Arsenic and Old Lace is a masterful blend of dark comedy and classic theatre. This hilarious play by Joseph Kesselring follows the eccentric Brewster family, who are anything but ordinary. The story centers on Teddy Brewster, who believes he is Teddy Roosevelt and is often found "charging" upstairs or digging "locks for the Panama Canal" in the basement.

Living with Teddy are his two elderly aunts, who harbor a bizarre secret involving the hand-dug "locks" in the basement. The return of their "disagreeable" brother Jonathan, who has undergone plastic surgery, adds another layer of intrigue as he plots with Dr. Einstein to set up an operating room for criminals.

The play's only normal character, Mortimer, is a drama critic engaged to Elaine, the minister's daughter. Mortimer finds himself in a whirlwind of frantic action, ironic twists, and comic routines, as he deals with his family's peculiar antics and the bodies hidden in the living room's window seat.

The local police, unaware of the household's secrets, often drop by at the most inconvenient times, adding to the dramatic surprises in this delightful and inspired comic concoction.

Pongo Twistleton is in a state of financial embarrassment, again. Uncle Fred, meanwhile, has been asked by Lord Emsworth to foil a plot to steal the Empress, his prize pig. Along with Polly Pott (daughter of old Mustard), they form a deputation to Blandings Castle, bent on doing a "bit of good".

The Orchid Thief is Susan Orlean’s tale of an amazing obsession. Determined to clone an endangered flower—the rare ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindenii—a deeply eccentric and oddly attractive man named John Laroche leads Orlean on an unforgettable tour of America’s strange flower-selling subculture, through Florida’s swamps and beyond, along with the Seminoles who help him and the forces of justice who fight him.

In the end, Orlean—and the reader—will have more respect for underdog determination and a powerful new definition of passion.

In this edition, Orlean revisits this unforgettable world, and the route by which it was brought to the screen in the film Adaptation, in a new retrospective essay.

Stoneybridge is a small town on the west coast of Ireland where all the families know one another. When Chicky Starr decides to take an old, decaying mansion set high on the cliffs overlooking the windswept Atlantic Ocean and turn it into a restful place for a holiday by the sea, everyone thinks she is crazy.

Helped by Rigger (a bad boy turned good who is handy around the house) and Orla, her niece (a whiz at business), Chicky is finally ready to welcome the first guests to Stone House’s big warm kitchen, log fires, and understated elegant bedrooms.

Meet the guests: John, the American movie star, who thinks he has arrived incognito; Winnie and Lillian, forced into taking a holiday together; Nicola and Henry, husband and wife, shaken by seeing too much death in their medical practice; Anders, who hates his father’s business but has a real talent for music; Miss Nell Howe, a retired schoolteacher who criticizes everything and leaves a day early, much to everyone’s relief; the Walls, disappointed to have won this second-prize holiday in a contest where first prize was Paris; and Freda, the librarian, afraid of her own psychic visions.

Sharing a week with this unlikely cast of characters is pure joy, full of Maeve’s trademark warmth and humor. Once again, she embraces us with her grand storytelling.

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.

The triumphant return of one of comics’ greatest talents, with an engrossing story of one man’s search for love, meaning, sanity, and perfect architectural proportions. An epic story long awaited, and well worth the wait.

Meet Asterios Polyp: middle-aged, meagerly successful architect and teacher, aesthete and womanizer, whose life is wholly upended when his New York City apartment goes up in flames. In a tenacious daze, he leaves the city and relocates to a small town in the American heartland. But what is this “escape” really about?

As the story unfolds, moving between the present and the past, we begin to understand this confounding yet fascinating character, and how he’s gotten to where he is. And isn’t.

We meet Hana: a sweet, smart, first-generation Japanese American artist with whom he had made a blissful life. But now she’s gone. Did Asterios do something to drive her away? What has happened to her? Is she even alive? All the questions will be answered, eventually.

In the meantime, we are enthralled by Mazzucchelli’s extraordinarily imagined world of brilliantly conceived eccentrics, sharply observed social mores, and deftly depicted asides on everything from design theory to the nature of human perception.

Asterios Polyp is David Mazzucchelli’s masterpiece: a great American graphic novel.

Teatro Grottesco is a collection that delves into the eerie and the bizarre. It features tormented individuals who meet their doom in various odd little towns, as well as in dark sectors frequented by sinister and often blackly comical eccentrics.

The cycle of narratives includes the title work, introducing readers to a freakish community of artists who encounter demonic perils that ultimately engulf their lives. These are selected examples of the forbidding array of persons and places that compose the mesmerizing fiction of Thomas Ligotti.

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.

The New York Times bestselling adventure about two twins, many djinns, and one very magical quest. Meet John and Philippa Gaunt, twelve-year-old twins who one day discover themselves to be descended from a long line of djinn.

All of a sudden, they have the power to grant wishes, travel to extraordinary places, and make people and objects disappear. Luckily, the twins are introduced to their eccentric djinn-uncle Nimrod, who will teach them how to harness their newly found power.

And not a moment too soon... since John and Philippa are about to embark on a search to locate a monstrous pharaoh named Akhenaten and his eerie tomb.

"Take my camel, dear," said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. So begins The Towers of Trebizond, the greatest novel by Rose Macaulay, one of the eccentric geniuses of English literature.

In this fine and funny adventure set in the backlands of modern Turkey, a group of highly unusual travel companions makes its way from Istanbul to legendary Trebizond. Along the way, they encounter potion-dealing sorcerers, recalcitrant policemen, and Billy Graham on tour with a busload of Southern evangelists.

But though the dominant note of the novel is humorous, its pages are shadowed by heartbreak as the narrator confronts the specters of ancient empires, religious turmoil, and painful memories of lost love.

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.