Peter Mehlman

Peter Mehlman writes for film and television. He was the creator of the comedy series It’s Like, You Know, and was also a producer for Seinfeld.

Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike (Ballantine, $15). The happiest of the Rabbit series, but also the darkest in terms of the American dream. Money and leisure fight it out with desire and mortality, and, by the end, you can see who’ll win. Harry Angstrom’s ruminations on America, religion, and sex are funny and scary and cruel. Buy it at Amazon.com

My Life as a Man by Philip Roth (Vintage, $14). The obsessions of a writer crippled by his personal life, with all the markings of classic Roth—the autobiographical tightrope, the hazy lines between reality and fiction. The book starts off with two short stories written by the protagonist. The rest of the book tells you where the stories came from.

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Buy it at Amazon.com

Something Happened by Joseph Heller (Simon & Schuster, $15). As scorchingly funny and surreal as Catch-22, but more relatable. Heller is so off-center, the story seems impossible. But ultimately, it’s reality with its most horrific impact.

Buy it at Amazon.com

Birds of America by Lorrie Moore (Picador, $14). A book of short stories filled with brilliant wordplay and stinging moments. Moore takes you to places you can’t bear to be and then leads you deeper and deeper. Mixtures of tragedy and comedy come so easily in these stories, you can’t believe what you’re laughing about.

Buy it at Amazon.com

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (Vintage, $14). Merely by creating an entirely new genre—nonfiction novel—Capote makes the pantheon. But the structure is genius, bringing you meticulously to the edge of the murder of the Clutter family, then jumping over the event to the next morning—and taking you far beyond—before finally returning to that awful night. And no one’s writing is more elegantly clean than Capote’s.

Buy it at Amazon.com

Roget’s Thesaurus

Buy it at Amazon.com