Eve Ottenberg - What They Didn't Know, Stories and Essays

Cover of "What They Didn't Know"

Selected Works

Fiction

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.

What They Didn't Know, Stories and Essays

A number of these stories and essays are reprinted from literary journals, and one essay first appeared in The New York Times Magazine, but most are published here for the first time. The most recent stories range from a California prison to a house in foreclosure outside Trenton, New Jersey, to a high-powered Philadelphia law firm, but though the settings vary, they display thematic unity -- the power and propinquity of the unknown. "From the Depths" is a cycle of seventeen stories about people on the bottom of the social ladder in the early twenty-first century, while the 1980s series, "Kindness in the City, Six Stories," evokes the magic of the metropolis, that is, Manhattan.

The essays deal with four Renaissance literary masterpieces of humanism, by Cervantes, Rabelais, Erasmus and Boccaccio, the work of a contemporary fiction writer, Ozick,and an analysis of Augustine's Confessions. Altogether these stories and essays make for an extremely various and compelling mix.