A classic, smart comedy in which a college professor attains mankind's oldest dream: the ability to fly...sort of...George Entmen just turned forty, and he can't complain. As the James Lydecker Chair of Hermeneutics in the English department at Northwestern, he is honored in his field, beloved by friends and family, and ready to drift quietly into tenured middle age. But then he discovers he can fly.Sure, he can only fly very, very slowly; he needs to have his hands thrust out in front of him like Superman; and he only flies three or four inches above the ground. In fact, as he has to be prone to do it, he is, in flight, further from the sky than ever.But why does this nonetheless amazing phenomenon drive so many people into a rage? Why do he and his family find themselves dodging livid magicians, exploitative friends, scheming billionairesses, thirteen-year-old boys who are sure they saw the wire, and, perhaps worst of all, angry hermeneuticians?George's...

A raucous comedy about a paranoid loser who maybe wasn't paranoid enough...In the sixties, Jeffrey Parker briefly attended an antiwar rally. He wasn't all that interested—he just listened to a few speeches, and went home...and nothing was ever the same.In this wildly comic novel, Parker's brief dalliance is the beginning of the end. He never lands a decent job. Women never stick around. He has terrible stretches of bad luck, and is the unwilling victim of just plain bizarre occurances: once, he comes home to find that the final page in every one of his books has been removed.Then Parker discovers that he's been the target of a government plot—like the FBI's real-life COINTELPRO—and the obsession of a rogue FBI agent who just won't give up.This outrageously imaginative debut is reminiscent of John Kennedy Toole's explosive, out-of-nowhere farce A Confederacy of Dunces. Part thriller, part national tragedy, and all hysterical...