Bøker av 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.

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.

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.

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