New Releases by Christopher Buckley

The Columbianna, an ancient tramp steamer with a notably eccentric crew, 200 layers of paint on her decks, a sailing history going back to 1945, and demons in her plumbing, was crossing the Atlantic for the umpteenth time—but on this occasion with a sharp-eyed observer, whose brilliant account brings to life the harshness, humor, and bizarreness of life on board. Steaming to Bamboola is a story of the author''s time at sea. He tells first-hand about typhoons, cargoes, smuggling, mid-ocean burials, rescues, stowaways, hard places, hard drinking, and hard romance. It is the tale of a ship and her crew, men fated to wander for a living—always steaming to, but never quite reaching, Bamboola. This was the first book by renowned author and humorist Christopher Buckley, which was originally published in 1982 to glowing reviews. Forty years and over twenty books and hundreds of articles later, Buckley introduces Columbianna and her roguish crew to a new generation of readers.

Witness/participant, "blasé as a boulevardier/ in the spring Paris air," Buckley couples a lyric poet''s urgency with a storyteller''s feral patience: "claptrap until my heart started doing double-takes-/ the bus driver with my retreating hairline, the mechanic/ with my beard and a little wound of ink or motor oil/ leaking from his breast pocket." These poems will take you, reader, from "the edge/ of the cliff" to "the tideline" and "outside the Arlington Theater" of a remembered matinee into a rumination on coyotes and stars. From One Sky to the Next-both in, and out of, this world-one of the strongest collections I''ve ever read-keeps pulling me back.-Roger Weingarten

From the bestselling author of Thank You for Smoking and Make Russia Great Again comes a comic tour de force, the story of one man’s “lively and funny” (New York Journal of Books) journey through lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, an aging screenwriter is holed up in a coastal South Carolina town with his beloved second wife, Peaches. He’s been binge-eating for a year and developed a notable rapport with the local fast-food chain Hippo King. He struggles to work—on a ludicrous screenplay about a Nazi attempt to kidnap FDR and, naturally, an article for Etymology Today on English words of Carthaginian origin. He’s told Peaches so often about the origins of the word mayonnaise that she’s developed an aversion to using the condiment. He thinks he has Covid. His wife thinks he is losing his mind. In short, your typical pandemic worries. Things were going from bad to worse even before his doctor suggested a battery of brain tests. He knows what that means: dementia! But even in these scary times, there are plenty of things to do to distract him. His iPhone is fat-shaming him. He’s. been trying to read Proust and thinks the French novelist missed his true calling as a parfumier. And he’s discovered nefarious Russian influence on the local coroner’s face. Why is Putin so keen to control who decides who died peacefully and who by foul play in Pimento County. Could it be the local military base? Has Anyone Seen My Toes? is a “laugh-out-loud” (Publishers Weekly) romp through a time that has been anything but funny.

This book follows the fortunes of the great Soviet airliners over the last three decades and looks at what happened to this immense fleet of Antonovs, Ilyushins, Tupolevs and Yaks. Illustrated with 220 photos, and supported by many anecdotes, facts and figures, this book conveys the nostalgia and wonder of this tumultuous time in aviation history.

Herb Nutterman, a long-time Trump Organization employee, unexpectedly becomes President Trump''s White House chief of staff and finds himself entangled in Russian intrigue and leading the president''s reelection campaign.

Christopher Buckley?s latest book continues his exploration of how, despite the intellectual tools of science and philosophy, we are still somehow left with questions about identity, memory, love, loss, value, self, and God?not to mention the depredations of war. In his poetry and nonfiction, he has considered these matters in the belief that the answers to their mysteries are in the very act of pursuit. On every page is the work of a consummate artist who is also, recognizably, a companion spirit on the journey all of creation has been on all this time.

