You & Me — Padgett Powell

The cult hit The Interrogative Mood -- a Best Book of the Year selection by Amazon.com, GQ, The Believer, Time Out New York, and elsewhere -- reminded readers that Padgett Powell is one of the enduring stars of American fiction, an electric novelist with a pitch-perfect ear for the way Americans talk and the strange things we say and believe. Now he returns with a hilarious Southern send-up of Samuel Beckett's classic Waiting for Godot, and we enter the world of the sublime and trivial as only Powell can envision it.

Two loquacious men sit talking on a porch. Funny and profound, daft and cogent, they argue about love and sex, how best to live and die, the merits of Miles Davis and Cadillacs and Hollywood starlets of yore, underused clichÉs, false truisms, and the meaning of nihilism. Together, they shoot the shit -- and then they go on shooting it long after it's dead.

Ribald and roaring, You & Me is an exuberant and very funny novel from a master of American fiction at the top of his game.