Bøger af Eve Ottenberg

BUSYBODY is a comic novel about someone who can't mind her own business and how that trait leads to chaos, mass hysteria and in general the confusion of assorted nincompoops. The novel follows the travails of characters familiar from previous books in this series, like LIZARD PEOPLE, BONKERS, BIRDBRAIN and others, the digestion-obsessed undertaker, Buddy Schlimizzle and his scatterbrained wife, Bunzi, the squinting, gimpy Lucas Flush, proprietor of Pest Patrol and other peculiar nitwits and, in some cases, lunatics. It also features the reappearance of the people's eco-socialist soviet of South Florida, called Carbon, and how they thumb their noses at idiots in law enforcement, in Carbon's obsessed mission to stop Americans from eating burgers.

The new schools superintendent of a large East Coast city has big plans for education -- plans that involve firing legions of teachers. Thus begins The Walkout, a tale told from the perspectives of several different participants. There is intrigue, blackmail, treachery, skullduggery -- all set against the backdrop of a mass protest, as the teachers battle to save their jobs and education for their students. But the new superintendent, they learn, cares little for either; he has outsized plans and even more outsized ambitions, which set in motion all kinds of trouble. The struggle between blind ambition and decency, wild careerism and modest goals makes The Walkout not just a tale in three parts, but also a parable of our times.

Readers of CARBON will enjoy this new comic novel, which picks up one of the earlier book's comic threads that ended withFrank Fart quite dead and lying at the bottom of his grave, in a North Miami suburb. The angels, however, desperate to keep Frank out of heaven, arrange for an ill-advised reincarnation. This leads to one mishap after another, as Frank bungles his way through his new life in suburban Maryland.

A number of these stories and essays are reprinted from literary journals, and one essay first appeared in The New York Times Magazine, but most are published here for the first time. The most recent stories range from a California prison to a house in foreclosure outside Trenton, New Jersey, to a high-powered Philadelphia law firm, but though the settings vary, they display thematic unity -- the power and propinquity of the unknown. "From the Depths" is a cycle of seventeen stories about people on the bottom of the social ladder in the early twenty-first century, while the 1980s series, "Kindness in the City, Six Stories," evokes the magic of the metropolis, that is, Manhattan. The essays deal with four Renaissance literary masterpieces of humanism, by Cervantes, Rabelais, Erasmus and Boccaccio, the work of a contemporary fiction writer, Ozick, and an analysis of Augustine's Confessions. Altogether these stories and essays make for an extremely various and compelling mix.

When Jeremy Spit, chief terrorism and alien abduction reporter for the supermarket tabloid, Scuttlebutt, encounters a psychotic government custodian, he recognizes that he has struck the journalistic mother-load. The lunacy that then floods the pages of his publication and its competitor causes a national uproar from the halls of congress to the white house to the Maryland suburbs and a South Beach, Florida veterinary practice. The more outrageous the claim the better, from Spit's perspective. And his "source" is full of some doozies.

When Winnie Teitlebaum decides to commit suicide, little does she anticipate that she will be interrupted by a burglar. But she is, and her suicidal concentration is shattered. Thus begins the rather wacky relationship at the center of Reluctant Reaper, a comedy about a group of zany suburbanites, some of them quite adle-pated, some rather nuts. Some are elderly, with one foot literally in the grave. Set in Maryland in the summer of 2009, amid swine flu hysteria and the first steps of a new president, this novel portrays hypochondriacs, the Alzeihemer's afflicted, several petty criminals, colorful eccentrics and one raving lunatic, all thrown together whether they like it or not. And when they don't, they are not shy about vociferously, hilariously complaining.

This combination of sci-fi and fantasy follows the struggles of guardians and fighters, two special groups entrusted with the defense of earth, here and off-world, Elsewhere, where a war rages against humankind's enemies, a war in which angels assist the fighters. The novel also follows the flight of a young man who knows a guardian's name-which has brought an enemy interrogator, who is not human, to earth for the first time. As the guardians hurry to hide him, and the fighters struggle to protect earth, off-world, Elsewhere, millions of fighters mass for what could be the final battle to save their poor, besieged home planet. Realm of Shadow is also the story of a rescue and an escape from a prison world, a vast charnel house known to fighters and guardians, feared and avoided by them; an escape on which the earth's fate and the war's outcome both depend.

Fleeing government violence in Honduras, Elena and her three children arrive in Trump's U.S.A. unprepared for officially whipped up hysteria and bigotry about immigrants. The family heads for the mid-Atlantic sanctuary city of Dyre and hides from ICE in a sanctuary church. But anti-immigrant fever has reached a dangerous pitch, infecting the police department and the airwaves, as a local, right-wing radio celebrity rails against "hordes of immigrants spewing into the U.S." Sanctuary City is the story of ordinary people caught in the fatal coils of a neo-fascism that bloats itself on racism, political corruption and violence.

LIZARD PEOPLE is about the weirdos, nutcases, oddballs, nitwits and outright raving lunatics who think they are lizard people (some are!) and their mortal enemies, the equally bonkers members of Q-Anon. The story portrays several peoples' transformations into lizards, while the Q followers, obsessed with lizard Illuminati, plot to hunt them down. This comic novel also recounts the perils and pitfalls of modern technology in the hands of, well, the incompetent.

From Montclair, New Jersey to Leningrad in the former U.S.S.R., the stories in this collection cover parenthood, death, mental breakdown and people just getting by. These 41 stories explore the offbeat byways of human existence, peeling back the surface of life in patches to reveal the inner workings, one small section at a time. They stretch from the 1950s to the present, shining a light on how events over decades mold human reality.

