Annotations are from Advance,
the Ingram Book Magazine.

Author: Anthony, Patricia
Title: Brother Termite 1993
Kirkus
From the author of Cold Allies comes a new novel--a skillful mix of Washington politics and numbing mind control, the story of a future America taken over by insect-like aliens. "Utterly moving, convincing aliens".--Kirkus Reviews.

Author: Antrim, Donald
Title: Hundred Brothers 1997
Kirkus
With this satanically funny novel Donald Antrim establishes himself as a literary provocateur of the first order as well as a grandmaster of the subject of sibling rivalry as he bring together 11 eccentric brothers in the decaying library of their family estate for cocktails, a light supper, and a little ritual sacrifice.

Author: Arnott, Jake
Title: The Long Firm 1999
Kirkus
Club owner Harry Starks is a feared gangster in 1960s London. Five narrators tell the story of Harry's fall, and surprising resurrection, in this vividly imagined portrait of the sleazy London mobs ("firms") at the end of an era.

Author: Baldwin, William
Title: The Fennel Family Papers 1996
Booklist
From the author of the award-winning Hard to Catch Mercy. A professor at the bottom rung of the History Department ladder at a minor South Carolina university sees a chance to redeem himself when he discovers that one of his students is a direct descendant of the notorious Capt. Jack Fennel--who's the key to a Civil War-era historical controversy.

Author: Baldwin, William
Title: The Hard to Catch Mercy 1993
PW
In a small town in South Carolina in 1916, fourteen-year-old Willie T. Allson comes to manhood in a manner befitting the finest Southern tall tales. "An epic tale of Southern myth, mystery, and mayhem".--The Indianapolis News. Winner of the Lillian Smith Award for Fiction.

Author: Block, Lawrence
Title: Hit Man 1998
PW
Meet Keller, the coldly efficient, yet decidedly human hit man. Your basic Urban Lonely Guy. He makes a decent wage, lives in a nice apartment. Until the phone rings and he gets on a plane and flies halfway across the country and kills somebody. It's a living. But is it a life? Keller's not sure. He goes to a shrink. He gets a dog, he gets a girlfriend. He gets along. There's no one like Keller.

Author: Christensen, Kate
Title: Epicure's Lament
Publisher: Doubleday $ 23.95 ISBN: 0767910303 Date: 2004
PWKirkusLJ
From the author of In the Drink, a compelling novel about a man smoking himself to death. A literary tour de force of bitter humor and gorgeously articulated misanthropy to rival the works of Martin Amis and John Lanchester.
Suggested Reading: All Stars

Author: Clark, Martin
Title: Plain Heathen Mischief
Publisher: Knopf $ 24.95 ISBN: 1400040965 Date: 2004
KirkusPW
Of Martin Clark's spectacular first novel, the New York Times Book Review wrote, Like Nick Hornby in High Fidelity and Thomas McGuane in Nothing but Blue Skies, Clark has produced an oddly stirring portrait of a man in existential disarray." Which--wrote Malcolm Jones in Newsweek--made me laugh so hard I fell off the sofa." Plain Heathen Mischief ups the ante in existential hilarity; as Joel King (a defrocked Baptist minister) finds life even more bedeviling once he's served six months for a highly implausible crime. Now he's being sued for a cool $5 million, his wife wants divorce, the refuge provided by his sister turns as vicious as his parole officer, and a fresh start in Montana offers no hope for ex-cons of any religious persuasion. On the upside, a kindly former parishioner soon involves the hapless Joel in a flock of con men, crooked lawyers, conniving youth, and authorities bent on prosecution and harassment. In a bravura feat of storytelling Clark ranges from the cross to the double cross from Virginia to Las Vegas, from jail cells to trout streams, as he follows his Job-like hero to a redemption that no reader could possibly predict. - Publisher Marketing.

Author: Dooling, Richard
Title: Brain Storm 1998
Kirkus
Hilarious, smart, and full of cutting-edge controversies, this novel challenges conventional wisdom about everything from lawn care to the existence of the human soul.

