Archive for the ‘Humorous’ Category

BEFORE THE END, AFTER THE BEGINNING by Dagoberto Gilb

Dagoberto Gilb’s latest book, BEFORE THE END, AFTER THE BEGINNING, although a slight collection, is loaded with insight and humor. It’s a book about identity, about the tension between limiting factors outside our control– our race, our class, our gender – and our complexity as individuals.

November 9, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Award Winning Author, Class - Race - Gender, Humorous, Identity, Latin American, Mexico, Short Stories, Texas

THE REDEMPTION OF GEORGE BAXTER HENRY by Conor Bowman

George Baxter Henry is no paragon of virtue. In fact, he is a paradigm of vice, with a penchant for lustful young women. His marriage is on the rocks and his fractured family is falling apart. Connor Bowman’s novella after The Last Estate takes us back to the South of France—this time Nice, but with an American protagonist. In this sinfully laugh-out-loud story about a wounded family trying to stitch itself back together, Bowman manages to make the reader care about these cross and querulous individuals who are headed on a grease skid to oblivion.

October 16, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Family Matters, France, Humorous

BLUEPRINTS FOR BUILDING BETTER GIRLS by Elissa Schappell

Poor Holden Caulfield. In Catcher in the Rye, he muses, “Girls. You never know what they’re going to think.” How right he was! In Elissa Schappell’s new short story collection, the old blueprints for Appropriate Female Behavior — the name of a vintage etiquette manual, 1963 edition — have all been tossed away. And now the girls and women are forced to muddle through with the new rules: Be yourself but also be what your boyfriend, parents, and girlfriends want you to be as well.

October 11, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Humorous, Short Stories

CAIN by Jose Saramago

Saramago’s last, indeed posthumous, book is a real treat. Brief, inventive, funny, it furthers the author’s well-known distaste for religious dogma by traversing many of the familiar stories of the Old Testament by means of a fanciful parable told from a rational point of view. Much like The Elephant’s Journey, it shows Saramago’s stylistic fingerprints in relaxed form.

October 4, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Allegory/Fable, Alternate History, Award Winning Author, Humorous, Satire, Translated, World Literature

BOXER, BEETLE by Ned Beauman

First-time author Ned Beauman really lays it out there in the first chapter of this extraordinary novel, which begins with an imaginary surprise birthday party thrown by Hitler for Joseph Goebbels in 1940. It is an exhilarating, outrageous opening to a book that will in fact take a quite different course. But it is important as a way of establishing the moral parameters (and this IS a moral book) and freeing up an imaginative space in which Beauman can explore some ideas that are normally unapproachable.

September 13, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Debut Novel, Facing History, Humorous, Real People Fiction, Satire, Time Period Fiction, United Kingdom

PLUGGED by Eoin Colfer

Eoin Colfer? He writes those kid’s books, Artemis Fowl, doesn’t he? What’s someone who writes really popular children’s books doing writing a crime novel? Well according to the dedication, Irish author Eoin Colfer says the book is “For Ken Bruen who made me do it.” So we have Bruen to thank for this first book in what promises to be an entertaining series.

September 9, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  Â· Posted in: Humorous, Thriller/Spy/Caper, United Kingdom