Cornered at a cocktail party? Fake an injury -- e.g., biting your tongue, biting down on your fork, hitting your shin on the coffee table. "Even the most self-involved bore will not expect you to stay and listen to him when you're doubled over in agony." Jeanne Martinet's funny and surprisingly humane how-to guide resurrects those civilized excuses that used to be known as white lies before somebody decided that unflinching honesty represented the moral high road. Martinet is a feelings-sparer; she won't countenance leaving phone calls unreturned or standing people up. Beyond those strictures, though, not much fazes her. Blow an obligation? Invoke the terrible, horrible, very bad day. "Your freshly made error of omission will then become just another part of this 'bad day,' just a small piece of a run of bad luck, with which everyone can empathize." Among the mishaps you could call on: busted high heel/lost your keys/pigeon went to the bathroom on your head/therapist made a pass at you/found cockroach in food/raw sewage leak in apartment/tripped over crack in sidewalk and skinned everything so now pantyhose are caked with blood ... which was enough to make me regret that I don't wear pantyhose, because whose heart wouldn't go out to you when you claim that one?

-- Craig Seligman

Too Much Coffee Man's Parade of Tirade
By Shannon Wheeler
Dark Horse Comics, 143 pages

Too Much Coffee Man is a jittery, angst-ridden superhero with a coffee cup for a head. In this collection of Too Much Coffee Man Nos. 1-8 he (not necessarily in this order) gets created, dies, takes on Trademark Copyright Man (TMCM vs. TM©M), battles the superhero cliché and even, "for no apparent reason," gets "hit by lightning, radioactivity, or something, and becomes omnipotent!" He uses his power to solve all the world's problems, then grows bored with being worshiped by the inhabitants of a perfect world and tries to kill himself, but he's too powerful to be killed. Damn!

At any rate, none of this really matters, because the main event in "Too Much Coffee Man's Parade of Tirade" isn't TMCM's adventures, but the two stories that weave themselves around those adventures: the story of Shannon Wheeler, the snaggletoothed, slightly neanderthal-looking fellow who draws the comic ("It's an emotional self-portrait," he tells a fan, and he gets nicer-looking as he becomes successful), and Joel, a neurotic fan of the comic whose life degenerates as Wheeler's improves.

By the way, Nos. 1-8 actually collects only six issues, because Wheeler got tired of the story arc and skipped to the end, thus making Nos. 6 and 7 the ultimate collectible comics, because they don't exist. You should look for them.

-- Gary Kaufman

Beach: Stories by the Sand and Sea
Lena Lencek and Gideon Bosker, editors
Marlowe & Co., 256 pages

Despite what its title suggests, "Beach: Stories by the Sand and Sea," edited by Lena Lencek and Gideon Bosker, is no carefree romp on the subjects of shore and surf. This collection of short stories, novel excerpts and narrative nonfiction by J.G. Ballard, Albert Camus, Jamaica Kincaid, Vladimir Nabokov and John Steinbeck, among others, contemplates its subject slowly and somewhat solemnly, as if noting the singularity of each froth of wave, tuft of sea grass, grain of sand or swath of skin.

John Updike conjures a lifeguard who's also a divinity student, finding God in the stretch of water before him: "Swimming offers a parable. We struggle and thrash and drown; we succumb, even in despair, and float, and are saved." Cyrus Colter gives us a man who essentially sacrifices his family for a beach umbrella (and its accompanying social acceptance), and Doris Lessing offers an 11-year-old boy who challenges himself to a treacherous swim through an underwater rock and emerges, bleeding and breathless, into manhood. Deep stuff to go with your sunscreen. Taken in short doses, "Beach" might be just the thing to sample between leisurely dozes in the hot sun and bracing dips in the water. And you'll probably take its images home with you -- like sand in your shoe.

-- Amy Reiter

Car Camping : The Book of Desert Adventures
By Mark Sundeen
Quill, 240 pages

Remember a time when a vacation could happen at any moment? When you didn't have to get supervisor approval, consult travel agents, confer with spouses or worry about how to keep the kids amused? Housepainter Mark Sundeen, 22, tells of hopping in his ramshackle station wagon, alone or with some of his more eccentric family members, and hightailing it out of his Southern California neighborhood for various godforsaken, fascinating parts of the American West. These are the kind of people who head off for Sedona, Ariz., without quite knowing where it is. Sundeen, via his faux-naive authorial persona, makes many delightfully sly comments on the pretentious rich inhabitants of Telluride, tourists chasing Native American "spirituality" and the true meaning of the term "National Recreational Area."

-- Laura Miller

Home Truths
By David Lodge
Penguin, 128 pages

Fanny Tarrant is glib, cruel, in her 20s and makes an inappropriately successful living eviscerating the famous every Sunday in the pages of the London Sunday Sentinel. (She also bears a strong resemblance to the nubile know-it-alls in American print and TV media, whose words cut a lot deeper than their own frown lines.) Her most recent victim is the wealthy TV writer Sam Sharp, who, she reports, "swaggers around his estate with his Ralph Lauren jeans tucked into high-heeled cowboy boots. He can use the heels, actually, being a little short in the shank." She also writes of his toupee and his generally indefensible vanity. Sam turns to his old friend, a reclusive, onetime famous novelist named Adrian Ludlow (who shares some traits in common with Lodge), and the two hatch a scheme. Adrian agrees to let Fanny interview him, while plotting to use the occasion to turn the tables on the hectoring hack.

Fanny's writing -- heavy-handed and cheap -- is just good enough that you can imagine it making her a star. But being callow isn't the same as being evil, and that makes her inevitable comeuppance fairly unsatisfying. But she becomes an incidental foe in "Home Truths" anyway. Where the book really succeeds is as a meditation on how fame is destructive when it's unwanted, but even more so when it is subconsciously pursued.

-- Kerry Lauerman

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"