The Grantee is a comic novel with serious concerns. Duncan McAmis is in his third year teaching English at Long Beach City College. The year is 1968, and McAmis is rapidly coming unglued. Just before he self-destructs completely, he receives a Fulbright Grant to teach American literature in Denmark. In Copenhagen, McAmis continues to live precariously but makes two real friends, falls in love, is drawn into the Danish anti-Viet Nam war movement with nearly fatal consequences, and, ultimately, stumbles into his own life.Educational Foundation in Copenhagen, and the love of Inge, a Danish woman...

Put Out, set in September 1986, follows three men in their early 40s on a two-week bicycle camping trip through northwest California. All three men live slightly outside of the American mainstream, and this is the fifth such trip that the men have taken together over the past ten years, but the first on the west coast. Although the novel often has a comic tone, it explores the limits and competitiveness of their friendships, their struggles with aging, the consequences of recklessness and cowardice, and expiation.

All Companions Sink (November 2013) is Bob Laird's fourth novel, taking up the story of Marlon Brando Plover, the main character in Not That Far, Laird's second novel, eleven years later when Plover has somehow become director of admissions at UC Berkeley. The novel opens on the day in July 1995 that the University of California Regents end affirmative action in UC Admissions. Partly comic in tone, the book is the story of an important institution under great legal and political pressure and the acts of betrayal, cowardice, and, occasionally, courage that result as Plover is forced to...