Author: Egolf, Tristan
Title: Lord of the Barnyard 1999
BooklistLibrary Journal
A manic, inventive, and painfully funny debut novel about a town's dirty laundry--and a garbagemen's strike that lets it all hang out.

Author: Foley, Michael
Title: Road to Notown 1997
Kirkus
It's a familiar story, this time set in Ireland and London. The young narrator writes a critical article on the "famous" writer and soon becomes privy to his world and that of the literati who surround him. Here Kyle Magee, "the Zorba of the North", subjects our stary-eyed admirer to all the pretension, hypocrisy, and paranoia he can handle. Counter balancing this is the Herron household, a group of eccentric women who are tough, no-nonsense realists.

Author: Fry, Stephen
Title: Making History 1996
Booklist
In his most seriously ambitious novel to date, Fry creates a futuristic fantasy that becomes a thriller with a funny streak. Tackling one of history's darkest episodes, he poses the question: What if Hitler had never been born?

Author: Goldsmith, Olivia
Title: First Wives Club 1992
Kirkus
An empowering, triumphant debut--"hilarious, smooth, and sexy" (Cosmopolitan). When their husbands reach the pinnacle of success, first wives Elise, Brenda, and Annie are abandoned for younger, sleeker models--"trophy wives". Deciding that self-pity will get them nowhere, the three women set out for revenge--conspiring to give each man his due in full view of tout New York society.

Author: Grimson, Todd
Title: Brand New Cherry Flavor 1996
Kirkus
Lisa Nova has it all talent, brains, beauty, and a mean streak to match. When her thirst for revenge introduces her to a thousand-year-old Mayan witch doctor, she discovers to her delight a bizarre, erotic link to the afterworld. When a totally hip Hollywood meets a harrowing ancient ritualistic curse, anything can happen and does in this extravagant novel.

Author: Hoban, Russell
Title: Angelica's Grotto 2001
Kirkus
This darkly comic novel confronts Harold Klein, now in his infirm seventies, with a strange malady--the loss of his "inner voice"--and introduces him to the steamy world of Internet sex.

Author: Leyner, Mark
Title: Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog 1995
Kirkus
A fiendishly innovative young writer ups the ante on his cult classics Et Tu, Babe and My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist with a book so funny that it ought to be a controlled substance. "With his pumped-up prose and steroidal satire . . . You could call him the Quentin Tarantino of cult fiction".--Newsweek.

Author: Lish, Gordon
Title: Epigraph 1996
Kirkus
This audacious, stunning novel will neither sooth critics nor disappoint readers. It is an account of a man looking back on a period of his life which has drained him utterly. Told through a series of letters, it takes place after the death of Lish's wife of several decades, Barbara, who died at home after a long and paralyzing illness. Epigraph is both bitterly self-critical and merciless in its assessment of the motivations and failings of others.

Author: Manea, Norman
Title: Black Envelope 1995
Booklist
A splendid, violent spring suddenly grips Bucharest in the 1980s after a brutal winter. Tolea, a defiant and eccentric middle-aged intellectual who has been dismissed from his job as a high-school teacher on "moral grounds", is attempting to clear up the mystery of his father's death forty years after the fact. He is gradually and irresistibly drawn into a web of suspicion in which images of an underground world linger obsessively: the organization of deaf-mutes whose nightmarish presence recalls the Single Party itself; the polite and timid informer, with his modest, homely reports; the black dog who has the same name as, and seems to be a metamorphosis of, the man pursued by Tolea - an elusive photographer who has left an astonishing photo archive of Communist society. Shot through with black humor and poetry, The Black Envelope is a thoroughly modern exploration of love and guilt, vulnerability and death, estrangement, hope, and human solidarity. - Jacket Copy.

Author: Pelvin, Victor
Title: Omon Ra 1996
Kirkus
Omon Ra is a brilliant satiric novel by Victor Pelevin, the leading Russian novelist of the post-glasnost era and winner of the Little Russian Booker Prize. Omon is a boy chosen to be trained in the Soviet space program, the fulfillment of his life-long dream. However, he enrolls only to face frustration at the absurdity of Soviet protocol and the program's inadequate technology.