When the networks called the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden on Saturday, November 7, 2020, people from coast to coast exhaled--and danced in the streets. This quick-turnaround volume, a collection of 38 personal essays from writers all over the country--"many of America''s most thoughtful voices," as Jon Meacham puts it--captures the week Trump was voted out, a unique juncture in American life, and helps point toward a way forward to a nation less divided. An eclectic lineup of contributors--from Rosanna Arquette, Susan Bro and General Wesley Clark to Keith Olbermann, Stewart O''Nan and Anthony Scaramucci--puts a year of transition into perspective, and summons the anxieties and hopes so many have for better times ahead. As award-winning columnist Mary C. Curtis writes in the lead essay, "Saying you''re not interested in politics is dangerous because, like it or not, politics is interested in you." Novelist Christopher Buckley, a former speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush, laments, "The Republican Senate, with one exception, has become a stay of ovine, lickspittle quislings, degenerate descendants of such giants as Everett Dirksen, Barry Goldwater, Howard Baker and John McCain." Nero Award-winning mystery novelist Stephen Mack Jones writes, to Donald Trump, "Remember: You live in my house. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is my house. My ancestors built it at a cost of blood, soul and labor. I pay my taxes every year to feed you, clothe you and your family and staff and fly you around the country and the world in my tricked-out private jet. If you violate any aspect of your four-year lease--any aspect--Lord Jesus so help me, I will do everything in my power to kick yo narrow ass to the curb." As Publisher Steve Kettmann writes in the Introduction: "The hope is that in putting out these glimpses so quickly, giving them an immediacy unusual in book publishing, we can help in the mourning for all that has been lost, help in the healing (of ourselves and of our country), and help in the pained effort, like moving limbs that have gone numb from inactivity, to give new life to our democracy. We stared into the abyss, tottered on the edge, and a record-setting surge of voting and activism delivered us from the very real threat of plunging into autocracy."

The latest comic novel from Christopher Buckley, in which a hapless Englishman embarks on a dangerous mission to the New World in pursuit of two judges who helped murder a king. London, 1664. Twenty years after the English revolution, the monarchy has been restored and Charles II sits on the throne. The men who conspired to kill his father are either dead or disappeared. Baltasar “Balty” St. Michel is twenty-four and has no skills and no employment. He gets by on handouts from his brother-in-law Samuel Pepys, an officer in the king’s navy. Fed up with his needy relative, Pepys offers Balty a job in the New World. He is to track down two missing judges who were responsible for the execution of the last king, Charles I. When Balty’s ship arrives in Boston, he finds a strange country filled with fundamentalist Puritans, saintly Quakers, warring tribes of Indians, and rogues of every stripe. Helped by a man named Huncks, an agent of the Crown with a mysterious past, Balty travels colonial America in search of the missing judges. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Samuel Pepys prepares for a war with the Dutch that fears England has no chance of winning. Christopher Buckley’s enchanting new novel spins adventure, comedy, political intrigue, and romance against a historical backdrop with real-life characters like Charles II, John Winthrop, and Peter Stuyvesant. Buckley’s wit is as sharp as ever as he takes readers to seventeenth-century London and New England. We visit the bawdy court of Charles II, Boston under the strict Puritan rule, and New Amsterdam back when Manhattan was a half-wild outpost on the edge of an unmapped continent. The Judge Hunter is a smart and swiftly plotted novel that transports readers to a new world.

The poems are straightforward, intensely lyrical and totally accessible. Whether he is addressing his departed friend, the poet Ernesto Trejo, or the great swell off the Pacific Ocean that haunts his dreams, the voice is always the same, modest and direct. This is a humble poetry of great truths . . . -- Philip Levine, writing in Ploughshares Christopher Buckley''s gift for wide-ranging thinking meshes so gracefully with lovingly tender details, he feels like a companion voice for all time--a Hikmet, a Neruda, yes. -- Naomi Shihab Nye Not the East Coast satirical novelist . . . this Christopher Buckley has published several poetry books and anthologies that have won him numerous accolades. . . Like Thom Gunn, Gary Snyder, and other poets whose informal style of philosophical questing complements their easy intimacy with the natural, feeling world, Buckley''s new volume deserves an honored place on the shelves of well-rounded libraries and bookstores. --F. Josephine Arrowood -- FOREWORD These are poems of immortality and extinction that can still make you smile . . . (Buckley) has an exquisite ear for language and a gutsy way of blending bravado with humility . . .. no concept is overstated--it''s all marvelously fresh. --LIBRARY JOURNAL This is fluid, hypnotic writing, at once nostalgic and knowing . . . achieving a moody grandeur. --POETRY

