I'm a journalist who worked as a daily newspaper reporter and editor for 40 years for the Daily Mail in London, the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, the Sunday Australian in Sydney, and most recently the Vancouver Sun in Canada. My first novel was an erotic comedy, not much in that genre since Chaucer wrote The Miller’s Tale. My second, River Boy is about a skinny Canadian kid who can walk on water. No one has had that gig for 2000 years — and we’re not sure about the last guy. But is River Boy a brilliant illusionist or the long-awaited Second Coming? And if he is the new Messiah, why does the Christian church want to kill him?
It’s about consensual spanking as foreplay. Hose down the neighbours, retire the back rub, this is more sexy than a massage, more sensual, more visceral, more tactile. Spank is also a laugh-out-loud comedy, with quirky characters and bizarre scenarios involved in the improbable adventures of a middle-aged retired civil servant, and the desires of a beautiful Cambridge graduate with a dark sexual past.
Where else will you meet a titled lady who makes pornographic movies, an aspiring Hollywood movie actress who sells telephone sex; a librarian with a sideline of entertaining ‘assertive older gentlemen’; and a dominatrix at a posh S&M club who really wants to be a ballet dancer.
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Chaucer didn’t invent erotica, but he must be the all-time bestselling writer of medieval smut. He wrote The Miller’s Tale to entertain fellow travellers on a pilgrimage. I bet they lapped it up. This bawdy celebration of lust and trickery is as rude — and hilarious — as it was 400 years ago.
Believe me, you don’t want to hang out with Ignatius J Riley. Fat, delusional, slothful, indolent, insufferable — even his mother struggles to love him — yet you will find yourself cheering him on as he trundles a hotdog cart through the streets of New Orleans in search of love and meaningful employment. Sadly, the author committed suicide eight years before his widely rejected manuscript was eventually published and he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Pierre’s adolescent high schooler makes JD Salinger’s protagonist in Catcher in the Rye look like a valedictorian. Just as (finally) he is about to score with a teenage crush, who has hitherto rejected him, he ejaculates prematurely.
"My world dissolves under my belly with a jet like stung snakes squirting out through their own eye holes. Then quiet. Just a slow ocean moving slowly, and spit-curry after-poon drying cold on my face."
What’s worse, at that precise moment, cops burst into the room, catching him with his pants down, and arresting him for a mass killing he didn’t commit.
You couldn’t make this stuff up unless you’re a comic genius like DBC Pierre
Everything you want to know about being Jewish, brilliant, vengeful, Jewish, neurotic, charming, and being a Canadian writer in Bohemian Paris in the fifties. Richler’s hero Barney Panofsky is the portrait of a man who wasted his life, but had a great time doing it. A self-proclaimed ‘impenitent rotter’, he is redeemed by his unwavering regret at losing the love of his third wife. Oh, the carousing, the romance, the revelry. How I wish I had been there.
Forget everything you know about farm machinery manufacture in Ukraine, this is a story of growing old disgracefully (woohoo!) in which a randy old widower of 84 weds a voluptuous 36-year-old blonde “golden hair, superior breasts... when you see her you will understand,” he tells his daughter. After all, he’s known her for three months and she has a penchant for green silk underwear.
Wise, funny, warm, bitchy, author Lewycka absolutely nails this story about old country familial love and frailty.
Not sure what she knows about Ukrainian tractors, but who cares? She has a poet’s love of language and humanity.
5,888 authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them. Browse their picks for the best books about romantic love, London, and bildungsroman.
We think you will like 1984, Catch-22, and Jernigan if you like this list.
From Konstantin's list on the worst ways the world could end in a book.
This book is really exciting and appealed to my love for espionage, political intrigue, and all things dystopian. Although it’s a political commentary, the book is a suspenseful narrative following an ordinary man who begins to peel back the curtain of his society and the assumptions he has made of it. While the book opened my eyes to the potential of abuse of nations and governments, it also taught me of the dangers of indoctrination that can sometimes even be apolitical. Most of all, Winston Smith to this day is one of my most beloved characters for whom my heart broke continually for in this book.
From Robert's list on memoirs, essays, and fiction inspiring me to write.
Catch-22 is a laugh-out-loud funny and grotesquely horrific antiwar satire that exposes the absurdity of the military bureaucracy and of war. It focuses on Yossarian, a WWII bombardier who doesn’t want to fly any more missions. The book is so complex and detailed you’ll find something new in it with each reading. The title, meaning a dilemma with no solution, has found its way into the English language—you can look it up in Webster’s. The catch-22 in Catch-22 is this: If you wanted to get out of combat duty you had to be crazy. But anybody who wanted to get out of combat duty wasn’t really crazy. Many years ago, when I was writing about the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex, I often turned to Catch-22 for inspiration.
From D.B.C.'s list on misfits and wretched excess.
Being lured into another world by a strong first-person voice turns a book into a wide-open door, and I love going through strange doors. This one opens onto a richly detailed middle-class mess who’s also an exceptional host, recently widowed alcoholic single-parent Peter Jernigan. He takes us on a ride through suburban New Jersey as passengers in his mind, narrating his life’s unravelling with brutal whimsy and humour. This was one of the most helpless relationships I’ve had with a character in a book. A privilege and a reminder of the balancing act we all face.