Daniel Klein – författare

Q. Why are there almost as many jokes about death as there are about sex? 

Stoned out of his skull—this is how we find washed-up New York magazine writer Digby Maxwell when he is offered a last chance to redeem himself by becoming editor of a small philosophy magazine headquartered in a rural Vermont college town. Digby''s assignment is to make the magazine relevant to contemporary culture. For starters, that requires several more tokes, very deep tokes.

A wildly witty novel in the tradition of J. P. Donleavy and Nick Hornby, Nothing Serious takes serious potshots at Manhattan pop culture and academic small-mindedness, sexual obsessions and political correctness, twenty-first century alienation and philosophers ranging from Aristotle to Sartre.

Small, almost imperceptible changes are rippling through the New England village of Grandville, altering it in ways its inhabitants cannot yet imagine. The sixty-five-year-old projectionist at the local movie theater encounters an unexpected love affair. The town’s drama leader wrestles with self-doubt over a politically-correct play a New Yorker is pushing her to produce, while her teenaged daughter discovers long-lost black relatives living nearby. Laced through these episodes are stories that reach back to a seventeenth-century family in Rotterdam, an eighteenth-century migration by a farmer''s lonely son, and a nineteenth-century underground railway journey by a gifted runaway slave. Each episode in Grandville’s history comes to bear on the lives of current residents. Does every event, no matter how small or distant in the past, influence all events that follow?

Billy had said the word "murder". Worse, he''d said "serial murder". This was definitely not a game anymore.

Back from his tour of duty in Germany-and desperately missing his Momma-Elvis Aron Presley just isn''t turned on by the music the way he used to be. Between his Machiavellian manager, the hangers-on and childhood pals crowding his Graceland mansion, and his own propensity for fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches, the King tries desperately to get his heart back into Rock and Roll.

But how can the King sing when young girls-the presidents of his fan clubs-are dying all over Tennessee? Elvis suspects foul play; to prove it, and to find the killer, he''ll need to navigate the resentment, squareness, and bigotry that hound-dog him at every turn. Only by allying himself with a self-taught doctor in a small black community, his alluring-and forbidden-nurse, and a mysterious early Elvis impersonator, can Presley hope to Take Care of Business in time to save the next victim.