Author: Prose, Francine
Title: Primitive People 1992
Kirkus
Young Simone flees the chaotic violence of Haiti only to land in a world no less brutal or bizarre--the world of upstate New York's Porter family. Here, dead sheep swing from trees, light bulbs are ceremoniously buried, a fur-clad mother carves terrifying goddesses from pumice, and learning to lie is the principle rite of passage into adulthood.

Author: Queneau, Raymond
Title: Saint Glinglin 1993
BooklistPW
Queneau's tragicomic masterpiece which retells in an array of styles the primal Freudian myth of sons killing the father. Queneau satirizes anthropology, folklore, philosophy, and epistemology while spinning a story as appealing as a fairy tale about a land where it never rains and a bizarre festival is held every Saint Glinglin's Day. - Publisher marketing.

Author: Ridley, John
Title: Love is a Racket 1998
PW
This modern-day noir thriller in the tradition of James Ellroy comes from the acclaimed author of Stray Dogs. Jeffty is a small-time Hollywood con, deep in debt to a dangerous man. He and his streetwise partner set out to make a killing in the ultimate scam. "Chillingly effective, " says the San Francisco Chronicle.

Author: Russo, Richard
Title: Nobody's Fool 1993
BooklistPW
In his slyly funny and moving new novel, the author of The Risk Pool follows the unexpected operation of grace in a deadbeat, upstate New York town--and in the lives of the unluckiest of its citizens.

Author: Taibo, Paco Ignacio
Title: Leonardo's Bicycle 1995
Kirkus
A brilliantly crafted collage of noir adventure and political psychodrama, Leonardo's Bicycle chronicles the effects of a century of violence on the nature of imagination. While a cast of revolutionaries, radicals, criminals, and dreamers chase a wild goose into a hail of gunfire, Leonardo da Vinci hovers overhead on a bicycle.

Author: Tillman, Lynne
Title: No Lease on Life 1998
Booklist
A powerfully evocative novel of a single 24 hours, and an entire life, on the strange and mean streets of New York. Unable to sleep, Elizabeth Hall sits at her East village apartment window and watches the world below. In another building, a shady man sits at his window, watching her. Author Lynne Tillman stunningly captures the pathos and humor of life at the end of the 20th century.

Author: Tolkin, Michael
Title: Among the Dead 1993
PW
A black comedy of love and loss in L.A., from the acclaimed author and screenwriter of The Player. In his first novel, Tolkin explored the emotional geography of a soulless Hollywood executive. Now, he raises the stakes in a new novel that asks the question: What if the executive had a conscience?

Author: Updike, John
Title: Bech at Bay: A Quasi Novel 1998
PWKirkus
Henry Bech, the moderately well-known Jewish-American writer who served as the hero of John Updike's previous Bech: A Book (1970) and Bech Is Back, has become older but scarcely wiser, as he relentlessly pursues literary fame.

Author: Van Der Vyver, Marita
Title: Entertaining Angels 1995
Kirkus
Griet Swart is a recently divorced, 30-ish woman living out of a suitcase in a borrowed flat in Cape Town, South Africa. A collector of fairy tales for a children's book publisher, Griet soon finds herself viewing her own life in storybook terms. While trying to restart her life with the help of family, friends, and an enigmatic therapist, she turns for comfort to the wisdom of the folktales she inherited from her Afrikaner grandparents.

Author: Wager, Bruce
Title: I'm Losing You 1996
Booklist
In an epic novel that does for Hollywood what Nashville did for Nashville, I'm Losing You follows the rich and famous and the down and out as their lives intersect in a series of coincidences that exposes the "bigger than life" ferocity of Hollywood--and proves that Bruce Wagner is a talent to be reckoned with. "A writer without mercy . . . this book is like a wire stretched across the throat".--Oliver Stone.

Author: Womack, Jack
Title: Let's Put the Future Behind Us 1996
Kirkus
In this satirical romp through post - Soviet Russia, Womack describes a world of petty bureaucrats, shameless opportunities, and full-blown mafiosi.

