Norman Mailer once wrote about the “nobility” of the baser forms of speech. The author, in this engaging memoir of wanderlust, demonstrates how it works: “Before the sun reaches the horizon it is absorbed by a thick brown haze that... Read More

The line between faith and sadism is explored in this comic novel about a gay writer from San Francisco who accepts a speaking engagement as a “Jewish humanist” at a Bible college in Minnesota. When a snowstorm traps him there,... Read More

Twelve-year-old Nunzio Paradiso is sprawled beneath a wrecked 1973 Pontiac Bonneville, hooking it up for towing, when he hears someone speak in Italian. “Dio,” the voice says. A moment later it comes again. “Dio.” The explanation... Read More

Michael Smith works at the Kincaid Clinic, a hospital for the mentally ill that provides the setting for much of this novel. One of his patients explains that a riddle drove him insane: “What can go up a chimney down but not down a... Read More

One day in the mid-1970s a group of tabloid writers and editors were drinking at a dingy Chicago bar. They worked for the National News Extra, the tabloid that on Dec. 8, 1974 published the headline that gave this book its title. They... Read More

Even if truth is stranger than fiction, Townsend has been giving truth a run for its money in the person of Adrian Mole, her fictitious English diarist whose life and predicaments were nicely captured in his self-description from an... Read More

This debut novel starts out calmly enough, as if the author is driving a taxi slowly down a New York street, pointing out quirky neighborhood characters. Then, when the introductions are over, she puts the pedal to the metal, there’s a... Read More

For personal glory and to save his country from destruction, Maximilian Lamm, professor of physics in Nazi Germany, wants to build an atomic bomb. Contemptuous of Nazis and their fixation on absurd racial theories, he nevertheless joins... Read More