seriously funny

April Fools’ Day is a day for humor, but it’s also a day that reminds us that humor is intimately bound up with darker feelings, including shame, anger, and grief. Here’s a look at some of the fiction coming out this month that’s funny without necessarily being light.

The Society of Shame by Jane Roper (Anchor, April 4): After Kathleen Held returns home early from a trip to discover that her garage is on fire, her politician husband comes tumbling out of the car in his underwear followed by a 20-something woman from his campaign staff. But the thing that ends up really embarrassing Kathleen is the fact that she got her period and the blood leaked onto her pants—and the stain was caught on camera by her taxi driver and broadcast to the world. Kathleen becomes the face of the #YesWeBleed movement, with unpredictable consequences. Our starred review calls the book “astutely written, with the perfect balance among humor, heartbreak, and understanding.”

Calling Ukraine by Johannes Lichtman (MarySue Rucci Books/Scribner, April 11): This comic novel provides a portrait of Ukraine before Russia’s 2022 invasion. In 2018, American John Turner moves to Lutsk to help call-center reps learn to banter in American English. Our starred review says: “Perhaps most impressive is Lichtman’s high-wire act of tone.… When a comic figure…is set down in a country inured to tragedy—and as the undeclared Russian war worsens and a comic actor is elected to the Ukrainian presidency—it becomes clear that John’s misunderstandings and awkwardnesses…can’t stay mere fish-out-of-water humor. In places like Ukraine, comedy is backed with consequences.”

Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki, translated by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Helen O’Horan, and Daniel Joseph (Verso, April 11): Suzuki (1949-1986) was a Japanese SF writer who produced what our review calls “dark and punky stories” filled with people who feel like aliens or are placed in the wrong timelines. “These 11 stories surprise with wry humor and stun with the loneliness of living,” according to our review.

Games and Rituals by Katherine Heiny (Knopf, April 18): Heiny specializes in what our starred review calls “lovably quirky” characters, and the beauty of her story collections is that there are more of them (though of course her novels are wonderful, too!). “Here again,” our review says, “Heiny approaches her disarmingly charming characters with tenderness, empathy, and humor, even (perhaps, especially) when they meander outside the bounds of good behavior.” This book features a love-smitten driving examiner; a woman dealing with her elderly father’s foibles; and an almost-empty-nester who’s committed to decluttering her home and maybe her life. “For Heiny fans and those just discovering her naughty, generous-spirited fiction, this collection is bound to spark considerable joy.”

Moorewood Family Rules by HelenKay Dimon (Avon/ HarperCollins, April 25): Dimon is known for romance novels, but her latest “leans more significantly into the wacky interpersonal hijinks of its premise,” according to our review. The Moorewoods are a family of con artists based at a glamorous house in Newport— but when Jillian Moorewood gets out of prison, she’s not happy to find them up to their old tricks of wooing wealthy widows. She’d only taken the fall for them because they’d promised to go legit. Our review calls it “an ensemble comedy with a healthy dose of humorous back-stabbing.” human sacrifices

What The Neighbors Saw

Adelman, Melissa

Minotaur (304 pp.)

$28.00 | June 20, 2023

9781250876560

A shocking death rocks an upscale neighborhood and makes it harder for the residents to conceal dangers that lurk beneath the surface.

When Alexis Crawford and her attorney husband, Sam, decide to buy a fixerupper for their growing family, they follow the adage of looking for the worst house in the best neighborhood. And River Forest is about the best neighborhood they can afford: It’s D.C.–adjacent, it’s certainly safe, and it has a run-down yet gorgeous Cape Cod Revival that’s just come on the market and is the sort of place that realtors might call gracious. Alexis and Sam don’t often act impulsively, but soon they find themselves moving in and trying to get to know their new neighbors. Immediately, Alexis feels out of place, not only as a Black woman in a largely White neighborhood, but also as someone from a different class background. Though she tries to talk with Sam, he’s too busy working to make partner to notice how isolated she’s becoming. The tragic death of neighbor Teddy Bard gives Alexis a chance to connect to his widow, Blair, and the story continues in alternating chapters from the two women’s firstperson points of view, with varying degrees of reliability. After the police determine that Teddy’s death was a murder, Alexis starts to wonder if this is a sign of more simmering tensions in what was supposed to be her safe haven. Sam’s ongoing distance and Blair’s friendship make Alexis wonder how much she really knows herself as well.