Author: Woodrell, Daniel
Title: Give Us A Kiss 1996
Kirkus
Ozark-born and bred Daniel Woodrell is a writer's writer known for his stylish virtuosity as well as his special sense of place. Woodrell's best work yet, this book is an audience-grabbing joyride through the gun-filled, family-feuding, drug-running, lowlife world of Missouri's Redmond clan.

Author: Yglesias, Raphael
Title: Fearless 1993
Kirkus
Max and Carla are two New Yorkers who have nothing in common until they both survive a plane crash. Now they must face their families, friends, guilt and each other in this deftly-crafted saga.

LINKS:

Black Humor Quotes
Black Humor Definition
Bibliography - Black Humor Scholarship

Author: Abe, Kobo
Title: Kangaroo Notebook 1996

Author: Aldiss, Brian Wilson
Title: Somewhere East of Life 1994

Author: Amis, Martin
Title: Dead Babies 1991

Author: Antrim, Donald
Title: Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World 1993

Author: Astley, Thea
Title: Coda 1994

Author: Baer, Will Christopher
Title: Kiss Me, Judas 1998

Author: Bainbridge, Beryl
Title: The Bottle Factory Outing 1975

Author: Banbury, Jen
Title: Like a Hole in the Head 1998

Author: Banville, John
Title: Athena 1995

Author: Beattie, Ann
Title: Chilly Scenes of Winter 1976

Author: Bellow, Saul
Title: More Die of Heartbreak 1987

Author: Bernhard, Thomas
Title: Voice Imitator 1997

Author: Boyle, T. Coraghessan
Title: Descent of Man 1979

Author: Bukiet, Jules
Title: After 1996
Title: Signs and Wonders 1999

Author: Carroll, Jonathan
Title: Outside the Dog Museum 1992

Author: Cheever, Benjamin
Title: Famous After Death 1999

Author: Ciresi, Rita
Title: Blue Italian 1996

Author: Collins, Max Allen
Title: Mommy 1997

Author: Coupland, Douglas
Title: Shampoo Planet 1992

Author: Crews, Harry
Title: Celebration 1998

Author: Crews, Harry
Title: The Knockout Artist 1988

Author: Dixon, Stephen
Title: Gould; A Novel in Two Novels 1997

Author: Dooling, Richard
Title: Critical Care 1992
Title: White Man's Grave 1994

Author: Dorsey, Tim
Title: Florida Roadkill 1999

Author: Ducornet, Rikki
Title: The Stain 1984

Author: Dunn, Katherine
Title: Geek Love 1989

Author: Durstin, Larry
Title: Still Looking 1997

Author: Eggers, Paul
Title: Saviors 1998

Author: Elton, Ben
Title: Popcorn 1997

Author: Ephron, Amy
Title: Biodegradable Soap 1991

Author: Epstein, Leslie
Title: Goldkorn Tales 1985

Author: Everett, Rupert
Title: Hello Darling, Are You Working? 1989

Author: Figes, Eva
Title: Nelly's Version 1988

Author: Fitzhugh, Bill
Title: Pest Control 1996

Author: Gates, David
Title: Jernigan 1991

Author: Goldberg, Lee
Title: Beyond the Beyond 1997

Author: Graham, Toni
Title: The Dacquiri Girls 1998

Author: Gray, Alasdair
Title: Poor Things 1992

Author: Green, George
Title: The Caveman's Valentine 1994

Author: Hannah, Barry
Title: Never Die 1991

Author: Hasek, Jaroslav
Title: The Good Soldier Svejk 1974

Author: Heath, Roy
Title: The Murderer 1992

Author: Heller, Joseph
Title: Catch-22 1961 Title: Closing Time 1994

Author: Hiaasen, Carl
Title: Tourist Season 1986

Author: Hinojosa, Francisco
Title: Heretic Ethics 1998

Author: Huxley, Aldous
Title: After Many Summers Dies the Swan 1939

Author: Hynes, James
