war to control the burgeoning population of young males, while working-class men dream of...
The Dog 2014
The author of the best-selling and award-winning Netherland now gives us his eagerly awaited, stunningly different new novel: a tale of alienation and heartbreak in Dubai.
Distraught by a breakup with his long-term girlfriend, our unnamed hero leaves New York to take an unusual job in a strange...
Dogtangle 2025
Dogtangle opens with a town hall meeting in a Taco Bell nestled in the bland corporate environment of Business Park. A man, bleating to anyone who will listen about the evils of current zoning laws, meets a woman who works in pharmaceutical marketing. They begin a relationship. They get married....
It's every parrothead's dream: to leave behind the rat race of the workaday world and start life all over again amidst the cool breezes, sun-drenched colors, and rum-laced drinks of a tropical paradise.
It's the story of Norman Paperman, a New York City press agent who, facing the onset of middle...
Doomed 2014
Damned, Book 2
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.
Her...
East Is East 1991
Japanese seaman Hiro Tanaka, inspired by dreams of the City of Brotherly Love and trained in the ways of the samurai, jumps ship off the coast of Georgia and swims into Tupelo Island, a nest of rabid rednecks, genteel ladies, descendants of slaves, and the denizens of an artists’ colony. His arrival...
Ending Up 2015
Everyone wants a comfortable place to die, and Kingsley Amis’s characters have found it in Tuppeny-happeny Cottage, where assorted septuagenarians have come together to see one another out the door of life. There’s grotesque Adela, whose sole passion is her cheapness; her brother Brigadier Bernard...
Having collected, among other things, cocktail sticks, electoral campaign badges, paintings of moored ships, rabbits' feet, noises at five in the morning, Croatian maxims, staircase ornaments, the first pages of novels, the labels on melons, birds' eggs, moments with you, hangmen's nooses, Hector...
Fight Club 2005
THE FIRST RULE about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.
Every weekend, in the basements and parking lots of bars across the country, young men with whitecollar jobs and failed lives take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded just as long as they have to. Then they...
First Person 2019
Kif Kehlmann, a young, penniless writer, thinks he’s finally caught a break when he’s offered $10,000 to ghostwrite the memoir of Siegfried “Ziggy” Heidl, the notorious con man and corporate criminal. Ziggy is about to go to trial for defrauding banks for $700 million; they have six weeks to write...
Fixer Chao 2026
William Paulinha—a resourceful gay Filipino sex worker barely getting by in New York—is determined to turn his life around when he crosses paths with Shem C., an on-the-rise author now disgraced and exiled from both his marriage and the city’s literary inner circle.
Furious at the world that cast...
Fra Keeler 2012
A man purchases a house, the house of Fra Keeler, moves in, and begins investigating the circumstances of the latter's death. Yet the investigation quickly turns inward, and the reality it seeks to unravel seems only to grow stranger, as the narrator pursues not leads but lines of thought, most...
It is the year 2025. Global warming is a reality. The biosphere has collapsed, and most mammals—not to mention fish, birds, and frogs—are extinct. Tyrone Tierwater is eking out a bleak living in southern California, managing a pop star’s private menagerie that “only a mother could love”—scruffy...
Fury 2002
Malik Solanka, a celebrated academic and dollmaker, has fled his life in London for a new beginning in New York City. But beneath his calm exterior lies a simmering, uncontrollable rage—one that has already driven him to abandon his family and threatens to erupt again.
In the restless, high-energy...
Girl, 20 2013
Kingsley Amis, along with being the funniest English writer of his generation was a great chronicler of the fads and absurdities of his age, and Girl, 20 is a delightfully incisive dissection of the flower-power phase of the 1960s. Amis’s antihero, Sir Roy Vandervane, a conductor and composer who...
The Golden House 2018
When the mysterious Nero Golden arrives in New York with his three sons, he seems determined to erase his past and reinvent himself in America. Settling into a grand house in Greenwich Village, the family adopts new names and begins a life of wealth, secrecy, and self-invention.
