A laugh-out-loud novel about teenage pretensions and adult delusions from an author whom the New York Times has called "a Balzac of the station wagon set"Chick Swallow and his best friend, Nickie Sherman, are teenage boulevardiers of Decency, Connecticut, devotees of Oscar Wilde who spend their evenings crafting perverse aphorisms in an ice-cream parlor. "There is only one thing worse than not having children," opines Chick, "and that is having them." Unrep...

An irresistible comedy about faith, desire, and middle-class morality from the man described by Kingsley Amis as "the funniest serious writer to be found on either side of the Atlantic"Pity the poor reverend Andrew Mackerel of the People's Liberal Church of Avalon, Connecticut. His is the first split-level church in America, a bastion of modern thought and sophisticated virtue, yet even his prosperous parishioners are not immune to the backsliding evangelism infecti...

This autobiographical novel of family tragedy by the author of Slouching Towards Kalamazoo "moves deftly from manic hilarity to manic fury, and back again" ( Newsday).The most poignant of Peter De Vries's novels, The Blood of the Lamb is also his most personal. It follows the life of Don Wanderhop from his childhood in an immigrant Calvinist family living in Chicago in the 1950s through the loss of a brother, his faith, his wife, and fina...

"The range of his performance is hard to equal. . . . De Vries produces something that is more than brilliant entertainment." — New York TimesHarking from the golden age of fiction set in American suburbia—the school of John Updike and Cheever—this work from the great American humorist Peter De Vries looks with laughter upon its lawns, its cocktails, and its slightly unreal feeling of comfort. Without a Stitch in Time, a selection of forty-six arti...

Twin tales of middle-class hilarity and despair from the writer who was dubbed "America's preeminent comic novelist" by the New York TimesWhen college professor Hank Tattersall sees his former flame, Lucy Stiles, at a campus concert, it sets off a chain reaction that results in one of the funniest and most unforgettable exit scenes in American literature—involving a locked door, an alcoholic dog, and a punning doppelgänger. The Cat's Pajamas is th...

A comic novel of ambition and infidelity in the suburbs by "the funniest serious writer to be found either side of the Atlantic" (Kinglsey Amis).Harking from the golden age of fiction that skewered the middle-class American dream—the school of John Updike and John Cheever—this novel by the author of Slouching Towards Kalamazoo looks with laughter upon the lawns, cocktails, and creature comforts of suburbia, as well as the antics and anxieties that lurk jus...

A masterwork of literary parody about a suburban Samaritan and the poet he seeks to inspireAfter the wild adventures of Comfort Me with Apples, Chick Swallow has found domestic peace in Decency, Connecticut, accepting his fate as a middle-class husband and father and the author of an advice column in the local newspaper. His hard-won contentment is about to disappear like warm water down a bathtub drain, however, when fate intervenes to reunite our hero wit...

A brilliant, fiercely funny novel that ponders the eternal question: is it better to laugh or cry?Joe Sandwich is a clown. Not literally, but what else do you call an eleven-year-old who goes to church to confess his good deeds: "I did my homework without being told"? A stockbroker who gets seasick watching the market tape and claims the gross national product is "deodorants"? A father who mows curse words into his lawn and names his son Hamilton because, well, who ...

Suburban absurdity meets good old American despair in this acclaimed novel by "the funniest serious writer to be found on either side of the Atlantic" (Kingsley Amis).Harking from the golden age of fiction set in American suburbia—the school of John Updike and Cheever—this work from the great American humorist Peter De Vries looks with laughter upon its lawns, its cocktails, and its slightly unreal feeling of comfort. A manic epic, Reuben, Reuben is really ...

The sins of the father are hilariously visited on the son in this witty and profound novel about the meaning of it allStanley Waltz is a Polish American piano mover and pugnacious atheist married to a born-again believer. His heroes are H. L. Mencken and Clarence Darrow, and if he confuses "illusion" with "allusion" and thinks a certain style of egg is "bedeviled," that does not mean his reasoning is any less sound. Unfortunately, his wife is immune to his intellect...

A masterwork of literary parody about a suburban Samaritan and the poet he seeks to inspireAfter the wild adventures of Comfort Me with Apples, Chick Swallow has found domestic peace in Decency, Connecticut, accepting his fate as a middle-class husband and father and the author of an advice column in the local newspaper. His hard-won contentment is about to disappear like warm water down a bathtub drain, however, when fate intervenes to reunite our hero wit...

The classic American coming of age novel of a precocious young man and the lessons learned from his tutor by "a masterly entertainer and social satirist" ( The New York Times).It is 1963 in an unnamed town in North Dakota, and Anthony Thrasher is languishing for a second year in eighth grade. Prematurely sophisticated, young Anthony spends too much time reading Joyce, Eliot, and Dylan Thomas but not enough time studying the War of 1812 or obtuse triangles....