Category
Satirical Fiction and Parodies
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
Myra Breckinridge 2019
So begins the irresistible testimony of the luscious instructor of Empathy and Posture at Buck Loner's Academy of Drama and Modeling. Myra has a secret that only her surgeon shares; a passion for classic Hollywood films, which she regards as the supreme achievements of Western culture; and a sacred...
The Mystic Masseur 2002
In this slyly funny and lavishly inventive novel—his first—V. S. Naipaul chronicles the ascent of the impecunious village masseur Ganesh Ramsumair. To understand a little better, one has to realize that in the 1940s masseurs were the island’s medical practitioners of choice. As one character...
The Namaste Club 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...
Northanger Abbey 1992
Northanger Abbey is a perfectly aimed literary parody that is also a withering satire of the commercial aspects of marriage among the English gentry at the turn of the nineteenth century. But most of all, it is the story of the initiation into life of its naïve but sweetly appealing heroine,...
One Fat Englishman 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...
Our Gang 2001
In the character of Trick E. Dixon, Roth shows us a man who outdoes the severest cynic, a peace-loving Quaker and believer in the sanctity of human life who doesn’t have a problem with killing unarmed women and children in self-defense. A master politician with an honest sneer, he finds himself...
Apex Hides the Hurt 2007
The town of Winthrop has decided it needs a new name. The resident software millionaire wants to call it New Prospera; the mayor wants to return to the original choice of the founding black settlers; and the town’s aristocracy sees no reason to change the name at all. What they need, they realize,...
Pygmy 2010
A gang of adolescent terrorists, a spelling bee, and a terrible plan masquerading as a science project: This is Operation Havoc.
Pygmy is one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the US disguised as exchange students. Living with American families to blend in, they are...
Rejection 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,...
An irresistible mix of imagination, satire, and humor, these stories by acclaimed Japanese author Yasutaka Tsutsui imagine the consequences of a world where the fantastic and the mundane collide.
The opening story, “The Dabba Dabba Tree,” details the hilarious side effects of a small conical tree...
Tell-All 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,...
A Time to Be Born 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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
Myra Breckinridge May 21, 2019
So begins the irresistible testimony of the luscious instructor of Empathy and Posture at Buck Loner's Academy of Drama and Modeling. Myra has a secret that only her surgeon shares; a passion for classic Hollywood films, which she regards as the supreme achievements of Western culture; and a sacred...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
Pygmy April 20, 2010
A gang of adolescent terrorists, a spelling bee, and a terrible plan masquerading as a science project: This is Operation Havoc.
Pygmy is one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the US disguised as exchange students. Living with American families to blend in, they are...
Salmonella Men on Planet Porno January 12, 2010
An irresistible mix of imagination, satire, and humor, these stories by acclaimed Japanese author Yasutaka Tsutsui imagine the consequences of a world where the fantastic and the mundane collide.
The opening story, “The Dabba Dabba Tree,” details the hilarious side effects of a small conical tree...
In Persuasion Nation March 6, 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.
Apex Hides the Hurt January 9, 2007
The town of Winthrop has decided it needs a new name. The resident software millionaire wants to call it New Prospera; the mayor wants to return to the original choice of the founding black settlers; and the town’s aristocracy sees no reason to change the name at all. What they need, they realize,...
Fight Club October 17, 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...
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil September 6, 2005
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...
The Green Man August 30, 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...
Cosmopolis April 6, 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...
The Mystic Masseur January 8, 2002
In this slyly funny and lavishly inventive novel—his first—V. S. Naipaul chronicles the ascent of the impecunious village masseur Ganesh Ramsumair. To understand a little better, one has to realize that in the 1940s masseurs were the island’s medical practitioners of choice. As one character...
A Friend of the Earth September 1, 2001
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...
Our Gang May 29, 2001
In the character of Trick E. Dixon, Roth shows us a man who outdoes the severest cynic, a peace-loving Quaker and believer in the sanctity of human life who doesn’t have a problem with killing unarmed women and children in self-defense. A master politician with an honest sneer, he finds himself...
Northanger Abbey November 3, 1992
Northanger Abbey is a perfectly aimed literary parody that is also a withering satire of the commercial aspects of marriage among the English gentry at the turn of the nineteenth century. But most of all, it is the story of the initiation into life of its naïve but sweetly appealing heroine,...