Booklists: suggested reading

Funny Fiction Booklist

• Yo : A Novel
  Alvarez, Julia
  Algonquin Books List Price: 18.95 ISBN: 1565121570
  Publishers Weekly Kirkus
  ALA RUSA Notable
  Sexually magnetic and thrice married, obsessed by human circumstances and relationships, Yolanda Garcia has managed to put herself at the center of many lives. Told from the viewpoint of one of the family and friends first tangled in her web and now frozen in the spotlight her literary fame has generated, Yo! delivers delicious insight into the very nature of artistic creation and the material from which it is built.
  Suggested Reading: Latino/Latina Stars
• The Extra Man
  Author: Ames, Jonathan
  Publisher: Scribner List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0684845040 Date: 1998
  Booklist
  With a quirky edge and outrageous humor, Jonathan Ames has written a remarkable second novel - a modern-day New York comedy of manners that explores the memorable relationship between a young man and his eccentric older roommate.
  
• Big Trouble
  Author: Barry, Dave
  Publisher: Putnam List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 0399145672 Date: 1999
  PW Kirkus Library Journal
  The humorous Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist makes his fiction debut with a ferociously funny novel about love and mayhem in south Florida, and the the life-changing events that rumble through a odd-ball family after two hit men pull up to their door.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars | Florida Fiction
• The Error of Our Ways : A Novel
  Carkeet, David
  Henry Holt & Co List Price: 25.00 ISBN: 0805045023 Date: 1997
  Publishers Weekly Kirkus
  NYTBR Notable
  
• Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
  Author: Chabon, Michael
  Publisher: Random $ 26.95 ISBN: 0679450041 Date: 2000
  PW Booklist
  This brilliant novel by the "young star of American letters", in the words of Jonathan Yardley, is a literary triumph in which two misfit young men make it big creating comic-book superheroes.
  Updated 8/18/00
• The Country Life
  Author: Cusk, Rachel
  Publisher: St Martins List Price: ISBN: 0312198485 Date: 1999
  LJ PW Kirkus
  "Clamamity Jane Eyre" arrives at Cold Comfort Farm in this brilliant comedy of manners and identity by a Whitbread-winning young author. "A novel that makes you laugh out loud and that you put down with regret." - London Literary Review.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
• Welcome to Higby
  Author: Dunn, Mark
  Publisher: MacAdam Cage $ 25 ISBN: 931561176 Date: 2002
  PW
  From the hilarious author of Ella Minnow Pea comes a comical tour de force--a Southern tale about simple dreams--that captures the soul of small-town America with a big slice of apple pie.
  Updated 8.13.02
• Bridget Jones's Diary
  Author: Fielding, Helen
  Publisher: Viking List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0670880728 Date: 1998
  PW Kirkus Booklist
  LJ Best First Novel, Booklist Notable First Novel, NYTBR Notable List
  This laugh-out-loud chronicle charts a year in the life of Bridget Jones, a single thirty-something on a permanent doomed quest for self-improvement. Caught between her Singleton friends, who are all convinced they will end up dying alone and found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian, and the Smug Marrieds, whose dinner parties offer ever new opportunities for humiliation, Bridget struggles to keep her life on an even keel (or at least afloat). - From the Advance Uncorrected Proofs.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars | Chicklit
• Cross Dressing
  Author: Fitzhugh, Bill
  Publisher: Avon $ 24 ISBN: 0380977567 Date: 2000
  Kirkus
  An advertising man is forced to impersonate his twin brother, a Catholic priest, in this audacious satire from the acclaimed author of Pest Control. Soon, Dan finds himself admiring the good-looking, gun-toting Sister Peg, who gives him impure thoughts about renouncing his vow - not that he ever took one.
  Suggested Reading: Humorous Fiction
  Updated 4/19/00.
• Standing in the Rainbow
  Author: Flagg, Fannie
  Publisher: Random $ 25.95 ISBN: 0679426159 Date: 2002
  Kirkus Booklist PW
  Fannie's back in town--at her funniest, most touching, rooted, and surprising best. She has also brought along several characters from her earlier bestseller, Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!, plus some new folks to make readers smile, laugh, and cry.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
  Updated 7.22.02
• Everthing Is Illuminated
  Author: Foer, Jonathan Safran
  Publisher: Houghton Mifflin $ 24 ISBN: 0618173870 Date: 2002
  Kirkus Library Journal PW Booklist
  A writer journeys to the farmlands of eastern Europe to find Augustine, the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Passionate and marked by an indelible humanity, Everything Is Illuminated mines the black holes of history and is ultimately a story about searching for people and places that no longer exist.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
  Updated 3/14/02
• Making History
  Author: Fry, Stephen
  Publisher: Random List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0679459553 Date: 1998
  Booklist
  An extravagantly imaginative, funny, and troubling supposition, Making History is based on a deceptively simple premise: What if Hitler had never been born? The most ambitious work yet by British actor/writer Stephen Fry, soon to star in the leading role in a film about Oscar Wilde.
  
