From the award-winning Serbian author David Albahari comes a devastating and Kafkaesque war fable about an army unit sent to guard a military checkpoint with no idea where they are or who the enemy might be.

Atop a hill, deep in the forest, an army unit is dropped off to guard a checkpoint. The commander doesn’t know where they are, what border they’re protecting, or why. Their map is useless. The radio crackles with a language no one can recognize. A soldier is found dead in a latrine and the unit vows vengeance—but the killer, like the enemy, is unknown. Amid orgies and massacres, the commander struggles to maintain order and keep his soldiers alive, but he can’t be sure whether they’re fighting a war or caught in some bizarre military experiment.

Equal parts Waiting for Godot and Catch-22, David Albahari’s Checkpoint is a haunting and hysterical confrontation with the absurdity of war.

Thus begins what may be the most popular of Ross Thomas’s unique stories. The combination of Wu, pretender to the Imperial throne of China, and Quincy Durant, who has his own colorful past, makes for a heady experience. After starting with the deceased pelican on a California beach, the plot mixes in the disappearance of a large sum of money that should have been buried in Vietnam, and the search for the missing member of a trio of singing sisters from the Ozarks. Only Thomas could have stirred this concoction with the style, humor, and suspense that captures the reader at the very beginning and doesn’t let go until the last word.

Conservative Insurgency is a rallying cry and a battle plan for constitutional conservatives that takes the form of an oral history looking back from the year 2041 at constitutional conservatives’ successful struggle against progressive dominance. Conservative Insurgency also shows what the country will look like when conservatism is firmly in control and have restored the Founder’s vision

Er ist wieder da – aber was könnte Adolf Hitler denn heute noch anrichten? Diese bitterböse Satire probiert es einfach aus, indem sie ihn im heutigen Berlin wiedererweckt. Und sie trifft deshalb von der ersten Seite an so schmerzhaft, weil ihr Protagonist der echte Hitler ist. Nicht der TV-Ulkhitler, nicht Hollywoods Haudraufhitler, sondern der Mann, der seine Umwelt eigenwillig analysiert. Der messerscharf und blitzartig die Schwächen der Menschen erkennt. Der sturheil seiner bizarren Logik folgt, verbohrt, aber eben nicht bescheuert.

Dieses Buch über Adolf Hitlers Weg von einem leeren Grundstück in Berlin-Mitte über einen Kiosk und eine türkische Reinigung bis hinein ins deutsche Fernsehen ist ein atemberaubendes Lesevergnügen, so boshaft wie perfide: Weil der Leser sich zunehmend ertappt, wie er nicht mehr über Hitler lacht. Sondern mit ihm. Lachen mit Hitler – geht das? Darf man das überhaupt?

Finden Sie’s selbst raus. Dies ist schließlich ein freies Land.

Noch.

The forces of science, human error, and power run amok all collide in a wildly inventive, funny, and razor-sharp political satire about Putin’s Russia, from one of the country’s most fearless journalists.

When a scientist experimenting on a humans in a sanatorium near Moscow gives growth serum to a dwarf oil mogul, the newly heightened businessman runs off with the experimenter’s wife, and a series of mysterious deaths and crimes begins. Fantastical and wonderfully strange, this political parable has an uncanny resonance with today’s Russia under Putin.

Oleg Kashin is a famous Russian journalist and activist who, in 2010, was beaten to within an inch of his life by unknown assailants in an attack most likely politically motivated by his reporting. The events of Fardwor, Russia! (the title is taken from a flag with a slogan—“Forward, Russia!”—gone wrong) could seem grotesque, if they did not so eerily echo the absurd state of affairs in modern Russia. Under Putin’s regime, an author dares to criticize the state of affairs and affairs of the state only through veiled satire—and even then, as Kashin’s experience shows, the threat of repercussions is real.

A witty, playful, brave, and incisive work that blends science fiction with political satire, Fardwor, Russia! is a must-read for anyone interested in contemporary Russia—or the hilarious and frightening follies of power.

A brilliant and bitingly funny collection of stories united around a single, crumbling apartment building in Ukraine that heralds the arrival of a major new talent

A brilliant and bitingly funny collection of stories united around a single, crumbling apartment building in Ukraine that heralds the arrival of a major new talent

When artist Simon Dykes wakes after a late night of routine debauchery, he discovers that his world has changed beyond recognition. His girlfriend, Sarah, has turned into a chimpanzee. And, to Simon’s appalled surprise, so has the rest of humanity. Simon, under the bizarre delusion that he is ‘human’, is confined to an emergency psychiatric ward. There he becomes of considerable interest to eminent psychologist and chimp, Dr Zack Busner. For with this fascinating case, Busner thinks may finally make his reputation as a truly great ape.

This hilarious, brilliantly inventive novel by the author of The Master and Margarita tells the story of a scroungy Moscow mongrel named Sharik. Thanks to the skills of a renowned Soviet scientist and the transplanted pituitary gland and testes of a petty criminal, Sharik is transformed into a lecherous, vulgar man who spouts Engels and inevitably finds his niche in the bureaucracy as the government official in charge of purging the city of cats.

The new novel from one of American literature’s brightest stars, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Robert Olen Butler’s uproarious new novel is set in the underworld. Its main character, Hatcher McCord, is an evening news presenter who has found himself in Hell and is struggling to explain his bad fortune. He’s not the only one to suffer this fate—in fact, he’s surrounded by an outrageous cast of characters, including Humphrey Bogart, William Shakespeare, and almost all of the popes and most of the U.S. presidents. The question may be not who is in Hell but who isn’t. McCord is living with Anne Boleyn in the afterlife but their happiness is, of course, constantly derailed by her obsession with Henry VIII (and the removal of her head at rather inopportune moments). Butler’s Hell isn’t as much a boiling lake of fire—although there is that—as it is a Sisyphean trial tailored to each inhabitant, whether it’s the average Joes who die and are reconstituted many times a day to do it all again, or the legendary newspaperman William Randolph Hearst, doomed to obscurity as a blogger mocked by his fellows because he can’t figure out Caps Lock. One day McCord meets Dante’s Beatrice, who believes there is a way out of Hell, and the next morning, during an exclusive on-camera interview with Satan, McCord realizes that Satan’s omniscience, which he has always credited for the perfection of Hell’s torments, may be a mirage—and Butler is off on a madcap romp about good, evil, free will, and the possibility of escape. Butler’s depiction of Hell is original, intelligent, and fiercely comic, a book Dante might have celebrated.

Funny and sad, satirical and humane, this novel tells the interlinked stories of three unforgettable men whose trajectories cross in Denmark: the flamboyant Ravi, the fundamentalist Karim, and the unnamed and pragmatic Pakistani narrator.

As the unnamed narrator copes with his divorce, and Ravi—despite his exterior of skeptical flamboyance—falls deeply in love with a beautiful woman who is incapable of responding in kind, Karim, their landlord, goes on with his job as a taxi driver and his regular Friday Qur’an sessions. But is he going on with something else? Who is Karim? And why does he disappear suddenly at times or receive mysterious phone calls? When a “terrorist attack” takes place in town, all three men find themselves embroiled in doubt, suspicion, and, perhaps, danger.

An acerbic commentary on the times, How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position is also a bitter-sweet, spell-binding novel about love and life today.

Diabolically funny and subversively philosophical, Italian novelist Giacomo Sartori’s I Am God is the diary of the Almighty’s existential crisis that erupts when he falls in love with a human.

I am God. Have been forever, will be forever. Forever, mind you, with the razor-sharp glint of a diamond, and without any counterpart in the languages of men. So begins God’s diary of the existential crisis that ensues when, inexplicably, he falls in love with a human. And not just any human, but a geneticist and fanatical atheist who’s certain she can improve upon the magnificent creation she doesn’t even give him the credit for. It’s frustrating, for a god.

God has infinitely bigger things to occupy his celestial attentions. Yet he can’t tear his eyes (so to speak) from the geneticist who’s unsettlingly avid when it comes to science, sex, and Sicilian cannoli. Whatever happens, he must safeguard his transcendental dignity. So he watches—disinterestedly, of course—as the handsome climatologist who has his sights set on her keeps having strange accidents. And as the lanky geneticist becomes hell-bent on infiltrating the Vatican’s secret files, for reasons of her own….

A sly critique of the hypocrisy and hubris that underlie faith in religion, science, and macho careerism, I Am God takes us on a hilarious and provocative romp through the Big Questions with the universe’s supreme storyteller.

It’s all-out war for ruthless red state special operator Kelly Turnbull when he returns in this blockbuster prequel to “People’s Republic,” Kurt Schlichter’s top selling novel of America after the polarized politics of blue versus red have split our country apart.

“Indian Country” finds Turnbull sent back into the blue states to help those trapped inside resist a politically correct police state. As the progressive government ratchets up the violence, Turnbull must mold regular Americans into a fighting force capable of resisting the People’s Republic Army, led by his former US Army Special Forces mentor.

Longer, bigger and bolder than the original, “Indian Country” is filled with Kurt Schlichter’s trademark snarky humor and even more non-stop action, drawing on his work as a television commentator and Senior Columnist for Townhall.com, and his experience as a retired Army infantry colonel.

