Over the past several years, "the American in Tuscany" has become a literary subgenre. Launched by the phenomenal success of Frances Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun, bookstores now burgeon with nimble, witty accounts of this clash in cultures-Americans trying to do American things in Italy and bumping against a brick wall of tradition. Before this subgenre exhausts itself, it's only fair that we hear the other side of the story-that of a native Tuscan and of dozens of Americans who have stormed through his life and homeland, determined to find in it whatever they are looking for, whether...

Read Robert Rodi's posts on the Penguin Blog.
"A charming, hilarious look at a little-documented world." -- People
In dog years, Robert Rodi is 350. Age, however, couldn't possibly have prepared him for his experience with canine agility-the athletic cousin to best-of-breed shows. Rodi, an epicure and urban intellectual, picks up agility with aspirations for blue ribbons. His dreams of glory quickly fade when faced with the competition: hearty Midwestern handlers and their ferociously fit pups, who annihilate scrawny, scruffy, Dusty, Rodi's rescue dog and...

Novelist Rodi (Fag Hag, The Sugarman Bootlegs) launches a broadside against the depiction of Jane Austen as a "a woman's writer ... quaint and darling, doe-eyed and demure, parochial if not pastoral, and dizzily, swooningly romantic - the inventor and mother goddess of 'chick lit.'" Instead he sees her as "a sly subversive, a clear-eyed social Darwinist, and the most unsparing satirist of her century." In this volume, which collects and amplifies two-and-a-half years' worth of blog entries, he combs through the first three novels in Austen's canon - Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice,...

An immediate cult sensation when it was first released in 1992, Fag Hag gave birth to a genre that later reached mainstream popularity in "Will and Grace." Long out of print, the novel finally returns to shock and delight a whole new generation. Natalie Stathis is a big, flamboyant girl with a big, obsessive crush on a gorgeous gay artist, Peter Leland. She's managed to become his best friend and constant companion, and gleefully uses her influence over him to poison every one of his budding romances-on the principle that when he's run through all the men in town, it'll finally be her turn....

The riotous follow-up to Rodi's cult hit Fag Hag, Closet Case turned the genre of the gay coming-out story inside-out and upside-down. Long out of print, this 1993 comic tour de force now returns to delight and enlighten a whole new generation. Lionel Frank is a workaholic account executive at an upscale advertising agency, in charge of the uber-masculine All-Pro Power Tools account. But Lionel has a secret life-one spent huddled in his car, dialing phone-sex numbers like 1-800-BOY-TOYZ, or lurking in the shadows of gay strip clubs with his flamboyant hairdresser friend, Tone. When continued...

Avery Overman has a very high temperature. In fact, his mom says he's "burning up" and makes him stay in bed in the middle of the day. Avery doesn't like being treated like a baby, but he has to admit he isn't feeling very good; he's dizzy and he's sweating a lot. When he accidentally falls out of his covers, he notices how much nicer it looks under the bed: darker, quieter, and cooler. So he shimmies beneath the box spring...and discovers that Underbed is actually a bigger place than he ever imagined-a strange world filled with cattle rustlers and mobsters and robots and alligators, and a...

When two friends discover old video footage of an unknown saloon singer, they try to pass it off as bootlegs of a long-lost cabaret legend. But their prank backfires when the viral sensation takes on a vivid - and lethal - life of its own...and as its fame increases, so does the body count. Scaldingly funny, brutally unsentimental, nerve-shreddingly suspenseful - and featuring a mid-story switcheroo on par with Hitchcock's "Psycho" - THE SUGARMAN BOOTLEGS reads like the bastard child of "All About Eve" and "Frankenstein." It's a highly addictive cross-cultural mash-up as only Robert Rodi (FAG...

Robert Rodi's follow-up to THE SUGARMAN BOOTLEGS once again finds him mixing lethal social satire and nail-biting suspense, in the classic Alfred Hitchcock tradition. When financial collapse hits Marcus Hyde - a fussy, high-end art dealer - he's forced to give up his spacious apartment and move in with his sister Pamela, who's large, slovenly - and titanically pregnant. But there's even worse in store for Marcus when Baby is born. He's never seen anything more horrifying than this scarlet, steaming, shrieking lump of raw greed and unchecked will, with yellow eyes and fingernails like teeth....

A wildly irreverent satire of gender identity and family dynamics, Rodi's 1995 novel has been long out-of-print; now it returns, its NSFW hilarity as timely as ever - if not timelier. Mitchell Sayer, a buttoned-down gay attorney at a prestigious Chicago law firm, discovers he has a long-lost twin. But his well-ordered life comes apart at the seams when the separated siblings finally meet, and Mitchell discovers his brother Donald is better known as Kitten Kaboodle, star of the city's most infamous drag revue. Plunged into a chaotic world where he's forced to confront his own fluid...

Novelist Rodi (Fag Hag, The Sugarman Bootlegs) continues his broadside against the depiction of Jane Austen as a "a woman's writer ... quaint and darling, doe-eyed and demure, parochial if not pastoral, and dizzily, swooningly romantic - the inventor and mother goddess of 'chick lit.'" Instead he sees her as "a sly subversive, a clear-eyed social Darwinist, and the most unsparing satirist of her century." In this volume, which collects and amplifies three years' worth of blog entries, he combs through the final three novels in Austen's canon - Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion - with the...