Poetry. Winner of the 2017 Vern Rutsala Book Prize. "THE FAR REPUBLICS is expansive--an exuberant sensibility, but rueful. The public poems relish detail--all the brand names of the time are woven into a private living-as-it- goes account that also can''t forget what could have been. You can''t help but being swept into the flood."--Dennis Schmitz "Christopher Buckley''s gift for wide-ranging thinking meshes so gracefully with lovingly tender details; he feels like a companion voice for all time--a Hikmet, a Neruda, yes."--Naomi Shihab Nye Christopher Buckley''s past publications have won numerous awards, and his poems have been included in many anthologies and journals. Star Journal: Selected Poems was published in 2016 as part of the Pitt Poetry Series.

Star Journal is a selection of poems from Christopher Buckley''s twenty previous collections, from 1980 through 2014. Buckley''s poetry is unique in its use of current science and cosmology, recent facts and theories mixed in with a lyrical underpinning.

A collection of conservative wit and humor, Conservative Christmas Quotables captures the best of The Christmas Virtues and delivers it in a pint-sized package. You''ll be sure to laugh along with the snark of P. J. O'' Rourke, Christopher Buckley, Jonah Goldberg, and others as they dish out the best bits of the holiday season. But you''ll also be sure to pause. Conservative Christmas Quotables brings us back to a time when Christ was still part of Christmas, and when family--holy and otherwise--was at the heart of the holiday. Conservative Christmas Quotables makes a great stocking stuffer for anyone who needs a laugh--or a break--this holiday season. "Stop undoing Christmas! Don''t you support Santa? And baby Jesus? You''re just going to take Him down? Stuff Him in a box? He gave us His life, Mom. His life!" --Stephen F. Hayes''s daughter, protesting the Christmas clean-up "The whole point of Christmas is not to have arguments. That''s what Thanksgiving dinner is for." --Jonah Goldberg "The joy of children running downstairs in their pajamas is the greatest gift Mom and Dad could ever want." --Larry Miller "These days, shopping has become a contact sport." --Heather Wilhelm "Once you surrender to the madness, families tend to be fun as hell. The weirder, the better." --Matt Labash "Assembler most diligent, Locator of Part 7b, Repairer of Part 45c, Provider of socket head screw, And of (@#$%-ing)hex key." --Christopher Buckley''s prayer to Joseph, patron saint of fathers "When a sale at Crate & Barrel gets entangled with the birth of Jesus, something has gone terribly wrong." --Kirsten Powers "On Christmas, you show up to honor the Holy Family while rolling your eyes at your own." --Jonathan V. Last

NUMBER 13, AUTUMN 2015 . . .all men and women are created equal in rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. —Elizabeth Cady Stanton, revision of the American Declaration of Independence, 1848 Evening Street Review is centered on the belief that all men and women are created equal, that they have a natural claim to certain inalienable rights, and that among these are the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. With this center, and an emphasis on writing that has both clarity and depth, it practices the widest eclecticism. Evening Street Review reads submissions of poetry (free verse, formal verse, and prose poetry) and prose (short stories and creative nonfiction) year round. Submit 3-6 poems or 1-2 prose pieces at a time. Payment is one contributor’s copy. Copyright reverts to author upon publication. Response time is 3-6 months. Please address submissions to Editors, 2881 Wright Street, Sacramento, CA 95821. Email submissions are also acceptable; send to the following address as Microsoft Word or rich text files (.rtf): [email protected].