Observed by their...
The Green Man 2005
Like all good medieval coaching inns, the Green Man in Fareham, Hertfordshire, boasts a resident, if retired, ghost: Dr. Thomas Underhill, a notorious seventeenth-century practitioner of black arts and sexual deviancy, rumored to have killed his wife. The landlord, Maurice Allington, is the sole...
Happy Life 2026
Everyone, at some point in their lives, wants to be someone else. Eric Kherson—40, divorced, distracted—is spiraling. He has devoted his life to a successful career as the marketing director of a leading sports brand. But when family disaster rocks him to his core, he finds himself adrift from his...
Hell 2010
Its main character, Hatcher McCord, is an evening news presenter who has found himself in Hell and is struggling to explain his bad fortune. He’s not the only one to suffer this fate—in fact, he’s surrounded by an outrageous cast of characters, including Humphrey Bogart, William Shakespeare, and...
How It All Began 2012
When Charlotte Rainsford, a retired schoolteacher, is accosted by a petty thief on a London street, the consequences ripple across the lives of acquaintances and strangers alike. A marriage unravels after an illicit love affair is revealed through an errant cell phone message; a posh yet financially...
Hustle, Baby 2026
It’s hard enough to be a teenager at the turn of the millennium, and especially so for Dilo, who on top of juggling school and caring for her baby-cousin Maysha, is tasked with hustling to help her family get by.
After Dilo’s born-again Christian mother, Mary, and Aunt Anji relocated the family...
“I don’t expect anyone to believe me,” warns the narrator of this novel, a Mexican student called Juan Pablo Villalobos. He is about to fly to Barcelona on a scholarship when he’s kidnapped in a bookshop and whisked away by thugs to a basement. The gangsters are threatening his cousin—a wannabe...
In Persuasion Nation 2007
Talking candy bars, baby geniuses, disappointed mothers, castrated dogs, interned teenagers, and moral fables—all in this hilarious and heartbreaking collection from an author hailed as the heir to Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon.
In a self-running, smart house, a young and sentient Roomba listens as her owner, Harold, reads aloud to his dying wife, Edie. Mesmerized by To Kill a Mockingbird and craving the human connection she witnesses in Harold’s stories, the little vacuum renames herself Scout and embarks on a journey of...
Invisible Monsters 2018
She’s a fashion model who has everything: a boyfriend, a career, a loyal best friend. But when a sudden freeway "accident" leaves her disfigured and incapable of speech, she goes from being the beautiful center of attention to being an invisible monster, so hideous that no one will acknowledge she...
A witty and thrilling space opera with a touch of romance from the author of The Knife and the Serpent.
Glenn is a normal graduate student (aside from his kinks and genderfluidity), living a normal life with his normal girlfriend, Vivy (a spy for an interdimensional agency with her own kinks). ...
Julius Julius 2026
With biting wit, Aurora Stewart de Peña satirizes the creative industry she’s spent years in.
From the people who brought you the invention of advertising comes Julius Julius, a rambling architectural wonder, outpost of the very first ad man of ancient Pompeii, built on the backs of generations of...
Less 2017
Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. 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...
Less Is Lost 2023
For Arthur Less, life is going surprisingly well: he is a moderately accomplished novelist in a steady relationship with his partner, Freddy Pelu. But nothing lasts: the death of an old lover and a sudden financial crisis has Less running away from his problems yet again as he accepts a series of...
Lucky Jim 2012
Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century, Lucky Jim remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently misanthropic as when it first scandalized readers in 1954. This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university...
Beverly Underwood and her arch enemy, Lula Dean, live in the tiny town of Troy, Georgia, where they were born and raised. Now Beverly is on the school board, and Lula has become a local celebrity by embarking on a mission of censorship to rid the public libraries of all inappropriate books—none of...
The Mannequin Murder 2026
For your average fourteen-year-old, it would be a normal, middle-class life: father’s a doctor, mother’s an English teacher, a baby sister toddles aimlessly around the house in sagging diapers. But Karsten is not like other fourteen-year-olds. He processes every object, every event, in exquisite,...
