Christopher Buckley

Nick Naylor likes his job. In the neo-puritanical nineties, it's a challenge to defend the rights of smokers and a privilege to promote their liberty. Sure, it hurts a little when you're compared to Nazi war criminals, but Nick says he's just doing what it takes to pay the mortgage and put his son through Washington's elite private school St. Euthanasius. He can handle the pressure from the antismoking zealots, but he is less certain about his new boss, BR, who questions whether Nick is worth $150,000 a year to fight a losing war. Under pressure to produce results, Nick goes on a PR offensive. But his heightened notoriety makes him a target for someone who wants to prove just how hazardous smoking can be. If Nick isn't careful, he's going to be stubbed out.

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Outraged over the mounting Social Security debt, Cassandra Devine, a charismatic 29-year-old blogger and member of Generation Whatever, incites massive cultural warfare when she politely suggests that Baby Boomers be given government incentives to kill themselves by age 75. Her modest proposal catches fire with millions of citizens, chief among them "an ambitious senator seeking the presidency." With the help of Washington's greatest spin doctor, the blogger and the politician try to ride the issue of euthanasia for Boomers (called "transitioning") all the way to the White House, over the objections of the Religious Right, and of course, the Baby Boomers, who are deeply offended by demonstrations on the golf courses of their retirement resorts.

From New York Times bestselling author Christopher Buckley, “one of the funniest writers in the English language” (Tom Wolfe), a compelling and hilarious adventure featuring a sixteenth-century relic hunter and his best friend, Albrecht Dürer, who conspire to forge the Shroud of Turin.The year is 1517. Dismas is a relic one who procures “authentic” religious relics for wealthy and influential clients. His two most important patrons are Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony and soon-to-be Cardinal Albrecht of Mainz. While Frederick is drawn to the recent writing of Martin Luther, Albrecht pursues the financial and political benefits of religion and seeks to buy a cardinalship through the selling of indulgences. When Albrecht’s ambitions increase his demands for grander and more marketable relics, Dismas and his artist friend Dürer conspire to manufacture a shroud to sell to the unsuspecting noble. Unfortunately Dürer’s reckless pride exposes Albrecht’s newly acquired shroud as a fake, so Albrecht puts Dismas and Dürer in the custody of four loutish mercenaries and sends them all to steal Christ’s burial cloth (the Shroud of Chambéry), Europe’s most celebrated relic.On their journey to Savoy where the Shroud will be displayed, they battle a lustful count and are joined by a beautiful female apothecary. It is only when they reach their destination that they realize they are not alone in their intentions to acquire a relic of dubious legitimacy. Filled with fascinating details about art, religion, politics and science; Vatican intrigue; and Buckley’s signature wit, The Relic Master is a delightfully rich and intelligent comic adventure.

President of the United States Donald Vanderdamp is having a hell of a time getting his nominees appointed to the Supreme Court. After one nominee is rejected for insufficiently appreciating To Kill A Mockingbird, the president chooses someone so beloved by voters that the Senate won't have the guts to reject her -- Judge Pepper Cartwright, the star of the nation's most popular reality show, Courtroom Six. Will Pepper, a straight-talking Texan, survive a confirmation battle in the Senate? Will becoming one of the most powerful women in the world ruin her love life? And even if she can make it to the Supreme Court, how will she get along with her eight highly skeptical colleagues, including a floundering Chief Justice who, after legalizing gay marriage, learns that his wife has left him for another woman. Soon, Pepper finds herself in the middle of a constitutional crisis, a presidential reelection campaign that the president is determined to lose, and oral arguments of a romantic nature. Supreme Courtship is another classic Christopher Buckley comedy about the Washington institutions most deserving of ridicule.

Elizabeth Tyler MacMann, the First Lady of the United States, has been charged with killing her philandering husband, the President of the United States. In the midst of a bedroom spat, she allegedly hurled a historic Paul Revere spittoon at him, with tragic results. The attorney general has no choice but to put the First Lady on trial for assassination.The media has never warmed to Beth MacMann (her nickname in the tabloids is Lady Bethmac), and as America girds for a scandalous, sensational trial, Beth reaches out to the only defense attorney she trusts, Boyce Shameless Baylor, who charges $1,000 an hour and has represented a Who's Who of scoundrels: murderous running backs, society wife-killers, Los Alamos spies, and national-security sellouts.Why Boyce Baylor? Because Beth loved him once, when they were law students. Boyce wanted to marry her, but Beth chose the future President instead. Now, after all these years, Boyce has a second chance. To what lengths will a shameless lawyer go to win the Trial of the Millennium and regain the love of his life?

