Eve Ottenberg - Booby Prize

Cover of Booby Prize

Selected Works

Fiction

A comic novel about a group of nitwits, oddballs and lunatics who manage to get kidnapped by a leftist group obsessed with ending meat-eating.

Busybody

Busybody is a comic novel about someone who can't mind her own business and the chaos and mass hysteria caused by this trait.

Lizard People

LIZARD PEOPLE is a comic novel about the weirdos, nutcases, oddballs and outright lunatics who think they are lizard people and their mortal enemies, the equally bonkers in Q-ANON.

Roman Summer

A novel about expats in Rome.

Hope Deferred

A novel about loss and finding one's way through life.

Bonkers

A comic novel about loony judges, generals and others in the Trump era.

Anxiety, and Other Stories

An offbeat collection of 41 stories.

Troglodyte

A novel about the madness of supermarket tabloids.

Birdbrain

A comic novel about life in the collision lane.

Wages

A novel about a fight for $15-dollar-an-hour minimum wage in Philadelphia.

Further Adventures of Feckless Frank

This comic novel follows a character from Carbon, Frank Fart, as he bumbles his way through his new reincarnated life in suburban Maryland.

Carbon

This comedy about a twenty-something making his way in the idiot world of climate change denial, satirizes the buffoonery, lies and greed impeding solutions to the problem of global warming

Sanctuary City

A novel about the struggles of undocumented immigrants in today's United States.

Hometown U.S.A.

A novel about life in fracking country.

Tainted Water

A novel about the human cost of a water crisis in a low-income city.

Homegrown

When two suburban retirees decide to go into the marijuana trade for extra spending money, it doesn't take long for things to go haywire, in this novel which could be called a comic meditation on mental illness.

Sunset at Dawn

This fourth and final volume in the series "The Human Struggle," reveals much about the causes of the war off-world, in which angels assist fighters in their battle against humanity's fascist enemies. It also traces the skullduggery of an enemy corporation here on earth, as it maneuvers to speed the planet's demise.

The Race of Men

The third in the sci-fi fantasy trilogy, "The Human Struggle," this novel follows the fighters, Detective Orozco, head of the transuniverse orphanage, and Pavel Saltwater, computer genius. Both are heroes from the previous books.

Zone of Illusion

Second in "The Human Struggle" series, this is a sci-fi fantasy about the collapse of an alternate reality and the human effort to avert it.

Realm of Shadow

A sci-fi fantasy about a war of the worlds, and the human struggle to survive it.

Sojourn at Dusk

A novel about a group of hippies, radicals and political activists in the 1960s and how they changed or did not in the ensuing decades.

Dark Is the Night

This murder story, set in a great but second-rate East Coast city during the 1960s, portrays society from the top to its dregs, people fighting to survive, while struggling against powerful, ambiguous forces, deep within the human soul.

The Walkout, A Tale in Three Parts

This tale of a teachers' strike pits beleaguered public workers against an ambitious official and the business model of education.

What They Didn't Know, Stories and Essays

These stories and essays, a number previously published, make for a collection that is various and compelling.

Reluctant Reaper

A comic novel in dialogue about a group of daffy suburbanites and how they get tangled up with each other

Suburbia

A comic novel about a group of well-heeled ninnies who band together in a "not in my backyard" effort.

Dead in Iraq

A novel about the human costs of the Iraq war.

The Unblemished Darlings

A comic novel about a group of bumblers with a get-rich-quick scheme.

The Widow’s Opera

A dark drama about murder and betrayal in New York City in the 1950s.

Glum and Mighty Pagans

A comic novel about real estate in Manhattan.

Booby Prize

BOOBY PRIZE is a comic novel about how Carbon, the people's eco-socialist soviet of Florida comes to the Mid-Atlantic, determined to prevent Americans from eating meat, by the unlikely means of stealing the formula for a new erectile dysfunction medicine. The revolutionaries go on a kidnapping spree. But unfortunately, the assorted nuts, nitwits, idiots, weirdos, imbeciles, crackpots and morons that they have abducted are driving the communist kidnappers crazy. Readers of other books in this series -- CARBON, FURTHER ADVENTURES OF FECKLESS FRANK, BIRDBRAIN, TROGLODYTE, BONKERS, LIZARD PEOPLE and BUSYBODY -- will recognize lots of reappearing oddballs and their bizarre obsessions and complaints, from Maynard Ploshinsky, to the famously constipated undertaker Buddy Schlimizzle to the Space Force's chief of proctological hygiene, Dr. Elbert Posterior. And lots of others. While highlighting the preposterous, innately humorous aspect of the human body in a mildly subversive manner, this novel is one laugh after another.