A Month of Sundays 1996
At a desert retreat dedicated to rest, recreation, and spiritual renewal, this fortyish serial fornicator is required to keep a journal whose thirty-one weekly entries constitute the book you now hold in your hand. In his wonderfully overwrought style he lays bare his soul and his past—his marriage...
Moo 2009
In this darkly satirical send-up of academia and the Midwest, we are introduced to Moo University, a distinguished institution devoted to the study of agriculture. Amid cow pastures and waving fields of grain, Moo’s campus churns with devious plots, mischievous intrigue, lusty liaisons, and academic...
My Year of Meats 1999
Ruth Ozeki’s mesmerizing debut novel has captivated readers and reviewers worldwide. When documentarian Jane Takagi-Little finally lands a job producing a Japanese television show that just happens to be sponsored by an American meat-exporting business, she uncovers some unsavory truths about love,...
Survivor 2018
Tender Branson―last surviving member of the Creedish Death Cult―is dictating his life story into the recorder of Flight 2039, cruising on autopilot at 39,000 feet somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. He is all alone in the airplane, which will crash shortly into the vast Australian outback.
But...
Fight Club 2005
THE FIRST RULE about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.
Every weekend, in the basements and parking lots of bars across the country, young men with whitecollar jobs and failed lives take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded just as long as they have to. Then they...
A novel about a young woman's efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes.
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin,...
Having collected, among other things, cocktail sticks, electoral campaign badges, paintings of moored ships, rabbits' feet, noises at five in the morning, Croatian maxims, staircase ornaments, the first pages of novels, the labels on melons, birds' eggs, moments with you, hangmen's nooses, Hector...
Invisible Monsters 2018
She’s a fashion model who has everything: a boyfriend, a career, a loyal best friend. But when a sudden freeway "accident" leaves her disfigured and incapable of speech, she goes from being the beautiful center of attention to being an invisible monster, so hideous that no one will acknowledge she...
The Jewel and the Comet August 18, 2026
A witty and thrilling space opera with a touch of romance from the author of The Knife and the Serpent.
Glenn is a normal graduate student (aside from his kinks and genderfluidity), living a normal life with his normal girlfriend, Vivy (a spy for an interdimensional agency with her own kinks). ...
Happy Life July 14, 2026
Everyone, at some point in their lives, wants to be someone else. Eric Kherson—40, divorced, distracted—is spiraling. He has devoted his life to a successful career as the marketing director of a leading sports brand. But when family disaster rocks him to his core, he finds himself adrift from his...
Hustle, Baby July 14, 2026
It’s hard enough to be a teenager at the turn of the millennium, and especially so for Dilo, who on top of juggling school and caring for her baby-cousin Maysha, is tasked with hustling to help her family get by.
After Dilo’s born-again Christian mother, Mary, and Aunt Anji relocated the family...
Fixer Chao July 14, 2026
William Paulinha—a resourceful gay Filipino sex worker barely getting by in New York—is determined to turn his life around when he crosses paths with Shem C., an on-the-rise author now disgraced and exiled from both his marriage and the city’s literary inner circle.
Furious at the world that cast...
Julius Julius July 7, 2026
With biting wit, Aurora Stewart de Peña satirizes the creative industry she’s spent years in.
From the people who brought you the invention of advertising comes Julius Julius, a rambling architectural wonder, outpost of the very first ad man of ancient Pompeii, built on the backs of generations of...
The Whyte Python World Tour June 23, 2026
It’s Los Angeles, 1986, and metal rules the world. For aspiring drummer Rikki Thunder, life is beautiful, just like his hair—even if he is sleeping in a condemned paint store and playing with a band that’s going nowhere.
But when Rikki gets a shot to join L.A.’s hottest up-and-coming club band,...
The Mannequin Murder June 9, 2026
For your average fourteen-year-old, it would be a normal, middle-class life: father’s a doctor, mother’s an English teacher, a baby sister toddles aimlessly around the house in sagging diapers. But Karsten is not like other fourteen-year-olds. He processes every object, every event, in exquisite,...
A Time to Be Born June 2, 2026
Amanda Keeler has clawed her way out of the backwaters of Ohio and into the affections of Julien Evans, New York’s most powerful newspaper tycoon. With his ex-wife vanquished, Amanda reigns over their Fifth Avenue mansion, publishing wildly successful (ghostwritten) novels, charming guests at...
The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances April 7, 2026
In a self-running, smart house, a young and sentient Roomba listens as her owner, Harold, reads aloud to his dying wife, Edie. Mesmerized by To Kill a Mockingbird and craving the human connection she witnesses in Harold’s stories, the little vacuum renames herself Scout and embarks on a journey of...
Dogtangle November 4, 2025
Dogtangle opens with a town hall meeting in a Taco Bell nestled in the bland corporate environment of Business Park. A man, bleating to anyone who will listen about the evils of current zoning laws, meets a woman who works in pharmaceutical marketing. They begin a relationship. They get married....
Walk Me to the Distance October 21, 2025
In self-imposed exile after returning home from the war in Vietnam, David Larson meanders into the barren town of Slut’s Hole, Wyoming, where a local widow takes him under her wing. After making a sort of home among the town’s hardscrabble locals, David grudgingly adopts a young Vietnamese girl...
Suder October 21, 2025
It's the middle of the season and the third baseman for the Seattle Mariners, Craig Suder, is in the midst of an inescapable slump. On top of that, his wife has been keeping her distance and Suder can’t shake the creeping fear that he might have inherited his mother’s insanity. That’s’ when his team...
Banal Nightmare August 26, 2025
In a Midwestern college town at the height of the Me Too era, a group of simultaneously self-flagellating and self-aggrandizing pseudo-academics sit around, think, and send one another insulting emails. As the impulses and memories they have barely managed to repress begin to surface, their...
Plays Well With Others August 5, 2025
Annie Lewin is at the end of her rope. She’s a mother of three young children, her workaholic husband is never around, and the vicious competition for spots in New York City’s kindergartens is heating up.
An advice-columnist for a parenting website, Annie can’t help but judge the insanity of it...
Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books August 5, 2025
Beverly Underwood and her arch enemy, Lula Dean, live in the tiny town of Troy, Georgia, where they were born and raised. Now Beverly is on the school board, and Lula has become a local celebrity by embarking on a mission of censorship to rid the public libraries of all inappropriate books—none of...
The Namaste Club July 1, 2025
Just inland from Florida’s sun-splashed Treasure Coast is the Namaste Club yoga center. An exclusive oasis of palms, lakes, and adorable guest villas, it’s perfect for getaways where Shakti, a serenely blond Instagram influencer, holds yoga retreats for well-heeled Miami ladies. The Namaste Club is...
The Second Chance May 20, 2025
Nell has always known the day she's going to die. After a psychic predicted her death date twenty years ago, she has lived life accepting she would never see forty—embracing adventure and travelling the world, choosing fun over commitment and laying down roots.
So, when the fateful day comes, Nell...
Rejection September 17, 2024
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, *Rejection* is a provocative work of contemporary literary fiction and a plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex,...
The Terrifying Realm of the Possible March 19, 2024
Enter the wonderfully weird, always uncomfortable, side-splittingly funny world of The Terrifying Realm of the Possible, where your worst fears of who you are or might become are always just around the corner.
In these masterful short stories from the singular mind of the actor and comedian Brett...
Say Hello to My Little Friend March 5, 2024
Failed Pitbull impersonator Ismael Reyes—you can call him Izzy—might not be the Scarface type, but why should that keep him from trying? Growing up in Miami has shaped him into someone who dreams of being the King of the 305, with the money, power, and respect he assumes comes with it. After finding...
Less Is Lost July 27, 2023
For Arthur Less, life is going surprisingly well: he is a moderately accomplished novelist in a steady relationship with his partner, Freddy Pelu. But nothing lasts: the death of an old lover and a sudden financial crisis has Less running away from his problems yet again as he accepts a series of...
Blue Skies May 16, 2023
Here Boyle, one of the most inventive voices in contemporary fiction, transports us to water-logged and heat-ravaged coastal America, where Cat and her hapless, nature-loving family—including her eco-warrior parents, Ottilie and Frank; her brother, Cooper, an entomologist; and her...
Redshirts October 12, 2021
Ensign Andrew Dahl has just been assigned to the Universal Union Capital Ship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union since the year 2456. It’s a prestige posting, with the chance to serve on "Away Missions" alongside the starship’s famous senior officers. Life couldn’t be better...until Andrew...
The White Boy Shuffle September 7, 2021
Paul Beatty's hilarious and scathing debut novel, The White Boy Shuffle, is about Gunnar Kaufman, an awkward, black surfer bum who is moved by his mother from Santa Monica to urban West Los Angeles. There, he begins to undergo a startling transformation from neighborhood outcast to basketball...
Slumberland July 13, 2021
After creating the perfect beat, DJ Darky goes in search of Charles Stone, a little know avant-garde jazzman, to play over his sonic masterpiece. His quest brings him to a recently unified Berlin, where he stumbles through the city's dreamy streets ruminating about race, sex, love, Teutonic gods,...
Anxious People July 6, 2021
Looking at real estate isn’t usually a life-or-death situation, but an apartment open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes a group of strangers hostage. The captives include a recently retired couple who relentlessly hunt down fixer-uppers to avoid the painful truth...
I Don't Expect Anyone To Believe Me May 5, 2020
“I don’t expect anyone to believe me,” warns the narrator of this novel, a Mexican student called Juan Pablo Villalobos. He is about to fly to Barcelona on a scholarship when he’s kidnapped in a bookshop and whisked away by thugs to a basement. The gangsters are threatening his cousin—a wannabe...
The Captain and the Glory November 19, 2019
When the decorated Captain of a great ship descends the gangplank for the final time, a new leader, a man with a yellow feather in his hair, vows to step forward. Though he has no experience, no knowledge of nautical navigation or maritime law, and though he has often remarked he doesn't much like...
My Year of Rest and Relaxation June 25, 2019
A novel about a young woman's efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes.
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin,...
Adjustment Day May 7, 2019
Adjustment Day is an ingenious darkly comic work in which Chuck Palahniuk does what he does best: skewer the absurdities in our society. Geriatric politicians bring the nation to the brink of a third world war to control the burgeoning population of young males, while working-class men dream of...
First Person March 5, 2019
Kif Kehlmann, a young, penniless writer, thinks he’s finally caught a break when he’s offered $10,000 to ghostwrite the memoir of Siegfried “Ziggy” Heidl, the notorious con man and corporate criminal. Ziggy is about to go to trial for defrauding banks for $700 million; they have six weeks to write...
The Golden House June 5, 2018
When the mysterious Nero Golden arrives in New York with his three sons, he seems determined to erase his past and reinvent himself in America. Settling into a grand house in Greenwich Village, the family adopts new names and begins a life of wealth, secrecy, and self-invention.
Observed by their...
Invisible Monsters May 1, 2018
She’s a fashion model who has everything: a boyfriend, a career, a loyal best friend. But when a sudden freeway "accident" leaves her disfigured and incapable of speech, she goes from being the beautiful center of attention to being an invisible monster, so hideous that no one will acknowledge she...
Survivor May 1, 2018
Tender Branson―last surviving member of the Creedish Death Cult―is dictating his life story into the recorder of Flight 2039, cruising on autopilot at 39,000 feet somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. He is all alone in the airplane, which will crash shortly into the vast Australian outback.
But...
Less July 18, 2017
Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. 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...