May have fans of “all’s well that ends well” rooting for an imperfectly fitting ending.

Human Sacrifices

Ampuero, María Fernanda

Trans. by Frances Riddle

Feminist Press (144 pp.)

$15.95 paper | May 16, 2023

9781558612983

Terrifying stories lay bare the brutality of patriarchy and the violence it metes out on women and children.

Ecuadorian writer Ampuero begins with “Biography,” a nightmarish story of an undocumented woman who travels to a remote house to meet a man who’s offered her money to write his life story. In the next tale, “Believers,” a girl living in the shadow of turbulent protests spies on two missionaries who are renting a room from her family. A sense of claustrophobia dwells in these pages. A few stories in, the reader begins to prepare for the horrible thing (or things) that will inevitably happen. Page after page, women and children are brutalized and raped. Confronted by one monstrous scene after another, the reader becomes almost inured to the collection’s representations of violence. The stories are strongest when they avoid relying on the shock value of human cruelty and experiment with the possibilities afforded by the form of the short story.

“Pietà,” for instance, is told in a stream-of-consciousness style from the perspective of a nanny and maid who dotingly watches her charge grow up. The singular point of view and the rapid jumps in time reveal, within the span of a few pages, the tragedy of loving someone who’s terrible. In “Sacrifices,” the story unfolds completely in direct dialogue between a husband and wife lost in a parking lot. The lack of visual description—usually the bread and butter of fiction—yields deliciously frightening results.

Stories that rely heavily on depictions of violence but dazzle with formal experimentation.

Swamp Story

Barry, Dave Simon & Schuster (320 pp.)

$28.99 | May 2, 2023

9781982191337

Gold bars, pythons, and TikTok videos of swamp monsters add up to a hilarious Florida tale.

Jesse Braddock has a spectacularly handsome boyfriend and a darling baby girl, but she’s not feeling the happily-ever-after. Slater may look like “classic Tom Cruise,” but he’s a philanderer who’s spent most of Jesse’s trust fund, and now they’re living in a broken-down cabin in the Everglades with Slater’s videographer pal, Kark, “and ninety trillion mosquitoes. And no money.” Slater and Kark’s highest ambition is to sell a reality TV show called Glades Man, which would feature Slater taking his shirt off among the palmettos. After a close encounter with a python, Jesse is developing an ambition to take baby Willa and flee, but how? Nearby, Ken and Brad Bortle, proprietors of the failing Bortle Brothers Bait & Beer, are cooking up a get-rich scheme of their own (well, Ken’s). After seeing a viral video of Phil Teagler, an alcoholic former newspaper reporter, attempting to play a costumed character at a rich little girl’s birthday party, with dire but hilarious results, Ken has the idea of making a video of Phil playing a cryptid, which they dub the Everglades Melon Monster for its giant head (from a repurposed Dora the Explorer costume). Once that hits the sound and fury of TikTok, they’ll sell a ton of Melon Monster merch. When Ken, Kark, and Slater meet, they quickly realize they can join forces: Glades Man vs. Melon Monster. Meanwhile, Jesse has literally stumbled upon a legendary cache of Civil War–era gold bars buried in the Glades long ago. She has also run afoul of the Campbell brothers, Duck and Billy, a couple of ex-cons who, despite their childish nicknames, are mean as snakes but not as smart. In desperate need of help and a ride to Miami to consult a lawyer, she joins forces with Brad. All of those plot threads will get further entangled with Eastern European mobsters, the secretary of the interior, and a python hunter with an “emotional support boar,” among other things. Barry makes mirth of all this mayhem with his usual aplomb.

Florida’s humorist laureate finds chaos and comedy in the Everglades.