Washington TV host John O. Banion is arguably the most powerful man in Washington. He has it wealth, political influence, and the power to mock the president on live television. But his privileged life is thrown into upheaval when he is abducted by aliens - twice. Little does he know it was the work of a top secret government agency which aims to increase extraterrestrial belief through cattle mutilations, abductions and 'probing'. As Banion disregards his credibility and throws all his energy into becoming the impassioned leader of American alien abductees, the government becomes increasingly threatened, and strange events begin to unfold in Buckley's hilarious satirical novel on Washington politics.

In twelve months between 2007 and 2008, Christopher Buckley coped with the passing of his father, William F. Buckley, the father of the modern conservative movement, and his mother, Patricia Taylor Buckley, one of New York's most glamorous and colorful socialites. He was their only child and their relationship was close and complicated. Writes Buckley: "They were not - with respect to every other set of loving, wonderful parents in the world - your typical mom and dad."As Buckley tells the story of their final year together, he takes readers on a surprisingly entertaining tour through hospitals, funeral homes, and memorial services, capturing the heartbreaking and disorienting feeling of becoming a 55-year-old orphan. Buckley maintains his sense of humor by recalling the words of Oscar Wilde: "To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness."Just as Calvin Trillin and Joan Didion gave readers solace and insight into the experience of losing a spouse, Christopher Buckley offers consolation, wit, and warmth to those coping with the death of a parent, while telling a unique personal story of life with legends.

Florence Farfarletti has a bold plan for female emancipation in the Middle East and enlists the assistance of a motley team of ''activists'' to help her carry out her plan of reaching her audience with TV shows.

In an attempt to gain Congressional approval for a top secret weapons system, Washington lobbyist "Bird" McIntyre and sexy NeoCon wonkette Angel Templeton start a rumor 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, maneuvering 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.

The award-winning and bestselling author of Thank You for Smoking delivers a hilarious and whipsmart fake memoir by Herb Nutterman—Donald Trump’s seventh chief of staff—who has written the ultimate tell-all about Trump and Russia. Herb Nutterman never intended to become Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff. Herb served the Trump Organization for twenty-seven years, holding jobs in everything from a food and beverage manager at the Trump Magnifica to being the first general manager of the Trump Bloody Run Golf Course. And when his old boss asks “his favorite Jew” to take on the daunting role of chief of staff, Herb, spurred on by loyalty, agrees. But being the chief of staff is a lot different from being a former hospitality expert. Soon, Herb finds himself deeply involved in Russian intrigue, deflecting rumors about Mike Pence’s high school involvement in a Satanic cult, and leading President Trump’s reelection campaign. What Nutterman experiences is outrageous, outlandish, and otherwise unbelievable—therefore making it a deadly accurate account of being the chief of staff during the Trump administration. With hilarious jabs at the biggest world leaders and Washington politics overall, Make Russia Great Again is a timely political satire from “one of the funniest writers in the English language” (Tom Wolfe).

The latest comic novel from Christopher Buckley, 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.

At last, a White House reminiscence that pulls no punches! Herbert Wadlough, personal assistant to President N. Tucker (TNT), offers his unique and utterly self-serving inside view of the historic years 1989-1993 of the ill-fated Tucker administration, in which he played such a crucial role. From the inauguration crisis--when President Reagan refused to vacate the White House--to the epochal War on Bermuda, to the delicate negotiations (sexual, for the most part) between the President and his First Lady, Wadlough gives an account that is open, honest, and hilarious.

A monk recounts how financial advice from God helped him save his monastery but brought new temptations, in a hilarious fictional parody of the self-help genre co-written by the author of Wry Martinis. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.

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 spiraling 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 world 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 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 race. 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 hilarious romp through a time that has been anything but funny.

Christopher Buckley, author of 'Thank You for Smoking', is the man who persuaded America's ABC News that Russia was auctioning off Lenin's corpse. This book offers a selection of the best of Buckley's recent writing.

A 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.