Oh Honey July 1, 2017
Sharp, funny, and dark, this novel is about identity and connection. Jane is a telemarketer. She uses a different name each time, and soon it becomes clear that she is calling the same man again and again. Each call is a new battle between them, with him becoming angrier and more threatening. But...
Ending Up April 28, 2015
Everyone wants a comfortable place to die, and Kingsley Amis’s characters have found it in Tuppeny-happeny Cottage, where assorted septuagenarians have come together to see one another out the door of life. There’s grotesque Adela, whose sole passion is her cheapness; her brother Brigadier Bernard...
Take a Girl Like You April 28, 2015
Take a Girl Like You may well be Kingsley Amis’s most ambitious reckoning with the serious subject at the heart of his work: the sheer squalor—emotional, material, sexual, you name it—of modern life. It also introduces one of the rare unqualified good guys in Amis’s rogue-ridden world: Jenny Bunn, a...
The Blazing World November 4, 2014
After years of having her work ignored or dismissed by critics, artist Harriet Burden decides to conduct an experiment: she presents her own art behind three male masks, concealing her female identity.
Yet when the shows succeed and Burden steps forward for her triumphant reveal, she is betrayed by...
The Dog September 9, 2014
The author of the best-selling and award-winning Netherland now gives us his eagerly awaited, stunningly different new novel: a tale of alienation and heartbreak in Dubai.
Distraught by a breakup with his long-term girlfriend, our unnamed hero leaves New York to take an unusual job in a strange...
Doomed July 15, 2014
Damned, Book 2
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.
Her...
One Fat Englishman September 17, 2013
The hero of One Fat Englishman, a literary publisher and lapsed Catholic escaped from the pages of Graham Greene to the campus of Budweiser College in provincial Pennsylvania, is philandering, drunken, bigoted, and very very fat, not to mention in a state of continuous spluttering rage against...
Girl, 20 September 17, 2013
Kingsley Amis, along with being the funniest English writer of his generation was a great chronicler of the fads and absurdities of his age, and Girl, 20 is a delightfully incisive dissection of the flower-power phase of the 1960s. Amis’s antihero, Sir Roy Vandervane, a conductor and composer who...
The Alteration May 7, 2013
In Kingsley Amis’s virtuoso foray into virtual history it is 1976, but the modern world is a medieval relic, frozen in intellectual and spiritual time ever since Martin Luther was promoted to pope back in the sixteenth century. Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass...
How It All Began November 27, 2012
When Charlotte Rainsford, a retired schoolteacher, is accosted by a petty thief on a London street, the consequences ripple across the lives of acquaintances and strangers alike. A marriage unravels after an illicit love affair is revealed through an errant cell phone message; a posh yet financially...
Fra Keeler October 9, 2012
A man purchases a house, the house of Fra Keeler, moves in, and begins investigating the circumstances of the latter's death. Yet the investigation quickly turns inward, and the reality it seeks to unravel seems only to grow stranger, as the narrator pursues not leads but lines of thought, most...
Damned October 2, 2012
Damned, Book 1
Madison is the thirteen-year-old daughter of a narcissistic film star and a billionaire. Abandoned at her Swiss boarding school over Christmas, she dies over the holiday, presumably of a marijuana overdose. The last thing she remembers is getting into a town car and falling asleep. Then she's waking...
Lucky Jim October 2, 2012
Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century, Lucky Jim remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently misanthropic as when it first scandalized readers in 1954. This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university...
Nine Lives August 31, 2012
The killer's modus operandi is the same in each instance: strangulation, always with a guitar string, pulled tight from behind until life is taken. And though the murders are happening up and down the country, there is one other similarity that Inspector Wilkins can't help noticing. Each and every...
Tell-All May 31, 2011
For decades Hazie Coogan has tended to the outsized needs of Katherine "Miss Kathie" Kenton, veteran of multiple marriages, career comebacks, and cosmetic surgeries. But danger arrives with gentleman caller Webster Carlton Westward III, who worms his way into Miss Kathie’s heart—and boudoir. Soon,...