Life Satire

The Ravioli Racketeer New Jersey's "Biggest" Mobster He craved respect. He chased power. He cooked up something criminal. Organized crime has long cast a shadow over Northern New Jersey, where the mob once infiltrated politics, unions, and even law enforcement. In the fictional city of Riverview—a gritty stand-in for many real towns—the lines between tradition, corruption, and ambition blur in dangerous ways. Enter: The Ravioli Racketeer. Part wiseguy, part wannabe, this larger-than-life figure spent decades striving to earn his place in the Cosa Nostra's inner circle. While one best-...

Nine-year-old Meena can't wait to grow up and break free from her parents. But, as the daughter of the only Punjabi family in the mining village of Tollington, her struggle for independence is different from most. Meena wants fish fingers and chips, not chapati and dhal; she wants an English Christmas, not the usual interminable Punjabi festivities. But more than anything, she wants to roam the backyards of working-class Tollington with feisty Anita Rutter and her gang.

An utterly charming and tender story of the disparate tenants of a Brooklyn brownstone and the community they form around their ageing landlord when their home is suddenly threatened. Within a charming if dilapidated Brooklyn brownstone live a family of sorts: beautiful agoraphobe Adeleine, who surrounds herself with the past....

Danny Johnson, a writer whose career never materialized, moves with his wife and children to Cascade Falls, a water-filled golf community in the bone-dry desert outside of Phoenix. Grudgingly going to work for his father Ted, the Elmer Gantry of home development, Danny's quest for stability ultimately comes up short. His marriage begins to fray and the housing market goes bust, forcing him and those around him to examine their lives anew.

A child ridiculed for his weight, a son overshadowed by a favored brother, a husband who falls short of his wife’s ambitions, an old man with a broken heart.... As Orbits' life passes, he doggedly pursues a simple dream - a little place in the country where a family might thrive - while wondering if he can ever shake free of the tragedies that seem to define him. Fatboy Fall Down is the lush and heartbreaking musings of a man trying to understand his place in the world. Though shot through with sadness, Fatboy Fall Down is also full of surprising moments of wry humor.

Mack McAllister has a $600 million dollar idea. His mindfulness app, TakeOff, is already the hottest thing in tech, and he's about to launch a new and improved version that promises to bring investors running and may turn his brainchild into a $1 billion dollar business - in startup parlance, an elusive unicorn. Katya Pasternack is hungry for a scoop that will drive traffic. An ambitious young journalist at a gossipy tech blog, Katya knows that she needs more than another PR friendly puff piece to make her the go-to byline for industry news.

An irreverent and deeply moving comedy set in New York about friendship, fertility and fighting for one's sanity in a toxic workplace. Jen has reached her early 30s and has all but abandoned a once-promising painting career when, spurred by the economic crisis, she takes a poorly defined job at a feminist nonprofit. The foundation's aim is to empower women, but staffers spend all their time devising acronyms for imaginary programs, ruthlessly undermining one another and stroking the ego of their boss, the larger-than-life celebrity philanthropist Leora Infinitas.

The riotously funny new novel from Penny Smith.Miranda Blake is divorced. At 45, things are starting to head south. She's toying with the idea of Botox. Toying with the idea of facial surgery. Toying with getting a job. Toying with getting a toy boy. The only block to all those things is her stiff, uppity daughter, 23 year old Lucy, who takes after her father. Pompous, is how Miranda describes it. (Sane, is how Lucy sees it.)

Men have deserted women often, and perhaps Natalie Harris, whose husband ran off with the local carnival queen, should not have been surprised. But there she was - charming, well-meaning, and well-dressed - suddenly without gas to drive her children to school or money to pay their tuition. True. Natalie had had a lover for a number of years, but they saw each other only on Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. Still, she felt wronged and helpless when her husband left her; she was the kind of woman other men, attached to other women, liked to help - on their own terms, of course.