Comedy

“A remarkable journey. I laughed. I cried. I got another cat.”  —Lily Tomlin “Paula Poundstone is the funniest human being I have ever known.” —Peter Sagal, host of Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! and author of The Book of Vice “Is there a secret to happiness?” asks comedian Paula Poundstone. “I don’t know how or why anyone would keep it a secret. It seems rather cruel, really . . . Where could  it be? Is it deceptively simple? Does it melt at a certain temperature? Can ...

Hero. Legend. Role model. He’s none of those. Flint Dugdale, blunt Yorkshireman and reality TV show winner, has used his large frame and ‘persuasive personality’ to take charge of Britain’s first mission to Mars. Little does he know that the base – built by an advance party of incompetent robots – is not quite finished and has no food, water or doors. Worse, the ship’s scanners are picking up strange signals from the surface. There is life down there. But will it be pleased to ...

“Spectacular.”—NPR • “Uproariously funny.”—The Boston Globe • “An artistic triumph.”—San Francisco Chronicle • “A novel in which comedy and pathos are exquisitely balanced.”—The Washington Post • “Shteyngart’s best book.”—The Seattle Times The bestselling author of Super Sad True Love Story returns with a biting, brilliant, emotionally resonant novel very much of our times. Narcissistic, hilariously self-deluded, and divorced from the real world as most of us know it, hedge-fund manager Barry Cohen oversees $2.4 billion in assets. Deeply stressed by an SEC investigation and by his three-year-old son’s diagnosis of autism, he ...

“The Opposite” wasn’t just the classic Seinfeld episode in which George Costanza followed the opposite of his instincts to land success. The method behind the madness has been championed in industries worldwide and even likened to the rise of Trump. The award-winning writer who helped Costanza win, and first pondered “the opposite” in his own life, identifies traces of it in the legends he mined for anecdotes before the cameras rolled at his first high-profile Hollywood job on which he also became a recurring performer, ...

The love between a daughter and her mother—and the dark secrets they keep from each other—are at the heart of this wildly imaginative novel that combines elements of The Handmaid’s Tale, Stranger Things, and Twin Peaks. An isolated town. The remains of a mysterious cult. And a woman who disappears.  It’s 1985. Pony Darlene Fontaine has lived all her fifteen years in “the territory,” a settlement founded decades ago by a charismatic cult leader. In this strange town run on a sinister economic resource, the women crimp their hair ...

The #1 Best-selling author has returned with an Orwellian classic… Beloved friend, The year is 2084, and that famous Margaret Thatcher quote has become a reality: There really is no such thing as society. No one speaks to anyone else. No one looks at anyone else. People don’t collaborate, they only compete. I hate to admit it, but this has had tragic consequences. Unable to satisfy their social urges, the population has fallen into a pit of depression and anxiety. Suicide has become the norm. ...

“Nico Walker’s Cherry might be the first great novel of the opioid epidemic.” —Vulture “A miracle of literary serendipity. . . . [Walker’s] language, relentlessly profane but never angry, simmers at the level of morose disappointment, something like Holden Caulfield Goes to War.” —The Washington Post It’s 2003, and as a college freshman in Cleveland, our narrator is adrift until he meets Emily. The two of them experience an instant, life-changing connection. But when he almost loses her, he chooses to make an indelible statement: he joins the ...

From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman’s efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of ...