Title: Publish and Perish 1997

Author: Indiania, Gary
Title: Resentment 1997

Author: Irwin, Robert
Title: The Limits of Vision 1986

Author: Jensen, Liz
Title: Ark Baby 1998

Author: Jolley, Elizabeth
Title: Mr. Scobie's Riddle 1984

Author: Jones, Matthew F.
Title: The Cooter Farm 1991

Author: Kashner, Rita
Title: The Graceful Exit 1989

Author: Kelman, James
Title: How Late it Was, How Late 1995

Author: Kirn, Walter
Title: She Needed Me 1992

Author: Kraft, Eric
Title: Reservations Recommended 1990

Author: Kureishi, Hanif
Title: Love in a Blue Time 1999

Author: Landford, Terrill
Title: Shooters 1998

Author: Lefcourt, Peter
Title: Abrbreviating Ernie 1997

Author: Lethem, Jonathan
Title: Amnesia Moon 1996

Author: Lewis, Norman
Title: Within the Labyrinth 1986

Author: McCabe, Patrick
Title: Breeakfast on Pluto 1998

Author: McCormack, Mike
Title: Crowe's Requiem 1998

Author: McCoy, Maureen
Title: Divining Blood 1992

Author: McGinley, Patrick
Title: Foxprints 1985

Author: McGrath, Patrick
Title: The Grotesque 1989

Author: McGuane, Thomas
Title: Ninty-two in the Shade 1973

Author: Miller, Linda
Title: Like Being Killed 1998

Author: Millett, Lydia
Title: Omnivores 1996

Author: Moore, Christopher
Title: Island of the Sequined Love Nun 1997

Author: Morrow, Jmes
Title: City of Truth 1929

Author: Murdoch, Iris
Title: Jackson's Dilemma 1995

Author: Nicholson, Geoff
Title: Footsucker 1996

Author: Nunn, Kem
Title: Pomona Queen 1992

Author: O'Brien, Tim
Title: The Nuclear Age 1985

Author: Palahniuk, Chuck
Title: Survivor 1999

Author: Peterson, Brenda
Title: Duck and Cover 1991

Author: Polcek, Karel
Title: What Ownership's All About 1993

Author: Powell, Dawn
Title: Time To Be Born

Author: Prill, David
Title: The Unnatural 1995
Title: Serial Killer Days 1996

Author: Purdy, James
Title: In the Hollow of His Hand 1986

Author: Reed, Philip
Title: Bird Dog 1997

Author: Rees, Emilyn
Title: The Book of Dead Authors 1998

Author: Rogers, James
Title: Savage Life 1998

Author: Rushdie, Salman
Title: Shame 1997

Author: Sacks, Jen
Title: Nice 1998

Author: Schulman, Helen
Title: The Revisionist 1998

Author: Schulze, Ingo
Title: 33 Moments of Happiness 1998

Author: Shacochis, Bob
Title: The Next New World 1989

Author: Shames, Lawrence
Title: Florida Straits 1992

Author: Simpson, Thomas William
Title: This Way Madness Lies 1992

Author: Skvorecky, Josef
Title: The Republic of Whores 1993

Author: Smiley, Jane
Title: Moo 1995

Author: Southern, Terry
Title: Magic Christian

Author: Spark, Muriel
Title: Memento Mori 1990

Author: Toole, John Kennedy
Title: Confederacy of Dunces

Author: Torrington, Jeff
Title: The Devil's Carousel 1997

Author: Trott, Susan
Title: Divorcing Daddy 1992

Author: Unsworth, Barry
Title: Sugar and Rum 1999

Author: Vonnegut, Kurt
Title: Mother Night 1966

Author: Weldon, Fay
Title: Worst Fears 1996

Author: Welsh, Irvine
Title: Trainspotting 1996
Title : Filth 1998

Author: Wesley, Mary
Title: Jumping the Queue 1988

Author: Westlake, Donald
Title: Sacred Monster 1989

Author: White, Curtis
Title: Memories of My Father Watching T.V. 1998

Author: Woodrell, Daniel
Title: Muscle for the Wing 1998

Author: Womack, Jack
Title: Random Acts of Senseless Violence 1995