Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Humor is a funny thing. What you find hilarious might leave me cold or even offend me deeply. And my own sense of humor, which some have found quirky, can make me laugh when no one else does. So, I’m prepared to believe that you’ll think Daniel...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Meet Rachel Klein. It’s her last day on the job in the White House. She works in the fictional White House Office of Presidential Correspondence. There, Rachel uses Scotch tape to reconstruct the documents President Donald Trump rips up and tosses into the...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Sun-drenched beaches. Curvy young brown-skinned women dancing in grass skirts. Gentle, easy-going villagers gliding through the sea in hand-hewn canoes. If this is your image of a South Sea island, you can forget about it. That’s not what you’ll find...
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You’ve probably come across one of these if you read a lot of fiction. They’re epistolary novels. The ten-dollar word refers to the letters that tell the story. Scholars seem to believe that the first example of this now-obscure genre was Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister,...
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A review of Little Green Men, by Christopher Buckley. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). Not only does Buckley make me chuckle and wheeze with immoderate glee, but he also solves the mystery of the UFOs!
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Well, it’s not the equal of They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?, The Relic Master, or Thank You for Smoking. But it’s hard to believe that much of anything else written about life during the age of COVID could be funnier than the fictional pandemic memoir titled Has Anyone Seen My Toes?...
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A review of Serious Men, by Manu Joseph. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). In his debut novel, Indian magazine editor Manu Joseph takes on the caste system, Big Science, love, marriage, and sex, corruption in government, the news media, office politics, loyalty and betrayal, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and the fate of the Universe — yet it all hangs together somehow. This is Black Comedy, Indian-style.
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Carl Hiaasen sure knows how to lead off a story, and he proves it all over again in a savage takedown of Donald Trump. “On the night of January twenty-third, unseasonably warm,” he writes, “a woman named Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons went missing during a charity gala in the exclusive...
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Christopher Buckley is far and away the most accomplished political satirist writing today in America. In novels such as Thank You for Smoking and They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?, he has skewered the nation’s political establishment six ways from Sunday. Now, for the first time in nearly...
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In the sixth and final entry in Ron Goulart’s series of Groucho Marx Mysteries, the irrepressible comedian and his trusty sidekick and scriptwriter, Frank Denby, once again wander into the thicket of Hollywood studio politics to investigate a murder. This time around, the murder victim in...
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You can read the Groucho Marx Mysteries as detective stories in an historical setting. Certainly, they’re conceived and plotted along those lines, and they work as mysteries. The fifth book in the series, in which Groucho exposes Nazi spies in Hollywood, certainly does. But for me the main...
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It’s a little hard to believe that anyone could write a satirical story about Donald Trump, whose behavior is so far over the top that he would seem immune to satire. Yet that’s exactly what San Francisco literary phenomenon Dave Eggers has done in The Captain and the Glory. Unlike...
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For most Americans who recognize the name, Groucho Marx was one of the three Marx Brothers who headlined a series of 1930s Hollywood comedies, most famously Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, Duck Soup, and A Night at the Opera. Yet to me he was the hilarious host of the radio and, later, television...
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If you’ve read many of Carl Hiaasen’s more than two dozen novels, you’ve probably come across the six-foot-six, one-eyed Florida ex-governor who’s gone feral in the Everglades and subsists largely on road kill. His name is Clinton Tyree, but other than a few close friends,...
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In the course of his 75 years, Donald E. Westlake (1933-2008) published more than 100 novels and nonfiction books. He’s best known for his comic stories about crime capers, especially the fourteen books in the Dortmunder series about (to crib a phrase from Jimmy Breslin) a “gang that...
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Every self-respecting film buff is well acquainted with the Marx Brothers. Both Duck Soup and A Night at the Opera are among the top twelve comic films selected by the American Film Institute, and three others they made join them in the top 100. There were five brothers. But of all five, the only...
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What is this? A new Jeeves and Wooster novel? Didn’t P. G. Wodehouse die in 1975? Surprise! Long after the authors died, new novels kept coming out in the bestselling series by Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Tom Clancy, Ian Fleming, Vince Flynn, Stieg Larsson, Robert Ludlum, and Robert...
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Groucho Marx was the third-born of the five Marx Brothers but far and away the best known. When I was growing up, I thought he was the funniest man in the world, and I’m not sure I’ve come across anyone since then who has made me laugh more. (The one possible exception is Robin...
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Carl Hiaasen can show you the dark side of life in Florida and make you laugh in the process. In Lucky You, published in 1997, he proves the point again and again. The novel shines a light on religious nuts, redneck scumbags, money-laundering gangsters, and the decline of local journalism as well...
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Dumb criminals populate some of the funniest novels ever written. Jimmy Breslin’s 1969 bestseller, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, became a film two years later starring Robert De Niro and Jerry Orbach. Many of Elmore Leonard’s books feature criminals who give new meaning...
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The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.
Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.
Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.