5Meiselman 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