• Paradise Park
  Author: Goodman, Allegra
  Publisher: Dial $ 24.95 ISBN: 0385334168 Date: 2001
  Kirkus PW LJ
  Bestselling author and National Book Award finalist Goodman follows Kaaterskill Falls with a sparkling new tale featuring one of the most endearing, exasperating, indomitable heroines in modern fiction. With an open heart, a soul on fire, and her meager possessions, Sharon Spiegelman begins a hilarious 20-year quest for enlightenment. But each time she believes she has struck spiritual gold she comes up empty when her irrepressible self shines through.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
  Updated 1/31/01
• Mrs. Million
  Author: Hautman, Pete
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0684832437 Date: 1999
  Kirkus
  A female lottery winner in a small Midwestern town offers a monetary prize to whomever can tell her the mysterious whereabouts of her husband who has gone into hiding.
  
• Slab Rat
  Author: Heller, Ted
  Publisher: Scribner $ 23 ISBN: 0684864967 Date: 2000
  Kirkus Booklist
  In the pitch-perfect tradition of Nick Hornsby, Christopher Buckley, and Martin Amis comes Ted Heller with a razor-sharp, highly comic novel of ambition, deception and lethal office politics.
• Lucky You
  Hiaasen, Carl
  Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0679454446
  PW Kirkus LJ
  NYTBR Notable
  The newest - and funniest- novel yet by the bestselling author of Strip Tease and Stormy Weather. When JoLayne Lucks, the most recent winner of the Florida state lottery, has her ticket stolen by two would be "domestic terrorists", she enlists the help of Tom Krome- a journalist stretched thin by divorce, lite news, and a fool of a managing editor- in a chase that leads them to a deliriously righteous outcome - the inspired hallmark of Carl Hiaasen.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
• How to Be Good
  Author: Hornby, Nick
  Publisher: Riverhead $ 23.95 ISBN: 1573221937 Date: 2001
  Kirkus PW Library Journal Booklist
  In a humorous yet uncompromising look at what it takes to have the courage of one's convictions, Hornby reinvents himself as Katie--the consummate liberal, urban mom--whose world is being turned on its ear by the outrageous spiritual transformation of her husband, David.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
  Updated 8/1/01
• About A Boy
  Author: Hornby, Nick
  Publisher: Putnam List Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 1573220876 Date: 1998
  Kirkus
  NYTBR Notable List
  From the highly acclaimed author of the cult fiction hit High Fidelity, comes a funny, contemporary novel about sex, manliness, and fatherhood. Will doesn't want any children. He wonders why it bothers people that he lives so happily alone in his fashionable, Lego-free apartment, where no kid has ever thrown up on the rug. And then Will meets Angie...
  
• Clerical Errors
  Author: Isler, Alan
  Publisher: Scribner $ 24 ISBN: 0743210603 Date: 2001
  LJ Kirkus PW
  From the award winning author of The Prince of West End Avenue comes an irreverent tale of a formerly Jewish--and now decidedly errant--Catholic priest.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
  Updated 6/8/01
• Two Guys from Verona: A Novel of Suburbia
  Author: Kaplan, James
  Publisher: Atlantic Monthly List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0871137046 Date: 1998
  Booklist Kirkus
  NYTBR Notable List
  At their 25th high school reunion, Will and Joe, fortyish friends since the second grade, find that their lives will change in ways neither has ever dreamed of - one facing death, the other facing life for the first time. A lucid, trenchantly funny novel by the author of Pearl's Progress.
  
• Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale
  Author: Kinder, Chuck
  Publisher: Farrar Straus $ 24 ISBN: 0374172587 Date: 2001
  Kirkus PW LJ
  Kinder's book is a rueful, comi-tragic juggernaut of two couples who have spent the best years of their lives raising bad judgment to an art.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
  Updated 6/13/01
• The Grand Complication
  Author: Kurzweil, Allen
  Publisher: Hyperion $ 24.95 ISBN: 0786866039 Date: 2001
  Kirkus PW Booklist
  The anticipated new novel from the author of A Case of Curiosities, Kurzweil returns with another work narrated by Alexander Short, a reference librarian who takes on an unusual research assignment when he feels his passions--both professional and personal--waning.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
  Updated 8/1/01
• A Few Corrections
  Author: Leithauser, Brad
  Publisher: Knopf $ 24 ISBN: 0375411496 Date: 2001
  Kirkus
  This clever, humorous novel opens with the obituary of Wesley Sultan, a respectable, Midwestern businessman, riddled with errors. The book's narrator corrects the errors, piling correction upon correction until the original has been so altered it reveals Wesley lived a far more tangled and ambiguous life.
  Updated 2/21/01
• Bandbox
  Author: Mallon, Thomas
  Publisher: Pantheon $ 24.95 ISBN: 0375421165 Date: 2004
  Kirkus PW Booklist
  From the author of Henry and Clara comes a dazzling, hilarious novel that captures the heart and soul of New York in the Jazz Age. Mallon pens a madcap and poignant book that brilliantly portrays the gaudiest American decade of them all.
  Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction | All Stars | Music & Fiction
  Updated 12.15.03
• War Memorials
  Author: McCown, Clint
  Publisher: Graywolf $ 23.95 ISBN: 1555973124 Date: 2000
  Kirkus PW
  This comedic novel tells the story of Jimmy Vann, twice reported dead in World War II who finds his true calling in selling life insurance, and his son Nolan, who falls short of his father's expectations. Despite a seemingly endless series of mishaps, Nolan persists in his efforts to make his life mean something.
  Updated 9/14/00
• More Bread or I'll Appear
  Author: Martin, Emer
  Publisher: Hougton List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 03935918715 Date:1999
  Kirkus Booklist
  At high speed and with wicked humor, Emer Martin introduces readers to a family unlike any other. Here is the story of four siblings in an Irish family as they embark on a far-flung search for the fifth--their mother's beloved. Emer Martin's first book, Breakfast in Babylon, was named Ireland's Best Book of 1996 at the prestigious Listowel Writers' Week.
  
• Europa
  Author: Parks, Tim
  Publisher: Arcade List Price: $ 23.95 ISBN: 155970446 Date: 1998
  PW Kirkus LJ Booklist
  A finalist for the Booker Prize, this ferociously comic tale of love gone sour is the finest novel to date from the author of the national bestsellers An Italian Education and Italian Neighbors.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
• The Wishbones
  Author: Perrotta, Tom
  Publisher: Putnam List Price: $21.95 ISBN: 0399142673 Date: 1997
  Library Journal Kirkus
  NYTBR Notable
  ALA Rusa Notable
  In The Wishbones, Perrota's characters are nineties adults still clinging to their seventies dreams. This debut novel is a laugh-out-loud confessional about people who might be too old to rock-n-roll but who can't imagine stopping.
  
