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Curtains for Roy
Par Aaron Bushkowsky. 2014
Alex is a playwright suffering from writer’s block and harsh reviews. His best friend, Roy, is a theatre director with…
lung cancer and six months left to live. In pursuit of fresh air and great wine, they go on a road trip to the Okanagan Valley, where Roy rediscovers his passion for theatre. But when he decides to stage a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at a winery, disaster ensues: the woman cast in the lead is the winery owner’s wife and has no talent; wildfires encroach upon the surrounding forest; and Roy slips closer to death, one cigarette at a time. Curtains for Roy is a hilarious peek into the world of theatre, where the greatest drama is offstage and the best performances take place behind the curtain.Set for Life: A Novel
Par Andrew Ewell. 2024
A wryly funny and moving novel that captures the complexities of marriage, art, friendship, and the fictions we create in…
order to become the people we wish to be.A creative writing professor at a third-tier college in upstate New York is on his way home from a summer fellowship in France, where he&’s spent the last three months loafing around Bordeaux, tasting the many varieties of French wine at his disposal, and doing just about anything but actually working on his long overdue novel. A stopover in Brooklyn to see his and his wife&’s closest friends—John, a jaded poet-turned-lawyer with a dubious moral compass, and Sophie, a once-promising fiction writer with a complicated past and a mysterious allure—causes further trouble when he and Sophie wind up sleeping together while John is out serenading Brooklyn coeds with poems instead of preparing legal briefs. But instead of succumbing to his failures as a teacher, writer, and husband, an odd freedom begins to bubble up. Could a love affair be the answer he&’s been searching for? Could it offer the escape he needs from the department chair, Chet Bland, who&’s been breathing down his neck? Relief from the gossip of colleagues and generational tension with students? Respite from embarrassment over his wife, Debra Crawford, and her meteoric rise as a novelist? His escapades might even make the perfect raw material for an absolutely devastating novel, which would earn him tenure, wealth, and celebrity—everything he needs to be set for life. If only he could be the one to write it. A brilliant case of art imitating life, Andrew Ewell&’s gem of a debut is a hilarious and poignant tour de force that asks who owns whose story, skewers the fictions created from our lives and others&’, and brings a whole new meaning to the phrase &“publish or perish.&”Corey Fah Does Social Mobility: A Novel
Par Isabel Waidner. 2023
A novel that celebrates radical queer survival and gleefully takes a hammer to false notions of successThis is the story…
of Corey Fah, a writer who has hit the literary jackpot: their novel has just won the prize for the Fictionalization of Social Evils. But the actual trophy, and with it the funds, hovers peskily out of reach.Neon-beige, with UFO-like qualities, the elusive trophy leads Corey, with their partner Drew and eight-legged companion Bambi Pavok, on a spectacular quest through their childhood in the Forest and an unlikely stint on reality TV. Navigating those twin horrors, along with wormholes and time loops, Corey learns—the hard way—the difference between a prize and a gift.Following the Goldsmiths Prize–winning Sterling Karat Gold, Isabel Waidner’s bold and buoyant new novel is about coming into one’s own, the labor of love, the tendency of history to repeat itself, and what ensues when a large amount of cultural capital is suddenly deposited in a place it has never been before.Imagine a world where your position in society depended on what bit of the colour spectrum you could see. This…
is the world inhabited by Eddie Russett (red, middle-level) and Jane Grey (monochromatic, lowest in society). Eddie and Jane must negotiate the delicate Chromatic politics of society to find out what the 'Something that Happened' actually was, how society got to be this way, and crucially, is there Somewhere Else beyond their borders - and if there is, could there be Someone Else, too, someone whose unseen hand has been guiding the fortunes and misfortunes of the nation for the past 500 years?It's a tale of a young couple's thirst for justice and answers in an implacably rigid society, where the prisoners are also the guards, and cages of convention bind the citizens to only one way of thinking - or suffer the consequences. . ..Dear Committee Members: A novel (The Dear Committee Trilogy #1)
Par Julie Schumacher. 2014
&“Like Richard Russo&’s Straight Man this book has a lot to say about the humanities in American colleges and universities….…
