Three weeks. Two sisters. One car. A True Story.

Raina can’t wait to be a big sister. But once Amara is born, things aren’t quite how she expected them to be. Amara is cute, but she’s also a cranky, grouchy baby, and mostly prefers to play by herself.

Their relationship doesn’t improve much over the years, but when a baby brother enters the picture and later, when something doesn’t seem right between their parents, they realize they must figure out how to get along. They are sisters, after all.

Raina uses her signature humor and charm in both present-day narrative and perfectly placed flashbacks to tell the story of her relationship with her sister, which unfolds during the course of a road trip from their home in San Francisco to a family reunion in Colorado.

Take a wonderfully crazed excursion into the demented heart of a tropical paradise—a world of cargo cults, cannibals, mad scientists, ninjas, and talking fruit bats.

Our bumbling hero is Tucker Case, a hopeless geek trapped in a cool guy's body, who makes a living as a pilot for the Mary Jean Cosmetics Corporation. But when he demolishes his boss's pink plane during a drunken airborne liaison, Tuck must run for his life from Mary Jean's goons.

Now there's only one employment opportunity left for him: piloting shady secret missions for an unscrupulous medical missionary and a sexy blond high priestess on the remotest of Micronesian hells.

Here is a brazen, ingenious, irreverent, and wickedly funny novel from a modern master of the outrageous.

The Adventures of Augie March introduces us to Augie, an exuberant narrator-hero who is a poor Chicago boy growing up during the Great Depression. From the very first line, Augie captivates us with his free-spirited approach to life: "I am an American, Chicago born, and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted."

With a style reminiscent of Dickens, Saul Bellow fills this novel with a rich tapestry of characters and experiences. Augie is a "born recruit," making himself available for a series of occupations, and then proudly rejecting each as unworthy. His journey is filled with colorful companions—plungers, schemers, risk-takers, and "hole-and-corner" operators like the would-be tycoon Einhorn or the would-be siren Thea, who travels with an eagle trained to hunt small creatures.

Augie's nonconformity leads him into an eventful, humorous, and sometimes earthy way of life. His quest for reality, fulfillment, and love takes him from the depths of poverty to the peaks of worldly success, standing as an irresistible, poignant incarnation of the American idea of freedom.

This novel is written in the cascades of brilliant, biting, ravishing prose that would come to be known as “Bellovian,” re-writing the language of Bellow’s generation.

William Henry Devereaux, Jr. is the reluctant chairman of the English department at a badly underfunded college in the Pennsylvania rust belt. Over the course of a single convoluted week, he threatens to execute a duck, has his nose slashed by a feminist poet, discovers that his secretary writes better fiction than he does, and suspects his wife of having an affair with his dean.

Devereaux's reluctance is partly rooted in his character—he is a born anarchist—and partly in the fact that his department is more savagely divided than the Balkans. In the course of this week, he imagines his wife is having an affair, wonders if a curvaceous adjunct is trying to seduce him with peach pits, and threatens to execute a goose on local television.

All this while coming to terms with his philandering father, the dereliction of his youthful promise, and the ominous failure of certain vital body functions. In short, Straight Man is classic Russo—side-splitting, poignant, compassionate, and unforgettable.