Jesting Angels

"All of us ought to be ready to laugh at ourselves," wrote theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, "because all of us are a little funny in our foibles, conceits, and pretensions." Yes, to a greater or lesser extent, we all belong to Hypocrites Anonymous. Laughter helps us to preserve sanity in a crazed world; provides the lubrication we so desperately need to deal with irritating people and situations. Furthermore, it accents our need for humility by pricking the balloons of vain pretension. These vivid poems are thick with allusions to literature, theology, spirituality, history, and legend. They range from sentimental impressions of the Iowa State Fair to a fantasy visit to All Saint's Night in Dublin; from musings on the extinct dodo to a whimsical take on the pranks mischievous angels play; from a litany of the likely suspects in a murder mystery to a beatnik's view of the ascension. In life, no doubt we will become the butt of many well-deserved jokes. As Don Quixote's sidekick, Sancho Panza, once acknowledged, "Master, I confess that all I need to be a complete ass is a tail." Laughter, then becomes, in the words of Niebuhr, "a vestibule to the temple of confession."

E. P. Roe (1838-1888) was once one of the most popular American novelists, outselling even Mark Twain. At the height of his popularity, barely fifty years old, he died of a sudden heart attack. His most famous works include "Barriers Burned Away" and "The Earth Trembled."

This is a Victorian-era American novel. It features a plot hatched by a very popular young belle who seems to have all men adore her, and who decides to ensnare a new visitor ( who happens to be a pastor) just for fun and to amuse her friends. Her plan, however, comes unstuck and does not go the way she thought it would.

Do you want to give up your agitation and be successful in your career as well as personal life all at once? Do you also want to pursue the road less taken? There is no contradiction. This memoir is of a man who understood this at an early age. He spent his adult life devoted full time to the quest. It was a roller coaster!

A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human — and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do. With a foreword by Tom Bisell. "The next step in fiction...Edgy, accurate, and darkly witty...Think Beckett, think Pynchon, think Gaddis. Think." —Sven Birkerts, The Atlantic