Very funny and also moving.&” —Tom Perrotta, New York PostA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR and Boston Globe Finally a novel that puts the "pissed" back into "epistolary." Jason Fitger is a beleaguered professor of creative writing and literature at Payne University, a small and not very distinguished liberal arts college in the midwest. His department is facing draconian cuts and squalid quarters, while one floor above them the Economics Department is getting lavishly remodeled offices. His once-promising writing career is in the doldrums, as is his romantic life, in part as the result of his unwise use of his private affairs for his novels. His star (he thinks) student can't catch a break with his brilliant (he thinks) work Accountant in a Bordello, based on Melville's Bartleby. In short, his life is a tale of woe, and the vehicle this droll and inventive novel uses to tell that tale is a series of hilarious letters of recommendation that Fitger is endlessly called upon by his students and colleagues to produce, each one of which is a small masterpiece of high dudgeon, low spirits, and passive-aggressive strategies. We recommend Dear Committee Members to you in the strongest possible terms.Don&’t miss Julie Schumacher's new novel, The English Experience, coming soon.A wildly over-the-top social satire reimagining the mad misadventures of the iconic royal cousins King Ludwig and Empress Sisi, from…
the incomparable Jac Jemc.History knows them as King Ludwig II of Bavaria and Empress Elizabeth of Austria, icons of the late nineteenth century who died young and left behind magnificent portraits and palaces. But to each other they were Ludwig and Sisi, cousins who shared a passion for beauty and a stubborn refusal to submit to the roles imposed upon them.Ludwig, simultaneously spoiled and punished for his softness and “unmanly” interests, falls hard for the operas of Richard Wagner and neglects his state duties in the pursuit of art. Sisi, married at the age of sixteen to her beloved Franzl, bristles at the restrictions of her elevated position, the value placed on her beauty, and the simultaneous expectation that she ravage her body again and again in childbirth. Both absurdly vain, both traumatized by the demands of their roles, Sisi and Ludwig struggle against the ideals they are expected to embody, and resist through extravagance, petulance, performance, and frivolity.A tragicomic tour de force, Empty Theatre immerses readers in Ludwig and Sisi’s rarefied, ridiculous, restrictive world—where the aesthetics of excess belie the isolation of its inhabitants. With wit, pathos, and imagination, Jac Jemc takes us on an unforgettable journey through two extraordinary parallel lives and the complex, tenuous friendship that links them.How I Won a Nobel Prize: A Novel
Par Julius Taranto. 2023
Named One of the Best Books of the Year by VOGUE and VOX A "very funny, very good" (B. J. Novak) debut…
novel about a graduate student who follows her disgraced mentor to a university that gives safe harbor to scholars of ill repute, igniting a crisis of work and a test of her conscience (and marriage) Helen is one of the brightest minds of her generation: a young physicist on a path to solve high-temperature superconductivity (which could save the planet). When she discovers that her brilliant adviser is involved in a sex scandal, Helen is torn: should she give up on her work with him? Or should she accompany him to a controversial university, founded by a provocateur billionaire, that hosts academics other schools have thrown out? Helen decides she must go—her work is too important. She brings along her partner, Hew, who is much less sanguine about living on an island where the disgraced and deplorable get to operate with impunity. On campus, Helen finds herself drawn to an iconoclastic older novelist, while Hew stews in an increasingly radical protest movement. Their rift deepens until both confront choices that will reshape their lives—and maybe the world. Irreverent, generous, anchored in character, and provocative without being polemical, How I Won a Nobel Prize illuminates the compromises we&’ll make for progress, what it means to be a good person, and how to win a Nobel Prize. Turns out all of it would be simple—if you could run the numbers.Zuleika Dobson: Or An Oxford Love Story (classic Reprint) (Barnes And Noble Digital Library)
Par Max Beerbohm. 2015
This satirical novel of life and love at Oxford University is one of the Modern Library&’s 100 Best Novels Max…
Beerbohm&’s only novel is a comic masterpiece set in the privileged environs of Judas College, Oxford. When beautiful prestidigitator Zuleika Dobson gains admittance to the all-male campus, romance is suddenly in the air. But the smitten undergraduates are out of luck, because this femme fatale can only love a man unaffected by her charms. The snobbish and taciturn Duke of Dorset appears up to the challenge, but his wall of indifference crumbles when Zuleika falls for him. She immediately rejects him for reciprocating her feelings, of course, and the Duke is driven to despair. He resolves to kill himself to teach her a lesson, but one small problem remains: Zuleika thinks suicide is romantic—and every lovesick undergraduate at Oxford is dying to agree with her. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.Red Pyramid: Selected Stories
Par Vladimir Sorokin. 2024
Extended comic turns like The Queue and relentless, mind-bending, genre-shredding extravaganzas like Ice Trilogy have established Vladimir Sorokin as a…