The drug-overdose death of his beloved only granddaughter leads businessman Charlie Becker on a dangerous quest in search of the individual responsible, a search that propels him into the vicious drug culture and White House inner circles

The father of our country slept with Martha, but schlepped in the District. Now in the great man’s footsteps comes humorist and twenty-year Washington resident Christopher Buckley with the real story of the city’s founding. Well, not really. We’re just trying to get you to buy the book. But we can say with justification that there’s never been a more enjoyable, funny, and informative tour guide to the city than Buckley. His delight as he points out things of interest is con-tagious, and his frequent digressions about his own adventures as a White House staffer are often hilarious.In Washington Schlepped Here , Buckley takes us along for several walks around the town and shares with us a bit of his “other” Washington. They include “Dante’s Paradiso” (Union Station); the “Zero Milestone of American democracy” (the U.S. Capitol); the “Almost Pink House” (the White House); and many other historical (and often hysterical) journeys. Buckley is the sort of wonderful guide who pries loose the abalone-like clichés that cling to a place as mythic as D.C. Wonderfully insightful and eminently practical, Washington Schlepped Here shows us that even a city whose chief industry is government bureaucracy is a lot funnier and more surprising than its media-ready image might let on.

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.

The yacht was clearly cursed. The last two female passengers had department by ambulance. Now we had a sweaty, nervous boss, ten empty duffel bags, a shotgun, and a high-powered walkie-talkie, all of which did not add up to a regular sail. Back on shore, the repo men from the bank were waiting. So was the draft lottery.

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 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.

When the Soviet Union fell in December 1991, there were close to 3,500 assorted Soviet-built airliners that could be deemed operational — more than there had ever been before. The vast majority of these Antonovs, Ilyushins, Tupolevs, and Yaks flew for Aeroflot, and were scattered far and wide at bases across the Soviet Union. Thirty years later, they have almost all disappeared. Now dominated by state-of-the-art Airbuses and Boeings, the world’s airports and airways will never be the same again without the noise, smoke and charisma of these iconic designs from Soviet times.This book follows the fortunes of the great Soviet airliners over the last three decades and looks at what happened to this immense the fragmentation of Aeroflot into a myriad of new operators in the 1990s, the bankruptcies and consolidation of so many airlines that followed, and then the slow, inevitable disappearance of these aircraft from our skies. Illustrated with 220 photographs, most of which have never been published before, and supported by many anecdotes, facts and figures, this book conveys the nostalgia and wonder of this special, tumultuous time in aviation history.

Book by Buckley, Christopher, Macguire, James

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.

About Christopher Buckley, the late poet Peter Everwine writes, “I don’t think that I know of another poet who has such vertical range and depth’ Buckley manages to have one foot in the physical muck and tenderness of the world and the other foot planted among the stars and galaxies of the universe.” Buckley’s newest collection, Pre-Eternity of the World , is persistently the kind of poetry Everwine describes. In the title poem, Buckley describes pre-eternity as “loads of quantum confetti / ad infinitum . . . under the floorboards / of time . . . . Go figure.” But, is this a simple dismissal, or is the poet asking the reader to calculate the incalculable? He asks, “Did our parents fight WW II / just so we could go to double features / on Saturday,” watch black and white television, or “lie on a hill after school / letting our imaginations run off / with cloud formations? That’s about it.” These sorts of questions, cynical as they might be, are surprising and liberating, and he writes of intelligent design, of vacillation, and of science and math; the poet is “called on” to stand “bewildered.” Such is the beauty of Buckley’s poetry, with “Nothing but time to stop me / thinking.”

Contemporary American Poetry

Cloud Memoir is a collection of Christopher Buckley’s longer poems, his most wide-ranging and serious work built with a symphonic structure—theme, variation, recapitulation trilled with speculative formations, its this/but that, its faith-and-doubt. Rarely did/do the grey cells and the music of experience organize themselves into quick dramatic or pithy movements. These beautifully structured longer poems provide both the metaphysical and putative room to move.Tomorrow, no doubt, more of us will comefrom the Midwest for favorable exchange rates,the ruins and the partial restorationsof romance; we’ll believe without questionand so run no risk from the church.But there’s a new inquisition here,sectarian as the old—it takes us awayfrom lunch under bright umbrellasand unsettles conversation over drinksalong the Via Veneto; this red brigadewould kneecap half the globe to gettheir way. So maybe it’s as you say—after all there is no real evidence

Rants and raves. Absurdism, thinly veiled discordianism, tales of many things. Proverbs for the new millenium. Complete bullshit.