The Postcard

Berest, Anne

Trans. by Tina Kover

Europa Editions (464 pp.)

$28.00 | May 16, 2023

9781609458386

A Jewish family’s experience across multiple generations, researched by a mother and daughter, shines a spotlight on French antisemitism, both historic and contemporary.

The arrival in 2003 of an unsigned postcard, delivered to her mother Lélia’s postbox in Paris, bearing the names of four family ancestors murdered at Auschwitz, forces Anne Berest properly to consider her Jewish heritage. The result is this autofiction sharing the tragic saga of one branch of her forbears, the Rabinovitches, seeking peace and a safe home in the shifting European landscape of the 20th century. Lélia, who has methodically pieced together the story of her grandparents, now shares it with Anne, starting with Ephraïm and Emma’s marriage in Moscow and the birth of their first child, Myriam, Lélia’s mother, who will be the sole survivor. Two more children, Noémie and Jacques, are born, while the Rabinovitches move, for political reasons, to Latvia, then France. But Ephraïm fails to secure French citizenship for the family, and, as their lives become increasingly circumscribed after the German occupation, first Noémie and Jacques and then the parents are arrested, imprisoned, and slaughtered. Berest’s descriptions of captivity are notably horrific. Years later, as Anne’s child reports antisemitism at school, Anne remembers the postcard and begins a quest to find its author. Now the narrative switches from historical record to detection, involving a private eye and a graphologist, before turning more introspective as it traces Myriam’s experience. Having escaped into the French free zone with her husband, she settles in a remote Provencal cottage, then comes back to Paris and joins the Resistance. As the war ends, she witnesses the return of skeletal survivors from Germany. The story overall is poignant, tense, restless, and ultimately pivotal, as Anne not only solves her mystery, but, more importantly, gains her identity.

The anguish and horror of genocide arrive with fresh impact in an absorbing personal account.

Back To The Dirt

Bill, Frank Farrar, Straus and Giroux (336 pp.)

$17.00 paper | May 9, 2023

9780374534431

Grim, violent, and chock-full of mayhem and despair—welcome back to Frank Bill country.

Miles Knox is an aging Vietnam vet, well-meaning but prone to steroid-fueled rage—and tortured still by what he saw and did in country. Shelby McCutchen is his much-younger girlfriend, a stripper forced to take care of the fragile and damaged men in her family: her painkiller-addicted twin, Wylie, and her drunk and deeply unpleasant father. When Wylie is sought for the coldblooded double murders of his oxy dealers—sought by the slow and irrelevant forces of the law but also, more dangerously, by Nathaniel, the resourceful ex-cop whose brother was one of the victims—he holes up at Miles’ rural fishing camp, with Shelby as a kind of hostage. Meanwhile Miles (when he’s not distracted by brutal fistfights, flashbacks, job worries, and even an industrial accident) begins in a haphazard way to search for her...and he and Nathaniel eventually join forces, though at this point (it’s a long story) Miles, having suddenly been introduced to LSD, is inhabiting a hallucinatory world that’s equal parts southern Indiana now and southern Vietnam then. The book is not so much gritty as relentlessly grim—at its bleakest it seems a kind of ruin porn focused not on bombed-out buildings but on bombed-out people—but it does move quickly, with plenty of surprises, and it provides the all-hell-broke-loose tumult one expects from Bill. Reading it is like mainlining testosterone and hopelessness...and whether or not that seems like a compliment to you will give a good sense of whether you’re the intended audience.

All ain’t well in the heartland.

The Collected Regrets Of Clover

Brammer, Mikki

St. Martin’s (320 pp.)

$28.00 | May 9, 2023

9781250284396

Clover Brooks has spent almost her whole life in the presence of death; maybe the time has come for her to live a little.