master of the contemporary novel. It is to Sorokin&’s short fiction, however, that readers must turn to encounter the wildest and most unsettling of his inventions and provocations. Sorokin is a virtuoso of parody and pastiche, as well as a poet of the black sites where the human soul stands exposed to its own incontinent desires, and Red Pyramid spans the whole of his career, from his emergence in the Soviet Union as a member of Moscow&’s artistic underground to his late preeminence as an observer and interpreter of the Putin era, with its squalid parade of gruesome folly and unhinged violence. Included here are queasy tour-de-forces, like the early &“Obelisk,&” a story as scatological as it is conceptual; the notorious &“A Month in Dachau,&” which earned Sorokin his sobriquet as the Russian Sade; and profoundly unsettling texts like &“Tiny Tim,&” where tenderness is inseparable from horror. Sorokin&’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, n+1, Harper&’s Magazine, and The Baffler. This is the first time they have been collected in English.Blue Lard
Par Vladimir Sorokin. 2000
Blue Lard is an act of desecration. Blue Lard is what's left after the towering masterpieces of Russian literature have…
been blown to smithereens, the most graphic, shocking, controversial, and celebrated book to be published in Russia since the end of Communism. Denounced as an abomination on publication in 1999—a crowd of angry Putin supporters gathered in front of Moscow&’s Bolshoi Theater to toss shredded copies of Sorokin&’s books into an enormous papier-mâché toilet—this ferocious takedown of Russian greatness has since found its way into the canon of Russian literature itself. The book begins in a futuristic laboratory where genetic scientists speak in a dialect of Russian mixed with Chinese. There they work to clone famous Russian writers, who are then made to produce texts in the style of their forebears. The goal of this &“script-process&” is not the texts themselves but the blue lard that collects in the small of their backs as they write. This substance is to be used to power reactors on the moon—that is, until a sect of devout nationalists breaks in to steal the blue lard, planning to send it back in time to an alternate version of the Soviet Union, one that exists on the margins of a Europe conquered by a long-haired Hitler with the ability to shoot electricity from his hands. What will come of this blue lard? Who will finally make use of its mysterious powers? Max Lawton&’s translation of Blue Lard, the first into English, captures this key work in all its grotesque, havoc-making, horrifying, visceral intensity.Can civilization survive the untimely demise of God? &“A buoyant romp . . . superlatively intelligent and entertaining&” (The Baltimore Sun). Completing…
the World Fantasy Award–winning author&’s darkly comic trilogy, The Eternal Footman brings us into a future world in which God&’s skull is in orbit, competing with the moon, and a plague of &“death awareness&” spreads across the Western hemisphere. As the United States sinks into apocalypse, two people fight to preserve life and sanity. One is Nora Burkhart, a schoolteacher who will stop at nothing to save her only son, Kevin. The other is the genius sculptor Gerard Korty, who struggles to create a masterwork that will heal the metaphysical wounds of the age. A few highlights: a bloody battle on a New Jersey golf course between Jews and anti-Semites; a theater troupe&’s stirring dramatization of the Gilgamesh epic; and a debate between Martin Luther and Erasmus. And a chilling villain in the person of Dr. Adrian Lucido—founder of a new pagan church in Mexico, and inventor of a cure worse than any disease . . . &“Morrow hilariously joins the ranks of the great satirists.&” —The Denver Post &“[An] insanely ingenious plot, reminiscent, variously, of B-science-fiction movies in the 1950s, Evelyn Waugh&’s The Loved One, and Terry Southern at his most charmingly deranged.&” —Kirkus Reviews &“Any novel that springs from a sparkling intellect rather than a dreary neurosis is cause for celebration, and The Eternal Footman, with its load of truth and laughter, justifies a considerable quantity of champagne.&” —Tom Robbins, New York Times–bestselling author of Even Cowgirls Get the BluesSaint Jack: A Novel
Par Paul Theroux. 2014
An American pimp in Singapore finds his life of pleasure turning against him in this comic novel by the acclaimed…
author of The Great Railway Bazaar. Once a small-time American hustler, Jack Flowers found his calling when he jumped into the Straits of Malacca and hitched a ride to Singapore. Deftly identifying the fastest route to fame along the seedy port, Jack started hiring girls out to lonely tourists, sailors, bachelors—anyone with some loose change and a wandering eye. Some years later, he&’s running two pleasure palaces and something of a legend among those in the know. But just as Jack is riding high, a shocking tumble toward the brink of death leaves him shaken, depressed and vulnerable. Desperate to pull himself back up, he&’s quick to do business with Edwin Shuck, a powerful American working to take down an unsuspecting general. Marked with Paul Theroux&’s trademark biting humor, Saint Jack is an audacious tale of sex, faith, guilt, innocence, middle-age, and the meaning of it all.Make Russia Great Again: A Novel