Pressured by a patron who would buy a cardinalship, a sixteenth-century relic hunter and his best friend unsuccessfully forge a shroud before being placed in the custody of mercenaries to steal the celebrated Shroud of Chambéry.

Christopher Buckley at his best: an extraordinary, wide-ranging selection of essays both hilarious and poignant, irreverent and delightful. In his first book of essays since his 1997 bestseller, Wry Martinis, Buckley delivers a rare combination of big ideas and truly fun writing. Tackling subjects ranging from "How to Teach Your Four-Year-Old to Ski" to "A Short History of the Bug Zapper," and "The Art of Sacking" to literary friendships with Joseph Heller and Christopher Hitchens, he is at once a humorous storyteller, astute cultural critic, adventurous traveler, and irreverent historian.

Holy Days of Obligation, the third part of Christopher Buckley''s memoir trilogy is a book about place and vocation. Set primarily in Santa Barbara and Montecito in the 1950''s and 60''s, among the woods and natural elements all around him, in the residue of light lifting from soda fountains, movies, surf boards, and old Chevrolets, the narrator of these crisp essays finds his consciousness forming a faith in the power of "place" and in the work of art.

Christopher Buckley investigates the large, unanswerable questions that have dogged humanity since the Beginning. Often the seascapes along the California coast toss their debris of ontological doubts upon the shores of his writing . . . uncertainties concerning God, the human condition, the limits of our knowing, and the universe. Buckley''s poetry provides readers with the constant blending of beautiful language and stirring content. Full of emotion, Varieties of Religious Experience promises to deliver meaningful messages.

In an attempt to gain Congressional approval for a top secret weapons system, Washington lobbyist "Bird" McIntyre and sexy Neo-Con wonkette Angel Templeton start a rumour that the Chinese secret service is trying to assassinate the Dalai Lama. Their outrageous scheme provokes a series of crises involving the White House, the CIA, and a strangely sympathetic and vulnerable Chinese president, with both countries veering perilously towards war. Buckley has drawn his most convincing and outrageous characters to date: Bird, failed novelist of amusingly awful Clancy-esque thrillers; Angel, combination Anne Coulter and Ayn Rand; Bird''s demanding, equestrian wife, Myndi; Bewks, his feckless but endearing Civil War re-enactor brother; the mild-mannered Chinese President Fa and his devoted aide Gang, manoeuvring desperately against sinister Politburo hard-liners Minister Lo and General Han. Blending the skewering genius of Thank You For Smoking with Dr. Strangelove''s dark comedy, They Eat Puppies Don''t They? has something to offend -- and amuse -- everyone. Praise for Christopher Buckely: "One of the funniest writers in the English language." Tom Wolfe. "A Benchley with WordPerfect." John Updike. "An effervescent joy." Joseph Heller.

The bestselling author who made mincemeat of political correctness in Thank You for Smoking, conspiracy theories in Little Green Men, and Presidential indiscretions No Way to Treat a First Lady now takes on the hottest topic in the entire world-Arab-American relations-in a blistering comic novel sure to offend the few it doesn''t delight. Appalled by the punishment of her rebellious friend Nazrah, youngest and most petulant wife of Prince Bawad of Wasabia, Florence Farfarletti decides to draw a line in the sand. As Deputy to the deputy assistant secretary for Near East Affairs, Florence invents a far-reaching, wide-ranging plan for female emancipation in that part of the world. The U.S. government, of course, tells her to forget it. Publicly, that is. Privately, she''s enlisted in a top-secret mission to impose equal rights for the sexes on the small emirate of Matar (pronounced "Mutter"), the "Switzerland of the Persian Gulf." Her crack team: a CIA killer, a snappy PR man, and a brilliant but frustrated gay bureaucrat. Her weapon: TV shows. The lineup on TV Matar includes A Thousand and One Mornings, a daytime talk show that features self-defense tips to be used against boyfriends during Ramadan; an addictive soap opera featuring strangely familiar members of the Matar royal family; and a sitcom about an inept but ruthless squad of religious police, pitched as "Friends from Hell." The result: the first deadly car bombs in the country since 1936, a fatwa against the station''s entire staff, a struggle for control of the kingdom, and, of course, interference from the French. And that''s only the beginning. A merciless dismantling of both American ineptitude and Arabic intolerance, Florence of Arabia is Christopher Buckley''s funniest and most serious novel yet, a biting satire of how U.S. good intentions can cause the Shiite to hit the fan.