When she was 5, Clover witnessed her kindergarten teacher’s collapse, and then, when she was 6, her parents died in an accident while on vacation in China. Taken in by her maternal grandfather, she moved from Connecticut to New York City, where he raised her lovingly, if in some isolation. Now 36, she still lives in her grandfather’s West Village apartment, though he’s been dead for 13 years; works as a death doula; and counts as her only true friends her pets and her 87-year-old neighbor. Her work is emotionally challenging but rewarding; she holds the hands of the dying, then goes home to write down their last words in one of three journals: “Regrets,” “Advice,” or “Confessions.” Despite the loneliness of her life, Clover isn’t looking for a change, which is, naturally, when change finds her: first in the form of Sebastian, who asks her to spend time with his dying grandmother, and then in the form of Sylvie, who moves into the apartment downstairs. The grandmother, Claudia, turns out to be a spitfire: a former photojournalist, she left the love of her life behind when she married, and Clover, inspired by her energy and kindness, seeks closure to this tale, while also (maybe?) going on her first date ever with Sebastian and beginning a friendship with Sylvie. As she connects with others, she must also accept her lingering grief and guilt for her beloved grandfather’s death. There are so many opportunities for cliché here, and Brammer adroitly sidesteps them all. This is a beautiful tale of a vulnerable, compassionate woman who finds that, in order to care for others, she must also let herself be cared for. Even that cliché feels moving, rather than saccharine, in Brammer’s capable hands.

Walks the edge of sentimentality with poignant success.

Do A Cleanwell Leaves Home

Castillo, Ana HarperVia (256 pp.)

$27.99 | May 16, 2023

9780063259416

A new collection of stories from a grande dame of Chicana literature.

“Being who you are isn’t static,” says Ada, a middle-aged nurse in the story “Ada and Pablo.” She should know: Everything she thought was stable about her life in Mexico City with her husband, Pablo, has become unfamiliar, from a surprising new friendship at work with a young, handsome doctor, to physical changes wrought by menopause. Most unsettled of all is her decadeslong marriage to Pablo, as rumors and suspicions swirl about his behavior. Ada is not the only character tangled in this web of secrets in Castillo’s collection, comprising seven long stories and a very brief prologue. A gay man whose accomplished sister, a professor in Chicago, dies suddenly goes through her papers and learns she had a secret life in Mexico that extended far beyond what he ever could have imagined of her (“Ven”). An architect visits the site of one of his elderly father’s oft-told family legends to discover the facts behind it (“Cuernavaca”). In the memorable title story, set in the mid1970s, 18-year-old Katia, a budding feminist near the top of her Chicago high school’s graduating class, is sent to Mexico by her father to retrieve her mother, who has abruptly abandoned the family. Katia, obsessed as she is with learning what being a woman truly means—how free a woman’s freedom can actually be—is shocked when she arrives in Mexico and learns her mother has fallen in love with another woman. Throughout these stories, Mexico is the source of both mystery and clarity, whether through characters’ histories as immigrants or children of immigrants, or because, as happens frequently, the characters in these tales must travel there, like Dorothy to Oz, to unlock knowledge which often has the potential to alter their lives.

Castillo’s

truth-seeking characters leave an impression.

The Enchanted Hacienda

Cervantes, J.C. Park Row Books (368 pp.)

$30.00 | May 16, 2023

9780778334057

A 20-something returns home to find the magic within herself in this heartwarming tale.

Harlow Estrada has just had the worst day: She was let go from her dream job as a book editor and broke up with her boyfriend, a lawyer, after she overheard him mocking her at a party celebrating his own promotion. It’s a good thing she’d already been planning to go down to Hacienda Estrada, the family flower farm in Mexico, since her mother and aunt are gathering all her sisters and cousins for a special announcement. This isn’t just any farm: It’s full of magic that’s been passed down for generations in Harlow’s family, magic that only she didn’t inherit. Despite this, for some reason Harlow is the one chosen for the family’s magic-related task, and she must muster up the confidence to deal with the mishaps, troubles, and charismatic young men that come along with it to ultimately figure out what she truly wanted all along. Cervantes has created a charming world, the kind of place that anyone would want to spend time. The magic system, a combination of person-specific traits and magical flowers, is original and cozy, never entirely explained and yet incredibly familiar. Harlow’s family is similar, a warm hug of a group, sometimes causing friction but mostly showering Harlow with love. Each sister and cousin is interesting in her own right and could easily lead to her own follow-up book.

Though the beats of the book are fairly easy to predict, that doesn’t take away from the story. If anything, it heightens it as Harlow comes into her own in multiple areas of her life, from writing to family to love.

An enchantingly comfortable romantic dramedy.

Flux

Chong, Jinwoo

Melville House (352 pp.)

$28.99 | March 21, 2023

9781685890346

A marketing exec unknowingly makes a devil’s bargain when he’s offered a job that’s too good to be true.

More literary alchemy than timeywimey SF, Chong’s debut novel falls right on the emotional bubble between the cult film Donnie Darko and Charles Yu’s noodle-bender Interior

WW2 MARITIME THRILLER THAT’S WINNING AWARDS & RAVE REVIEWS

“…electrifying…the author’s knowledge of the relevant historical material…is extraordinary…A captivating, action-packed thriller that’s historically astute.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“This superior maritime thriller finds an American captain smuggling Jewish refugees as Nazis prowl.”

—BookLife Reviews at Publishers Weekly, Editor’s Pick

“Library collections on the lookout for vivid World War II accounts and lively plots will find The Hunt for the Peggy C a winning attraction.”

—Midwest Book Review

The Hunt for the Peggy C by John Winn Miller

Published by Bancroft Press

978-1-61088-570-6 (HC)

978-1-61088-572-0 (Ebook)

978-1-61088-574-4 (Audio)

For Film Rights: Bruce L. Bortz, Esq., Publisher, Bancroft Press, 410-627-0608 (cell) bruceb@bancroftpress.com

Chinatown (2020). The narrative throughline pivots on one very strange day for 28-year-old Brandon, who’s half Korean, queer, and confused most of the time. Working for one of America’s last magazines, he’s not really surprised when he’s fired a few days before Christmas. After he uncharacteristically buys an expensive handbag and makes a pass at the salesclerk, he falls down an elevator shaft. Then he’s offered a job by Lev, a fasttalking raconteur who works for Flux, a Silicon Valley–flavored startup founded by enigmatic Io Emsworth, a doppelgänger for convicted charlatan Elizabeth Holmes promising an equally nebulous breakthrough. By the time these machinations start revolving, Chong has already broken the timeline. When 8-year-old Bo loses his mother in a car accident, he becomes obsessed with the 1980s detective show Raider. The show’s legacy is both groundbreaking for star Antonin Haubert’s portrayal of an Asian police detective and “the most racist fucking thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” according to Lev, compounded by its star’s spectacular fall from grace. Meanwhile, Blue, 48, is navigating life after two months spent in a coma and a tenuous relationship with his ex and their daughter. Every day, Brandon comes to work, eats his breakfast, and then…he doesn’t know what happens, but he’s losing days and weeks at a time. In a story about identity, our hero isn’t always the most sympathetic cast member even in a story flush with fakers. The fantastical elements lend intrigue, but Chong seems more interested in grief and the ways it shapes us than rewarming old chestnuts about art and the nature of blame.

A paranoid and inventive cautionary tale about buying into someone else’s glitchy utopia.

Dykette

Davis, Jenny Fran

Henry Holt (320 pp.)

$26.99 | May 16, 2023

9781250843135

In her first novel for adults, Davis explores what happens when people are isolated physically while remaining very much online.

Over the course of 10 days—as 2019 turns into 2020—three New York couples convene for an ostensibly bucolic holiday getaway. Cablenews host Jules Todd and her partner, therapist/podcaster Miranda Saraf, are the “queer elders” with enough money and enough of a sense of domesticity to own a second home in the Hudson Valley. Lou runs a home-goods shop in Bushwick that has been featured in Vogue. Their new girlfriend, Darcy, retails coveted fashions on the Lower East Side. Perhaps more importantly, she’s leggy and gorgeous and has a blue checkmark next to her name on Insta. Jesse is a set decorator by trade and a “Renaissance butch” by inclination. He’s there with Sasha, a graduate student working on a cultural history of femininity as defined by small spaces and miniaturized objects. Most of the story is narrated from Sasha’s point of view, and if the descriptions of the main characters seem hyperspecific, it’s because Sasha is acutely aware of both status and LGBTQ+ typology. How readers react to this novel will largely depend on how they react to Sasha. Both she and her creator clearly understand that she’s a whole situation—radically insecure and spectacularly self-involved, emotionally demanding but never not playing a role, impulsive while never losing sight of her immediate goal. During the time covered by this narrative, her immediate goal is to not let Darcy replace her as the adorable bimbo in this particular ménage. The battle for high-femme dominance comes to a head when Jesse and Darcy collaborate on a piece of livestreamed performance art that Sasha perceives not just as infidelity, but also as a parody of her sweetly pink aesthetic.

A view of contemporary queer life presented by a spectacularly unreliable narrator.

HEDGE

Delury, Jane

Zibby Books (272 pp.)

$26.99 | June 6, 2023

9798985282856

The romance that arrives in the life of a woman moving on from her marriage turns out to be more of a problematic beginning than a happy ending.

Maud, a 40-year-old garden historian in San Francisco, has had enough of her pretense of a marriage to Peter, which also denied her the opportunity to follow her career. Now, spending the summer working on the restoration of a formal Victorian garden in New York’s Hudson Valley, and separated from her husband, she finds herself falling for Gabriel, an archaeologist who’s attached to the same project. But Maud’s two daughters have arrived to join her for two months and need her attention, especially sensitive, moody 13-year-old Ella, who seems jealous of Maud and is flirting with Gabriel. The tension among the group reaches a crisis point as Peter comes to visit and Ella disappears, leading to revelations that will require Maud to stay married and put her children’s needs first. Back in San Francisco, trying to make things work with Peter and assist Ella on her long road to recovery, Maud finds a new, local restoration job involving the garden of Hispanic settlers and looks back with a critical eye on “the collateral damage of that heedless summer.” Then she meets Alice Lincoln, a wealthy artist who might underwrite the current garden project, and they become friends, distracting Maud from her musings about Gabriel, sex, and a life free from compromise. But the association with Alice leads unexpectedly to further ruptures that will blow Maud’s life open even more drastically. Delury’s sharply drawn portrait of anguish, loneliness, fear, and desire is less innovative and more slender than her noted debut, The Balcony (2018). But dodging romantic predictability while acknowledging the heart’s true priorities, it delivers an engaging new journey from ignorance to knowledge via a garden.

A persuasive, quietly satisfying portrait of a woman’s midlife crisis and the essential choices she makes.

Homebodies

Denton-Hurst, Tembe

Harper/HarperCollins (320 pp.)

$30.00 | May 2, 2023

9780063274280

A young Black woman contends with New York media culture.

Mickey Hayward’s shiny writing job is not as great as she’d hoped it would be. “Instead of reporting on the goings on of Black life,” Denton-Hurst writes in her engaging debut, Mickey “was making listicles about the best lipsticks for every skin tone.” But when she’s abruptly fired from her position, Mickey is devastated and thrown into a depression that forces her to reconsider every aspect of her life—including her relationship with her girlfriend, Lex. For a break, Mickey takes off for her Maryland hometown, where she reconnects with old friends and tries to decide what to do with herself next. Full of contradictions, Mickey makes for an interesting protagonist—but very few of the other characters seem fully formed. Denton-Hurst’s descriptions of the publishing landscape are witty, as when she observes, “Every editor, writer, and intern believed they had a New York media memoir brewing just beneath the surface,” or when Mickey agonizes over a casual text message to her editor: “ ‘Of course!’ she wrote back, wondering if one exclamation point was enough.” But when Mickey heads for Maryland, the book starts to drag. DentonHurst has the novice writer’s habit of overwriting: Every action is engulfed by unnecessary description. For example, “Mickey toed off her sneakers before continuing inside, peeling off her coat and hanging her keys on the small hook in the entry.” The verbiage slows down the action and distracts from DentonHurst’s otherwise astute observations about media culture,