I’ve always loved satire. In college, I wrote and performed comedy sketches as part of a two-man team, and most of my work features at least some comic elements. For example, my novel The Whale: A Love Story is a serious historical novel about the relationship between Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne that also offers moments of comedy to honor Melville's comic spirit (Moby-Dick, while ultimately tragic, is a very funny book). The most serious subjects usually contain elements of the absurd, and the books I love find humor in even the gravest situations.
In the summer of 1850, Herman Melville finds himself hounded by creditors and afraid his writing career might be over. His last three novels have been commercial failures, and the critics have turned against him. In despair, Melville takes his family for a vacation to his cousin’s farm in the Berkshires, where he meets Nathaniel Hawthorne, and his life turns upside down.
This book chronicles the fervent love affair that grows out of that serendipitous afternoon. Melville dedicated Moby-Dick to Hawthorne, and this novel fills in the story behind that dedication with deep historical research and exquisite emotional precision. An exuberant tale of longing and passion, the book captures a transformative relationship, long the subject of speculation, between two of our most enduring authors.
Set in Moscow on the eve of the Russian Revolution, this novel’s plot does not scream “funny,” but it’s one of the most deeply funny books I’ve ever read.
An English printer living in Russia wakes up one day to find that his wife has left him and taken their children away, and revolutionaries have broken into his shop to print manifestoes.
From this unlikely setup, Fitzgerald spins a hilarious tale of loss, love, and redemption.
From the Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Offshore’, ‘The Blue Flower’ and ‘Innocence’ comes this Booker Prize-shortlisted tale of a troubled Moscow printworks .
Frank Reid had been born and brought up in Moscow. His father had emigrated there in the 1870s and started a print-works which, by 1913, had shrunk from what it was when Frank inherited it. In that same year, to add to his troubles, Frank’s wife Nellie caught the train back home to England, without explanation.
How is a reasonable man like Frank to cope? How should he keep his house running? Should he consult the Anglican…
Actually a collection of nine novellas set in the fictional town of Babbington, in an alternative-reality version of 1950s New York, this collection is historical fiction at its funniest and strangest, satirizing not only 1950s American culture but also our literary traditions.
Each novella chronicles a coming-of-age adventure of Peter Leroy (the author’s alter ego) in the style of a different classic-fiction genre, from a Huck Finn-style river journey to a Proustian moment at a family outing to a send-up of Aesop’s fables.
Stella Bradshaw, an aspiring teenage actor in 1950s Liverpool, joins a local theater company for its Christmas production of Peter Pan, and everyone gets more than they bargained for. Stella is a willful working-class ingenue desperate to escape her broken home life, and her enthusiasm and fearlessness force a collection of dissolute, jaded theater actors and directors to confront their own career and life choices.
The revelation on the last page makes you reconsider everything that went before in a surprise ending that’s far from a gimmick.
'This is one of Bainbridge's best books. The close observation and hilarity are underlain by a sense of tragedy as deep as any in fiction' The Times
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE IN 1990
It is 1950 and the Liverpool repertory theatre company is rehearsing its Christmas production of Peter Pan, a story of childhood innocence and loss. Stella has been taken on as assistant stage manager and quickly becomes obsessed with Meredith, the dissolute director. But it is only when the celebrated O'Hara arrives to take the lead, that a different drama unfolds. In it, he and Stella are…
A tale of labor unrest in the hardscrabble frontier of northwestern America sounds anything but fun or funny, but Walter explores the lives of miners, railroad workers, and Vaudeville performers with surprising verve and a glint of humor on nearly every page.
Set mostly in and around Spokane in the years between the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, this sweeping, satisfying story follows a pair of working-class brothers as they confront corrupt lawmen, scheming actresses, and violent union-busters.
'A beautiful, lyric hymn to the power of social unrest in American history...funny and harrowing, sweet and violent, innocent and experienced; it walks a dozen tightropes' Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See _____________________________________________
1909. Spokane, Washington.
The Dolan brothers are living by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for work at crooked job agencies. While sixteen-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his dashing older brother Gig dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment.
Muriel Spark is one of the wittiest novelists of the twentieth century, and this is one of her rare forays into historical fiction.
This novel harkens back to the publishing world of 1950s London, where a war widow working as an editor at a struggling publishing house becomes involved in the personal and professional politics of the literary world.
The characters are thinly veiled portrayals of real-life figures in the London publishing scene of the time, and Spark sends up their foibles, petty schemes, and peccadillos to devastating effect.
Rich and slim, the celebrated author Nancy Hawkins takes us in hand and leads us back to her threadbare years in postwar London, where she spends her days working for a mad, near-bankrupt publisher ("of very good books") and her nights dispensing advice at her small South Kensington rooming house. Everywhere Mrs. Hawkins finds evil: with aplomb, however, she confidently sets about putting things to order, to terrible effect.
I was first a clinical social worker and then a social work professor with research focus on older adults. Over the past few years, as I have been writing my own memoir about caring for my parents, I’ve been drawn to memoirs and first-person stories of aging, illness, and death. The best memoirs on these topics describe the emotional transformation in the writer as they process their loss of control, loss of their own or a loved one’s health, and their fear, pain, and suffering. In sharing these stories, we help others empathize with what we’ve gone through and help others be better prepared for similar events in their own lives.
ThePianist's Only Daughter is a frank, humorous, and heartbreaking exploration of aging in an aging expert's own family.
Social worker and gerontologist Kathryn Betts Adams spent decades negotiating evolving family dynamics with her colorful and talented parents: her mother, an English scholar and poet, and her father, a pianist and music professor. Their vivid emotional lives, marital instability, and eventual divorce provided the backdrop for her 1960s and ‘70s Midwestern youth.
Nearly thirty years after they divorce, Adams' newly single father flies in to woo his ex-wife, now retired and diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Their daughter watches in disbelief…
Grounded in insights about mental health, health and aging, The Pianist’s Only Daughter: A Memoir presents a frank and loving exploration of aging in an aging expert's own family.
Social worker and gerontologist Kathryn Betts Adams spent decades negotiating evolving family dynamics with her colorful and talented parents: her English scholar and poet mother and her pianist father. Their vivid emotional lives, marital instability, and eventual divorce provided the backdrop for her 1960s and ‘70s Midwestern youth.
Nearly thirty years after they divorce, Adams' father finds himself single and flies in to woo his ex-wife, now retired and diagnosed with…
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