Meiselman (The Lean Years)

Meiselman has had enough. After a life spent playing by the rules, this lonely thirty-six-year-old man—"number two" at a suburban Chicago public library, in charge of events and programs, and in no control whatsoever over his fantasies about his domineering boss—is looking to come out on top, at last. What seems like an ordinary week in 2004 will prove to be a golden opportunity (at least in his mind) to reverse a lifetime of petty humiliations. And no one—not his newly observant wife, not the Holocaust survivor neighbor who regularly disturbs his sleep with her late-night gardening, and certainly not the former-classmate-turned-renowned-author who's returning to the library for a triumphant literary homecoming—will stand in his way.

"Meiselman is a triumph of comic escalation." — Sam Lipsyte, author of Hark and The Ask