From the New York Times bestselling author of Swing Time and one of the most revered writers of her generation comes an "intelligent ... exquisitely clever [novel] about fame, mortality, and the triumph of image over reality” (The Boston Globe).

Alex-Li Tandem sells autographs. His business is to hunt for names on paper, collect them, sell them, and occasionally fake them—all to give the people...

"If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head. As formative events go, nothing else comes close. With these words Edgar Mint, half-Apache and mostly orphaned, makes his unshakable claim on our attention. In the course of Brady Udall's high-spirited, inexhaustibly inventive novel, Edgar survives not just this bizarre accident, but a hellish boarding school for Native American...

First published in 1971 in a typewritten edition, then finally printed in book form in 1989, I Served the King of England is "an extraordinary and subtly tragicomic novel" (The New York Times), telling the tale of Ditie, a hugely ambitious but simple waiter in a deluxe Prague hotel in the years before World War II. Ditie is called upon to serve not the King of England, but Haile Selassie. It is one of the great moments in his life. Eventually, he...

The hysterical, clever, and unforgettable sequel to Jonas Jonasson's international bestseller The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared. He's back. Even older. Even funnier. It all begins with a hot air balloon trip and three bottles of champagne. Allan and Julius are ready for some spectacular views, but they're not expecting to land in the sea and be rescued by a North Korean ship, and they could never have imagined...

Don Quixote is a middle-aged gentleman from the region of La Mancha in central Spain. Obsessed with the chivalrous ideals touted in books he has read, he decides to take up his lance and sword to defend the helpless and destroy the wicked. After a first failed adventure, he sets out on a second one with a somewhat befuddled laborer named Sancho Panza, whom he has persuaded to accompany him as his faithful squire. In return for Sanchoʹs services,...

"From the award-winning, internationally bestselling author, a romp of a novel, at once intimate and panoramic, about the adventures and misadventures of a 19th-century zelig. One man, many lives . . . Cashel Greville Ross experiences more of everything than most, from the rapturous to the devastating, from surprising good luck to unexpected loss. Born in 1799, Cashel seeks his fortune across the turbulence of multiple continents, from County Cork...

This is Barth's most distinguished masterpiece. This modern classic is a hilarious tribute to all the most insidious human vices, with a hero who is "one of the most diverting . . . to roam the world since Candide." "A feast. Dense, funny, endlessly i

"In this picaresque novel set in the early 2000s, David, an investment banker with Eastern European roots, goes bankrupt from the Enron fiasco, and moves to Russia to do some soul-searching. In the shadow of the Khazan cathedral, he's arrested for the murder of two Georgian wine-importers. David is imprisoned at Kresty, bewildered and alone. One day, Putin himself visits, with a modest proposal for David: to travel to Georgia and slip plutonium into...

"Pedro and Marques Take Stock is a modern picaresque novel and a vivid satire on social mobility set in the favelas of Brazil, telling the story of two supermarket stock clerks whose lives are upturned when their small-time marijuana business takes off"--

A rollicking extravaganza on Ruth Puttermesser, a woman lawyer who with the help of a genie becomes mayor of New York. Her real ambition, however, is to be a mother, but for that she has to wait until she is murdered and goes to heaven, where she meets the child's father. By the author of The Shawl.