Life Satire

Best-selling, critically acclaimed author Mark Helprin's work has drawn favorable comparisons to an elite group of literary legends, including James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, and Thomas Mann. Helprin's sheer comic brilliance shines in this ingenious farce.

Dakota Jones had a difficult upbringing, but he escaped to the military as soon as he could. Now, after several tours of duty he has finally been discharged. Refusing to return home, he arrives in Sullivan's Crossing, where his brother, Cal, and sister, Sierra, have found a home. Nestled at the crossroads of the Colorado and Continental Divide Trails, the area attracts those looking for answers or direction or a new lease on life. Dakota will come to terms with his less-than-perfect family and will plant the roots he's never had.

The Lifeboat is the third novel in the Skidian Chronicles series. In The Lifeboat an asteroid is on a collision course with earth. It soon transpires the asteroid has been sent on its way by the Skidian first people who have uploaded themselves to a celestial version of the cloud and now define themselves as Transcendents. The Transcendents have a plan for humanity which doesn't include an asteroid strike killing us all off. The plot contains plenty of parallels with current world politics, including the introduction of a character based on a certain ginger haired world leader. The Lifeboat...

Finbar Dolan is lost and lonely. Except he doesn’t know it. Despite escaping his blue-collar Boston upbringing to carve out a mildly successful career at a Madison Avenue ad agency, he’s a bit of a mess and closing in on 40. He’s recently called off a wedding. Now, a few days before Christmas, he’s forced to cancel a long-postponed vacation in order to write, produce, and edit a Superbowl commercial for his diaper account in record time. Fortunately, it gets worse....

Someone committed a crime in a fantasy kingdom. The suspect is a fearsome dragon. Jimmy Delehanty and Enid O’Malley, hardboiled private detectives and dragon hunters, are on the case. Enid’s the brainy one. Jimmy? Definitely not. Along the way they meet a diverse cast of characters – a narcissistic woodsman, a grouchy leprechaun, a giant with body shame, a tortoise who can’t get over his childhood, a bad-tempered oak tree, and a witch named Francine. The High Heeled Dragon Hunter is a mashup of fantasy, detective story, and a healthy dose of romantic tension between two pulp fiction...

When Rachel Meyer, a 30-something foodie from New York, agrees to move to Mumbai with her Indian-born husband, Dhruv, she knows some culture shock is inevitable. Blessed with a curious mind and an independent spirit, Rachel is determined to learn her way around the hot, noisy, seemingly infinite metropolis she now calls home. But the expat American’s sense of adventure is sorely tested when her mother-in-law, Swati, suddenly arrives from Kolkata - 1,000 miles away - alone, with an even more shocking announcement: She’s left her husband of more than 40 years and moving in with them.

In the beginning, there was The Average American Male. Maxim called it "pure filth". Even Penthouse called it "appalling". The New York Times called it "the literary love child of Neil LaBute, Judy Blume, and Eminem". Now, Chad Kultgen's unforgettable antihero is back - this time as a married man.

A hard-hitting and no-holds-barred broadside, from the anchorman of the Fox News Channel's The O'Reilly Factor - what's good about America (plenty), what's bad (plenty still), and what's completely ridiculous (most everything else).

The Big Jewish Book for Jews brings together Jewish wit, inspiring tales, classic skills, and even pickle recipes, for the instruction and edification of the modern Jew. Readers will learn how to sacrifice a lamb unto the Lord, the rules of Canasta, how to build a pyramid (the Bernie Madoff and the Egyptian kind), and how not to accept the first table you are shown to in a restaurant.

After his wife, Sarah, dies, K. loses his metaphorical capacity, becoming so wedded to the notion of clarity that he infuriates everyone, friends and strangers alike. When he intervenes in an armed robbery, K. finds himself both an inadvertent hero and the star of a new reality television program. Together with Claire, a grocery store clerk with a sharp tongue and a yen for celebrity, he travels the country, ruffling feathers and gaining fame at the intersection of American politics and entertainment.

POV: You built your whole personality around kindness, candles, and curated captions… and now the internet wants your head. Poppy Lennox has it all: a flawless feed, a soft life aesthetic, and a wellness brand built on empathy, affirmation, and artisanal candles. But when a well-meaning act of “performative kindness” spirals into a full-blown public meltdown, Poppy finds herself rebranded — not as an influencer, but as a walking warning sign. Welcome to the downfall era. 🕯️ A charity brand with no receipts. 🥂 A brunch that backfired. 📱 An intern with the receipts. 🔥 ...

Kate and Scott’s marriage has always been a lot of fun, with alcohol at the heart of it. After all, what’s more entertaining than a good laugh and a large drink…or six? But recently, those relaxing drinks have become more crutch than comfort - and the couple have almost forgotten how to talk to each other sober. Then their teenage daughter Holly uploads a video of their humiliating drunken escapades, which gets picked up by YouTube superstar PinkyPud - and goes horrifyingly viral.

Jack Gladney is the creator and chairman of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. This is the story of his absurd life - a life that is going well enough until a chemical spill from a rail car releases an Airborne Toxic Event, and Jack is forced to confront his biggest fear: his own mortality. White Noise is an effortless combination of social satire and metaphysical dilemma in which Don DeLillo exposes our rampant consumerism, media saturation and novelty intellectualism.

Every summer, a once-sort-of-famous cartoonist named Rich Fischer leaves his wife and two kids behind to teach a class at a weeklong arts conference in a charming New England beachside town. It's a place where, every year, students - nature poets and driftwood sculptors, widowed seniors, teenagers away from home for the first time - show up to study with an esteemed faculty.

Start with a pinch of paradise. Add a cup of sweet and witty banter. Then drizzle with chocolate Weddings are about three things: The bride, the dress, and the cake. I’ve never been the marrying kind. Far too much commitment in happily ever afters. Dresses? Not for me. Not as long as leggings and yoga pants exist. But cake? I’ve got cake covered. Nobody does cake like I do. I don’t origami, I can’t change my own tires. But when it comes to cake? I’ll make a grown man cry. Cupcakes. Sponge Cakes. Angelfood. Devils Food. Anything in between. You show me a cake and I’ll make it my ...

The brilliant new novel from the Orange Prize-winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin centres on three generations of the Mandible family as a fiscal crisis hits a near-future America. It is 2029. The Mandibles have been counting on a sizable fortune filtering down when their 97-year-old patriarch dies. Yet America's soaring national debt has grown so enormous that it can never be repaid. Under siege from an upstart international currency, the dollar is in meltdown.

A mordantly funny, all-too-real novel in the vein of Tom Perotta and Emma Straub about a suburban American family that has to figure out how to survive themselves and their neighbors in the wake of a global calamity that upends all of modern life.

Mack McAllister has a $600 million 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 business. Katya Pasternack is hungry for a scoop that will drive traffic. An ambitious 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.

Actuary Penny Sinclair has a head for business, and she always makes rational decisions. Knowing that 60 percent of spouses cheat and 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, she wasn't too surprised when her husband had an affair. (That he did so with a woman their daughter's age? Well, that part did sting a bit.) She just made sure she got everything in the divorce, including their lovely old Victorian house. And as soon as her younger daughter has her hipster-fabulous wedding in the backyard, she's trading it in for a condo in downtown Chicago....

In a provocative novel addressing contemporary immigration by the sharply observant Lionel Shriver, a New York family takes in a Honduran migrant—who may or may not be the innocent paragon she claims to be.