Par Christopher Buckley. 2020
In &“the Trump satire we&’ve been waiting for&” (The Washington Post), award-winning and bestselling author of Thank You for Smoking…
delivers a hilarious and whipsmart fake memoir by Herb Nutterman—Donald Trump&’s seventh chief of staff—who has written the ultimate tell-all about Trump and Russia.Herb Nutterman never intended to become Donald Trump&’s White House chief of staff. Herb served the Trump Organization for twenty-seven years, holding jobs in everything from a food and beverage manager at the Trump Magnifica to being the first general manager of the Trump Bloody Run Golf Course. And when his old boss asks &“his favorite Jew&” to take on the daunting role of chief of staff, Herb, spurred on by loyalty agrees.But being the chief of staff is a lot different from being a former hospitality expert. Soon, Herb finds himself deeply involved in Russian intrigue, deflecting rumors about Mike Pence&’s high school involvement in a Satanic cult, and leading President Trump&’s reelection campaign.What Nutterman experiences is outrageous, outlandish, and otherwise unbelievable—therefore making it a deadly accurate account of being the chief of staff during the Trump administration. With hilarious jabs at the biggest world leaders and Washington politics overall, Make Russia Great Again is a timely political satire from &“one of the funniest writers in the English language&” (Tom Wolfe).The Walls of Jericho (Dover Thrift Editions: Black History)
Par Rudolph Fisher. 2024
Rudolph Fisher’s outstanding debut novel The Walls of Jericho, published in 1928, explores race and class issues during the 1920s…
Harlem Renaissance through the lens of Black lawyer Fred Merrit, who buys a home in a white neighborhood bordering Harlem. What progresses is a satirical journey through Merrit’s life as he encounters the racism of his new white neighbors as well as racism and classism among the residents of Black Harlem. This edition includes four of Fisher’s short stories that capture the Black Jazz Age urban experience, initially published in the iconic magazine The Atlantic Monthly: “City of Refuge,” “The Promised Land,” “Ringtail,” and “Blades of Steel.”Say Hello to My Little Friend
Par Jennine Capó Crucet. 2024
Scarface meets Moby Dick in this groundbreaking, darkly comic novel about a young man's attempt to capitalize on his mother's…
murky legacy - a story steeped in Miami's marvelous and sinister magic.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 himself at the mercy of a cease-and-desist letter from Pitbull's legal team and living in his aunt's garage-turned-efficiency, Izzy embarks on an absurd quest to turn himself into a modern-day Tony Montana.When Izzy's efforts lead him to the tank that houses Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquarium, she proves just how powerful she and the water surrounding her really are -permeating everything from Miami's sinking streets to Izzy's memories to the very heart of the novel itself. What begins as Izzy's story turns into a super-saturated fever dream as sprawling and surreal as the Magic City, one as sharp as an iguana's claws, and as menacing as a killer whale's teeth. As the truth surrounding Izzy's boyhood escape from Cuba surfaces, the novel reckons with the forces of nature, with the limits and absence of love, and with the dangers of pursuing a tragic inheritance. Wildly narrated and expertly rendered, Say Hello to My Little Friend is Jennine Capó Crucet's most daring, heart-breaking, and fearless book yet.Praise for Jennine Capó Crucet'This is definitely a young writer to watch for-sassy, smart, with an unerring ear for a community's voices, its losses, its over-the-top extravagances, and its poignant struggles to understand itself in a new land' JULIA ALVAREZ, author of In the Time of Butterflies'Jennine Capó Crucet is a wonderful writer... wise and honest... furious and funny' LAUREN GROFF, author of Fates and Furies and Matrix'Jennine Capó Crucet is an electrifying new talent-she's funny, she's smart, and she knows how to tell great stories' CURTIS SITTENFELDThe Gulf
Par Adam De Souza. 2024
Staring down the final days of high school, a group of friends run away from home in order to join…
a commune in this YA graphic novel for ages 14 and up. Stand by Me meets Catcher in the Rye by way of Skim.Ever since Oli found a pamphlet for a remote island commune as a kid, it's all she can think about. Now that she's nearing the end of high school, feeling frustrated with the mounting pressure to choose a career and follow a path she has no interest in, the desire to escape it all has been steadily increasing.Everything comes to a head when Oli's relationship with her best friend goes south and she claps back at a school bully with more than just words. Oli flees to find the commune on a Gulf Island off the coast of Vancouver, taking with her Milo, who can't help but hide his feelings behind the safety of a video camera, and Alvin, a shy teen who sees more than he lets on. Behind them trails Liam, Oli's ex-best-friend and sometimes love interest, who wants to apologize for the way things went down. All four are grappling with a world that cannot be changed . . . and simply trying to find their place in it.This YA anti-coming-of-age road trip adventure, by talented up-and-coming comic artist Adam de Souza, captures at once the angst and humor of being a teen during a time of great transition.Western Alliances: A Novel
Par Wilton Barnhardt. 2023
From the New York Times-bestselling author of Lookaway, Lookaway, Wilton Barnhardt’s Western Alliances is a vivid portrait of a wealthy…
family set against the backdrop of the 2008 financial crisis. This laugh-out-loud, darkly funny novel follows the Costa family—whose members are every bit as richly absurd as the characters in HBO’s Succession.Salvador, the patriarch, runs one of Wall Street’s biggest banks the summer before everything collapses; Roberto and Rachel, his two children, have never worked a day in their lives; and Lena, his ex-wife, is a scheming hypochondriac. Part travelogue, part epic family drama, the novel follows Roberto and Rachel across Europe as the two dilettantes come to terms with their father’s choices and the repercussions of his actions.Oozing with his signature satire and biting wit, Barnhardt invites readers on a literary romp from an elegant Paris apartment to a hilariously-inept London hotel, ancient churches and crypts to gleaming Mediterranean coasts, hot dog stands in Providence, RI to the best places in Manhattan, and terrifying encounters in the Serbian countryside to dangerous liaisons in Moscow, as two grown-up rich kids are forced to come of age at last. In Western Alliances Barnhardt he delivers an un-put-down-able saga examining privilege, loyalty, ambition, and what family members owe to one another.Plumage from Pegasus: The 25th Anniversary Collection
Par Paul Di Filippo. 2019
&“Nothing is sacred to Di Filippo, as shown in this hilarious collection of parodies and other satirical writings that affectionately…
send up the SF genre.&” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) No one has a finger on the pulse of the future quite like Paul Di Filippo, and here he sets his sights on humanity&’s path in the wake of social media, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality—all with tongue firmly in cheek. In an age of poetry slams and publicity stunts, an author struggles to upgrade his stale live appearances in &“Pimp My Read.&” Let &“Kozmic Kickstarter&” put you on the ground floor of such futuristic projects as a chorus of doppelgängers, a live-role-playing simulation of the entire canon of ancient Star Wars movies, and more! In &“The Very Last Miserabilist in Paradise,&” a science fiction writer—used to delivering bad news about the future—searches for meaning in an era of unprecedented sanity, in which war and inequality, hatred and prejudice have vanished. Take &“A Walk on the Mild Side&” with a new production company that seeks to soothe an overstimulated populace with cozy new translations of old classics, such as Game of Thrones which features nothing but direwolf puppies being bathed by the Stark family. Head into the future with your sense of humor intact thanks to the thirty stories in this remarkable collection from a master of satirical science fiction.Diary of a Big Bad Wolf
Par Ben Miller. 2024
Your favourite fairytales from a BIG, BAD point of view. Pre-order the brand-new Fairytale Diary from bestselling author, Ben Miller,…
now! The big, bad wolf hasn&’t had a great winter. He's cold, lonely and hungry . . . But things are about to change - he&’s going to take the Fairytale Woods by STORM. But while he knows he&’s BIG and BAD, no one else seems to be scared of him, they just keep meddling with his plans – the troll under the bridge, the three annoying pigs, and that pesky Little Red Riding Hood! This is going to take all his brain power and his most cunning smile, to catch Grandma and reclaim his place at the top of the food chain! Turn the page, share the adventure in a hilarious and magical story for all the family, illustrated by Elisa Paganelli.Yellowface: A Reese's Book Club Pick
Par R. F Kuang. 2023
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK“Hard to put down, harder to forget.” — Stephen King, #1 New York Times bestselling…
authorWhite lies. Dark humor. Deadly consequences… Bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn’t write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American—in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from R.F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel. Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena’s a literary darling. June Hayward is literally nobody. Who wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks.So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I.So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn’t this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That’s what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.But June can’t get away from Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June’s (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface grapples with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media. R.F. Kuang’s novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.