In 1994, Christopher Buckley published one of the most acclaimed and successful comic novels of the decade, Thank You for Smoking. Now Buckley returns to the strange land of Washington, D.C., in Little Green Men, a millennial comedy of manners about aliens and pundits . . . and how much they have in common. The reluctant hero of this hilarious novel is John Oliver Banion, a stuffy Washington talk-show host, whose privileged life is thrown into upheaval when aliens abduct him from his exclusive country-club golf course. But were his gray-skinned captors aliens . . . or something far more sinister? After Banion is abducted again--this time in Palm Springs--he believes he has been chosen by the extraterrestrials to champion the most important cause of the millennium, and he embarks on a crusade, appearing before a convention of UFO believers and demanding that Congress and the White House seriously investigate UFOs. His friends and family suspect that Banion is having some kind of manic-depressive midlife crisis and urge him to seek therapy before his credibility as a pillar of the punditocracy is ruined. So John Oliver Banion must choose: keep his establishment status or become the leader of millions of impassioned and somewhat scruffy new friends who want to expose the government''s secret alien agenda. Little Green Men proves once and for all that the truth is out there. Way out there. And it reaffirms Christopher Buckley''s status as the funniest humanoid writer in the universe.

Boomsday: One of America''s most hilarious novelists and bestselling author of Thank You For Smoking takes on the plight of aging Baby Boomers in this Swiftian comedy about generational warfare. Supreme Courtship: The President of the United State, ticked off at the Senate for rejecting his nominees, decides to get even by nominating America''s most popular TV judge to the supreme court.

Charley Becker, head of one of America’s biggest conglomerates, is a man on a mission. His only granddaughter, the beloved Natasha, has been found dead in her flat after taking an accidental overdose of cocaine and now he wants revenge. Determined to find the men responsible, Charley starts by tracking down Natasha’s boyfriend, Tim. Then he finds the small-time dealers who supplied him. Charley’s way of doing business leaves no room for negotiation. But ‘wet work’—the shooting of a victim from up close—is only half the story and the further up the chain Charley gets, the higher the stakes become. To nail Peru’s megalomaniac cocaine king, he will have to hire himself some hit men, a gunboat and some truly extraordinary weaponry . . .

With a pajama-clad President Reagan refusing to leave the White House on his successor’s Inauguration Day, Buckley has given this farce of Oval Office politics a nearly perfect beginning. Parodying the familiar form of the White House memoir, Buckley recounts the turbulent years of the Democratic Tucker administration, as told by loyalist Herbert Wadlough. Through this former accountant’s eyes, we see the infighting that plagues the White House, the President’s faltering marriage to a former starlet, and his ongoing crises.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • “One of the best and surest political humorists in America.”—Los Angeles Times In the most inebriating humor book of the year, the author of Steaming to Bamboola and The White House Mess goes straight for the funny bone with essays and mischief that includes such gems of gullibility as the pope''s appearance on Oprah, O.J. Simpson''s search for a new apartment, the true story behind Whitewater, and so much more. “Funny and devastating.”—Entertainment Weekly “Clever, erudite, sophisticated, funny and flip. Buckley shows that his antennae are ever alert to the absurdities in our world.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer