Discusses the history of New York City and describes the city, its people and their way of life today.

"There are so few genuinely entertaining novels around that we ought to cheer whenever one turns up. Continuous, fizzing energy…Honey for the Bears is a triumph." —Kingsley Amis, New York Times A sharply written satire, Honey for the Bears sends an unassuming antiques dealer, Paul Hussey, to Russia to do one final deal on the black market as a favor for a dead friend's wife. Even on the ship's voyage across, the Russian sensibility begins to pervade: lots of secrets and lots of vodka. When his American wife is stricken by a painful rash and he is interrogated at his hotel by Soviet agents who know that he is trying to sell stylish synthetic dresses to the masses starved for fashion, his precarious inner balance is thrown off for good. More drink follows, discoveries of his wife's illicit affair with another woman, and his own submerged sexual feelings come breaking through the surface, bubbling up in Russian champagne and caviar.

A fictionalized historic account recalling the story of Jesus from his life to his death.

At the book's center are two twentieth-century men who represent different kinds of power: Kenneth Toomey, eminent novelist, a man who has outlived his contemporaries to survive into, bitter, luxurious old age as a celebrity of dubious notoriety, and Don Carlo Campanati, a man of God, eventually beloved Pope, who rises through the Vatican as a shrewd manipulator to become the architect of church revolution and a candidate for sainthood.

Set in postwar Malaya at the time when people and governments alike are bemused and dazzled by the turmoil of independence, this three-part novel is rich in hilarious comedy and razor-sharp in observation. The protagonist of the work is Victor Crabbe, a teacher in a multiracial school in a squalid village, who moves upward in position as he and his wife maintain a steady decadent progress backward. A sweetly satiric look at the twilight days of colonialism.

Before Shakespeare in Love, there was Anthony Burgess's Nothing Like the Sun: a magnificent, bawdy telling of Shakespeare's love life.