Mankind's enemies, including human storm troopers, are on the move, and once again humanity is a few steps behind. The fighter, Detective Orozco, hero of the two previous novels in this series, "The Human Struggle," is confronted with finding homes for the millions of fighters' orphans, stranded by the enemy's assault on their alternate universe, an assault that is leading to its collapse. Orozco's transuniverse orphanage is swamped, even assisted by angels, and to make matters worse, another fighter, hero of "Zone of Illusion," Pavel Saltwater, must crack the code of how, precisely, the enemy is destabilizing multiple human realities throughout the cosmos. And the prospects look grim.

Part millennial romance, part meditation on life in the collision lane, BIRDBRAIN is a comic novel about the mishaps of those who, instead of thinking or exerting themselves, prefer to eat. From corrupt and gluttonous politicians to insane judges and many addled members of the general population, the comedy sprawls from the halls of the Capitol to the saunas of a nearby fat farm with one hilarious misadventure after another.

Roman Summer is a psychological novel about things not turning out as expected; about how the passage of time invariably means loss and how to calibrate that loss when it is not total. The expats who form the nucleus of this story are young and old, almost all parents, and none expecting the damaging blows fate aims at them. Even those spared are only ready at first to admit that they themselves are subtly altered, but then the truth finally heaves into view: the mundane disasters of life change everything.

This murder story set in the great but run-down and second-rate East Coast city of D___, against the backdrop of 1960s counterculture, political activism and revolutionary violence, chronicles the intent of a drug-dealing hippie, who doubles as a police spy, to cash in on his girlfriend's death. Mob violence, political corruption, a virulently reactionary mayor and a decent legislator's attempt to unseat him weave together in a pattern of plots and subplots that ensnare artists, union organizers and people of goodwill in the coils of the coldly triumphant wicked. The social panorama of loan sharks, high society heirs and the psychotic homeless shifts from light to shade and hope to despair, as people in a landscape of unrelieved gloom and iniquity struggle to survive against a predatory world without and against powerful, ambiguous forces within. Above all, Dark Is the Night is a story about evil and the struggle against it, in the dark depths of the human soul.

The posh hamlet of Spuckelsburg, outside Washington D.C., is up in arms. A terrifying plan is afoot, to run a mass transit line right into the residents' opulent midst. Ready to fight, they have retained the services of a mad though ruthlessly effective lawyer, who showers his generous share of the massive settlements he wins on Las Vegas slot machines, exotic dancers and the insanely conspiracy-minded political cult to which he belongs. Thus begins Suburbia, a comic novel about a group of well-heeled ninnies who band together to protect their property values. No matter that some of them are so dim-witted they can scarcely follow a sentence with a relative clause-they know a threat when they see it. From the Viagra support group, to a lunatic's campaign for mayor on an anti-pepper spray plank, Suburbia presents one wildly hilarious situation after another with unforgettably eccentric characters.

"Bonkers" is comic novel about a judge, who is, well, bonkers. Set in the pre-covid era, it flips between Maryland and Florida, as it follows the misadventures of its very mixed-up characters. The novel also spoofs the disputes of litigious neighbors, people ridiculously flummoxed by simple modern technological gadgets, the routine lunacy of the military and more. Overall, it pokes fun at life in America in the Trump era.

The fourth and final volume in the sci-fi fantasy series, "The Human Struggle," Sunset at Dawn depicts the war off-world, in which angels and fighters battle humanity's enemies. Meanwhile on earth, momentous developments are afoot, which could alter human history by deeply involving the divine feminine. But mankind's enemies, aware of earth, have established their own corporation here, outside Washington, D.C., devoted to the promotion of robotic warfare and the privatizing of prisons, among other things, in order to speed the planet's demise. As fighters from the previous books infiltrate this deadly corporation, another fighter, Rafael Orozco, finds himself sidelined, only to learn that his new job involves protecting someone, whose appearance on earth may be too momentous to hide in the big, second-rate, run-down East Coast city of D___, which happens to be crawling with death-worshippers.

The fight for a ffifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wage has come to Philadelphia in this novel, and fast food workers are walking out. But one shady restaurant owner thinks he can roll back this tide and is not concerned about possible fatal results. WAGES is the story of ordinary people trying to make ends meet and the activists, some quite radical, who help them. It also addresses other social issues in a large American city, from the opiod epidemic to homelessness, all woven together in a tale of protest and murder.

This comic novel follows a twenty-something on the make in the idiot world of climate change denial. Set in Miami and Washington, D.C., Carbon makes fun of buffoonery, ignorance, corruption and outright greed, all of which stand between humanity and a reasonable solution to the spiraling catastrophe of a rapidly warming planet. The story also satirizes the utterly shameless amorality of supermarket tabloids, as they plunge into the climate change debate, denying global warming is a problem.. This novel is above all a comedy and full of laughs from the first page to the last.

A stereoscopic study of battlefield carnage and suburban aspirations - of the chaos of roadside explosions abroad and the masquerade of normality at home - Eve Ottenberg's stingingly detailed, stately paced Dead in Iraq is an elegy suffused with a sense of loss and fortified with a quiet fury over lives destroyed, dreams dashed, bonds severed. It's a novel about what happens under the noise of headline news, and how the lives of the survivors are lived after those headlines fade - the silent, invisible true casualty toll of war. James Wolcott, Vanity Fair columnist and author of the novel The Catsitters Eve Ottenberg not only knows how to tell a story, but brings you so far inside that it'll stay with you. Nat Hentoff, Village Voice columnist