• Barney's Version
  Author: Richler, Mordecai
  Publisher: Knopf Price: $ 25 ISBN: 067940418x Date: 1998
  Booklist PW LJ
  NYTBR Notable List
  In what is perhaps the most personal and feeling book of Richler's career, Barney Panofsky whose trashy TV compay has made him a small fortune- recalls with nostalgia and pain his young manhood in the Paris of the early 50's, and his lifelong passion for wine, women, and the Montreal Canadiens.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
• The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters
  Author: Robinson, Elizabeth
  Publisher: Little Brown $ 23.95 ISBN: 0316735027 Date: 2004
  Kirkus PW Booklist
  The bestselling status (and subsequent blockbuster film adaptations) of Bridget Jones's Diary and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood is proof of the enduring strength of this category. Although the novel is invented, Robinson is a successful Hollywood producer whose credits include Braveheart and Last Orders.
  Suggested Reading: Fiction & Mystery Debuts | All Stars
  Updated 11.12.03
• The Evolution of Jane
  Author: Schine, Cathleen
  Publisher: Houghton Mifflin List Price: $ 24 ISBN: 0395826578 Date: 1998
  PW Kirkus
  From the bestselling author of The Love Letter and Rameau's Niece comes of comedy of natural selection. When two cousins - who once were best friends - are reunited unexpectedly on a tour of the Galapagos Islands, the result is an antic mating of family saga and natural history that forever changes their lives.
  Read-alike suggestion: Animal Husbandry by Laura Zigman.
  Suggested Reading: Chicklit
• Wigfield: The Can-Do Town That Just May Not
  Author: Sedaris, Amy, Paul Dinello and Stephen Colbert, photos by Todd Oldham
  Publisher: Hyperion $ 22.95 ISBN: 0786868120 Date: 2003
  PW
  A hilarious illustrated satire of a Lake Wobegon gone hideously wrong and the earnest reporter who hopes to save it from extinction. Wigfield is a town in danger, and its only hope lies in the self-righteous "journalist" Russell Hokes, who arrives hoping to capture the quiet dignity of the disappearing American Small Town.
  Link: Wigfield site
  Updated 4.28.03
• The Man Who Ate the 747
  Author: Sherwood, Ben
  Publisher: Bantam $ 19.95 ISBN: 0553801821 Date: 2000
  Kirkus PW
  J.J. Smith is the Record Man. He knows all about the longest kiss, the fastest snail, the farthest cab ride. But while visiting Superior, Nebraska, to cover the story of a man eating a plane piece by piece, he finally understands why hearts, not just records, can be broken--and he discovers why love is truly the greatest wonder of all.
  Updated 7/20/00
• Horse Heaven
  Author: Smiley, Jane
  Publisher: Knopf $ 26 ISBN: 037540600x Date: 2000
  Kirkus PW Booklist Library Journal
  The universe of horse racing - passionate, cold-hearted, pure, corrupt - is revealed in Smiley's new novel that combines the intense feeling of her Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres with the wit, pace, and brightness of Moo.
  Suggested Reading: Horse Tales | All Stars
  Updated 4/12/00.
• White Teeth
  Author: Smith, Zadie
  Publisher: Random $ 25.95 ISBN: 0375501851 Date: 2000
  PW
  A spectacular, riotously entertaining epic set in post-World War II London, White Teeth is a novel of two families - the Joneses and the Iqbals - whose hilarious and tortured lives capture all the optimism and absurdity of the past half-century. "Zadie Smith's fizzing first novel is about how we all got here - from the Caribbean, from the Indian subcontinent, from 13th place in a long ago Olympic bicycle race - and about what "here" turned out to be."--Salman Rushdie.
  Updated 3/16/00.
• Hotel Honolulu
  Author: Theroux, Paul
  Publisher: Houghton Mifflin $ 26 ISBN: 0618095012 Date: 2001
  Booklist LJ
  Like the Canterbury pilgrims, every guest in the 88-room Hotel Honolulu has come in search of something and everyone has a story. In this unforgettable novel, Theroux reveals a funny, languid, louche floating world, island style--the essence of Hawaii as it has never been depicted.
  Updated 3/23/01
• Number 10
  Author: Townsend, Sue
  Publisher: Soho $ 24 ISBN: 1569473498 Date: 2003
  Kirkus
  In Townsend's riotously funny new novel, Edward Clare, prime minister of England, has a problem. For five years, since his landslide election, he has been universally viewed as the perfect leader and representative of the working man. But then something happens that turns the public against him.
  Suggested Reading: Political Fiction
  Updated 9.08.03
• Ray in Reverse
  Author: Wallace, Daniel
  Publisher: Algonquin $ 21.95 ISBN: 1565122607 Date: 2000
  Kirkus PW Booklist
  In this follow-up to Big Fish, Ray Williams, now sitting in heaven, reflects back on his difficult life - including his adulterous marriage, moments of sexual confusion, his worst deed, and his one good one.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
• Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions
  Author: Wallace, Daniel
  Publisher: Algonquin List Price: $ 16.95 ISBN: 1565122178 Date: 1998
  PW
  Sitting by his father's deathbed, William Bloom tries to understand the man quickly slipping away, who is more interested in evading his son's questions than answering them. So William reconstructs his father's life through a series of stories, and in doing so finds a way to say goodbye.
  
• Good in Bed
  Author: Weiner, Jennifer
  Publisher: Pocket $ 24.95 ISBN: 0743418166 Date: 2001
  Kirkus PW
  The day pop-culture journalist Cannie Shapiro reads her ex-boyfriends' published story about their sex life is the day her life changes. Embarking on a journey through her past she confronts her ex, deals with her lesbian mother and sifts through the answer to how she got where she is--single, angry and exposed.
  Suggested Reading: Chicklit Stars
  Updated 4/6/01
• Animal Husbandry
  Author: Zigman, Laura
  Publisher: Dial Price: $ 22.95 ISBN: 0385319002 Date: 1998
  PW Kirkus
  LJ Best First Novel
  A hilariously funny and wonderfully wise debut. In her spare time, late-night TV producer Jane Goodall- not the Jane Goodall- studies animal behavior to try to understand how and why the man she loves has so suddenly, inexplicalby jilted her. Turning to Freud, Darwin, her own lovelorn friends, and a cabinet full of theories, Jane begins a safari of sorts to track down the strange lair of the human heart.
  Suggested Reading: Chicklist Stars
Also - Humorus Mysteries