Chaos theory says that a tiny, almost imperceptible event can have large, even catastrophic coincidences: a butterfly flapping its wings in North America leads to a hurricane on another continent, for example. In this fictional take on chaos theory, several offbeat characters are linked by a single event that expands through time, sweeping them up in it and changing their lives. A traveler works a nifty trick with a playing card, and a tornado strikes a small Illinois town; a woman is born during the tornado and later meets the man who set it in motion; 1,200 years earlier, a man who is supposed to be stoned to death discovers he has an uncanny knack for surviving; and, back in the present day, another man speaks only in the present tense. Comparisons of this novel to the works of Tom Robbins are both obvious and appropriate: the story meanders around in an entertaining manner, never getting too serious about itself; the characters are splendidly loopy, close to caricature but never quite reaching it, and the situations in which they find themselves are comic, dramatic, and everything in between.
A big, panoramic story of the new America, as told by our master chronicler of the way we live now.As a police launch speeds across Miami's Biscayne Bay-with officer Nestor Camacho on board-Tom Wolfe is off and running. Into the feverous landscape ...
HE'S BACK AND HE'S FUHRIOUS!"Desperately funny . . . An ingenious comedy of errors." --Janet Maslin, The New York Times"Satire at its best." --Newsweek"Thrillingly transgressive." --The GuardianA NEW YORK TIMES SUMMER READING PICKIn this record-bre...
Johannes Cabal, a brilliant scientist and notorious snob, is single-mindedly obsessed in heart and soul with raising the dead. Well, perhaps not soul . . . He hastily sold his years ago in order to learn the laws of necromancy. But now, tormented by...
Narrator: Christopher Cazenove Published: 07/07/2009
BEAUTIFUL YOU is Palahniuk's much-anticipated satire of the emerging erotic thriller genre, a mash-up of mommy porn and chick lit ala Sex and the City, and fantasy lit ala Clan of the Cave Bear. Imagine if Ira Levin had a baby with Jean Auel.
Jennifer Government is Here to Help!In Max Barry’s twisted, hilarious vision of the near future, the world is run by giant American corporations (except for a few deluded holdouts like the French); taxes are illegal; employees take the last na...
Narrator: Michael Kramer,Patrick Frederic Published: 01/21/2003
The definitive novel of today’s Silicon Valley, After On flash-captures our cultural and technological moment with up-to-the-instant savvy. Matters of privacy and government intrusion, post-Tinder romance, nihilistic terrorism, artificial cons...
Bret Ellis, the narrator of Lunar Park, is the bestselling writer whose first novel Less Than Zero catapulted him to international stardom while he was still in college. In the years that followed he found himself adrift in a world of weal...
Narrator: James Van Der Beek Published: 08/16/2005
In post-NK3 Los Angeles, a sixty-foot-tall fence surrounds the hills where the rich used to live, but the mansions have been taken over by those with the only power that matters: the power of memory. Life for the community inside the Fence, ruled ov...
A wickedly satirical and outrageous thriller about globalization and marketing hype, Jennifer Government is the best novel in the world ever."Funny and clever.... A kind of ad-world version of Dr. Strangelove.... [Barry] unleashes enough w...
Narrator: Michael Kramer,Patrick Frederic Published: 10/17/2002
