Boris Vian was a jack of all trades, although unfortunately his name was Boris and "Boris of all trades" never took off as a turn of phrase. Nevertheless, Vian was a great songwriter, playwright, singer, jazz critic, and, of course, novelist. Vian's 1947 novel Autumn in Peking (L'Automne à Pékin) is perhaps Vian's most slapstick work, with an added amount of despair in its exotic recipe for a violent cocktail drink.

The story takes place in the imaginary desert called Exopotamie where all the leading characters take part in the building of a train station with tracks that go nowhere. Houses and buildings are destroyed to build this unnecessary structure - and in Vian's world, waste not, make not.

In Alistair Rolls' pioneering study of Vian's novels, "The Flight of the Angels," he expresses that Exopotamie is a thinly disguised version of Paris, where after the war, the city started changing its previous centuries of architecture to something more modern. Yes, something dull to take the place of what was exciting and mysterious.

Vian, in a mixture of great humor and an unequal amount of disgust, introduces various 'eccentric' characters in this 'desert' adventure, such as Anne and Angel who are best friends; and Rochelle who is in love and sleeps with Anne, while Angel is madly in love with her. Besides the trio, there is also Doctor Mangemanche; the archeologist Athanagore Porphyroginite, his aide, Cuivre; and Pipo - all of them in a locality similar to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, where there is a tinge of darkness and anything is possible, except for happiness.

Last Days of Summer is a contemporary American classic—a poignant and hilarious tale of baseball, hero worship, eccentric behavior, and unlikely friendship.

The story follows Joey Margolis, a neighborhood punching bag, growing up goofy and mostly fatherless in Brooklyn in the early 1940s. Joey is a boy looking for a hero, and he decides to latch on to Charlie Banks, the all-star third baseman for the New York Giants.

However, Joey's chosen champion doesn't exactly welcome the extreme attention of a persistent young fan with an overactive imagination. Then again, this strange, needy kid might be exactly what Banks needs.

This improbable friendship unfolds through letters, postcards, notes, telegrams, newspaper clippings, report cards, and ticket stubs, featuring a colorful cast of supporting characters.

Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, and Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event. It also covers Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, and evil intent in high places. The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by historical figures such as Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.

As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.

Pat Conroy called Dorothea Benton Frank’s debut, Sullivan’s Island, “hilarious and wise,” while Anne Rivers Siddons declared that it “roars with life.”

Now, Frank evokes a lush plantation in the heart of modern-day South Carolina—where family ties and hidden truths run as deep and dark as the mighty Edisto River.

Caroline Wimbley Levine always swore she’d never go home again. But now, at her brother’s behest, she has returned to South Carolina to see about Mother—only to find that the years have not changed the Queen of Tall Pines Plantation. Miss Lavinia is as maddeningly eccentric as ever—and absolutely will not suffer the questionable advice of her children.

This does not surprise Caroline. Nor does the fact that Tall Pines is still brimming with scandals and secrets, betrayals and lies. But she soon discovers that something is different this time around. It lies somewhere in the distance between her and her mother—and in her understanding of what it means to come home.