Finalist for the 2012 Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel

Poor Dennis. He’s a regular sort of guy who’s recently been dealt a shitty hand by life: he lost his job, his wife hates him and wants a divorce, and it turns out she was also cheating on him as well. Now he’s living on his brother’s couch. Holy fuck, that sucks. Dennis can’t imagine things could get much worse, and that’s why he jumped at the opportunity to take part in a new reality game show: a “sexcathlon” where the first person to achieve 10 increasingly difficult and perverted sexual challenges wins a million dollars and is crowned King of the Perverts. Dennis doesn’t care about the title, he just wants the money, but now he’s not sure he can make it to the end. Enduring a golden shower and following through with an Abe Lincoln are hard enough, but he’s losing his nerve and fears what act of perversion will come next. He’d like to drop out, but his Russian bear of a cameraman, Mongo, has other plans for him and that million dollar prize, and Dennis has to decide which is worse: winning the King of the Perverts, or losing it.

Stanley Johnson’s Kompromat is a brilliant satirical thriller that tells the story of 2016’s seismic and unexpected political events on both sides of the Atlantic.

The UK referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU was a political showdown the British PM, Jeremy Hartley, thought he couldn’t lose. But the next morning both he and the whole of the rest of the country woke in a state of shock.

America meanwhile has its own unlikely Presidential candidate, the brash showman Ronald Craig, a man that nobody thought could possibly gain office. Throw into the mix the cunning Russian President Igor Popov, with his plans to destabilise the west, and you have a brilliant alternative account of the events that end with Britain’s new PM attempting to seek her own mandate to deal with the Brexit related crisis and America welcoming its own new leader.

Now in development for a major new TV series, Kompromat is a fast-paced thriller from a true political insider, and who knows, it just might all be true!

Berlin, Summer 2011. Adolf Hitler wakes up on a patch of open ground, alive and well. Things have changed — no Eva Braun, no Nazi party, no war. Hitler barely recognises his beloved Fatherland, filled with immigrants and run by a woman.

People certainly recognise him, albeit as a flawless impersonator who refuses to break character. The unthinkable, the inevitable happens, and the ranting Hitler goes viral, becomes a YouTube star, gets his own T.V. show, and people begin to listen. But the Führer has another programme with even greater ambition — to set the country he finds a shambles back to rights.

Look Who’s Back stunned and then thrilled 1.5 million German readers with its fearless approach to the most taboo of subjects. Naive yet insightful, repellent yet strangely sympathetic, the revived Hitler unquestionably has a spring in his step.

It has been 20 years since The War, and Major John Karnage has finally settled into retirement: locked up in an insane asylum, with an explosive device embedded in the back of his neck to curb his violent tendencies.

Karnage and his troopers have been deemed unfit to live in normal society. Like a bit of old chewing gum stuck under a coffee table, the world has left The War and its scarred, unstable veterans behind. The military has been disbanded and World Peace has descended upon the Earth. Its inhabitants live happy, profitable lives under the global rule of the benevolent Dabney Corporation. All is tea and roses in this new, sanitized world…

Until a terrifying threat from beyond the stars rears its squiggly head! An invading armada of aliens threatens to destroy the Earth, and it’s up to Major Karnage to stop them—as long as he doesn’t accidentally blow his own head off first.

This 1946 novel (by the author of the Worzel Gummidge books) is about a woman who goes on a cruise and is swept overboard; she lives for three years on a desert island before being rescued by a destroyer in 1943. When she returns to England it seems to her to have gone mad: she cannot buy clothes without ‘coupons', her friends are only interested in ‘war work', and yet she is considered uncivilised if she walks barefoot or is late for meals.

The focus of Barbara Euphan Todd's satire is people behaving heroically and appallingly at one and the same time.

Rosamond Lehmann considered Miss Ranskill Comes Home ‘a work of great originality, and delightfully readable, a blend of fantasy, satire and romantic comedy… a very entertaining novel and less light than it seems.’

Sasha, a young computer programmer from Leningrad, is driving north to meet some friends for a nature vacation. He picks up a couple of hitchhikers, who persuade him to take a job at the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy. The adventures Sasha has in the largely dysfunctional institute involve all sorts of magical beings—a wish-granting fish, a tree mermaid, a cat who can remember only the beginnings of stories, a dream-interpreting sofa, a motorcycle that can zoom into the imagined future, a lazy dog-size mosquito—along with a variety of wizards (including Merlin), vampires, and officers.

First published in Russia in 1965, Monday Starts on Saturday has become the most popular Strugatsky novel in their homeland. Like the works of Gogol and Kafka, it tackles the nature of institutions—here focusing on one devoted to discovering and perfecting human happiness. By turns wildly imaginative, hilarious, and disturbing, Monday Starts on Saturday is a comic masterpiece by two of the world's greatest science-fiction writers.