In the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, a mine fire has been burning since 1962. The town has gradually been torn down, building by building, as poison gases and steam from the fire erupt at the surface. Against this backdrop, Jennifer Finney Boylan sets her wildly inventive and hilarious novel. Inspired in part by Holst's symphony of the same name, The Planets examines the complications of desire in the lives of nine of the few remaining Centralians with a wry, deadpan logic.

When lovesick Edith Schmertz takes an ill-fated leap out of an airplane on Easter Sunday, she sets in motion an inexorable chain of events, sending many human orbits spinning wildly out of control. A middle-aged bank president seeks temporary escape from a stifling marriage with a professional mime, part-time nudist, and office temp who strips away all externals in her search for pure truth. A little girl's birthday explodes into chaos when a pet rabbit crashes through her bedroom window; an entire family is kidnapped by a burro-riding hardware-store robber; and a modern-day Pluto finds his Persephone.

All of these characters are obsessed with human freedom - sexual, personal, psychological - and this rollicking journey through the solar system becomes an inward voyage to the center of the human heart.

A novel for everyone who has ever dreamed of strolling through the Harvard Quad, getting lost on the rolling hills of Middlebury, or being tapped by the Yale Society...

In Getting In acclaimed novelist Jennifer Finney Boylan takes readers through a rollicking - and moving - rite of passage with four hopeful high school seniors (and one hopelessly dysfunctional family) as they careen across America's Garden of Ivy at its most tangled, its most sexy, and its most hysterical.

What they're looking for is a place to put down roots for four years. But what they discover is who they really are and what they really want. If only they can survive the college interview...

An adolescent girl with a very large imagination, a chance encounter with a latex brain, a mother on the lam from her own family, and a lustful sculptress - these are some of the stars in Jennifer Finney Boylan's hilarious new novel, The Constellations, the much-awaited successor to her international triumph, The Planets. Also set in the smoldering coal town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, this outlandish but poignant tale investigates the complications of romance, desire, and sex in the world of fifteen-year-old Phoebe Harrison and her extended family.

When Phoebe runs away from home to find her mother, she inadvertently sends the love lives of the adults around her spinning out of control. Her uncle Pat, trysting in a forest with the artist Isabelle Smuggs, finds himself pursued, naked, by angry cows. Isabelle, who makes sculptures of celebrities and then guillotines them, finds the answers to some unpleasant questions in the basement of Wendy Walisko, who raises Sea-Monkeys. Phoebe's sister, Demmie, must grapple with the terrors of dognapping. Her father, Wedley, sees his marriage to Vicki Ambrasino deteriorate after his spouse sleeps with a man obsessed with his cement mixer. And Phoebe's mother, Emily, returns home at last to confront the family her disappearance has split asunder.

Boylan's wild journey through the stars ultimately takes us full circle to the center, literally, of the human heart. Through Phoebe's imagination and faith, the members of the Harrison family manage to find themselves reunited, sort of, despite their suspicion that any act of love, though triumphant overall, will still result in bedlam.

Three days before her Ash Wednesday wedding, an unhappy bride dyes her wedding gown black and drinks "an unexpected quantity" of light green ink. Although it fails to poison her, the ink stains her veins and arteries until she resembles "a stalk of celery left too long in a glass of colored water." Concerned, her maid of honor - who is having an affair with the groom - brings her a gift-wrapped package of heavy pancake make-up. But the wedding, of course, is off.

In the world of Jennifer Boylan, the lives of ordinary people may go suddenly, disturbingly awry, while those of the not-so-ordinary come completely unhinged. Astronaut Elvis Presley rides into orbit aboard a rhinestone-studded space capsule. Polar explorer Jimmy Durante, lost in Antarctica, recites "Da Rime of da An-chink Mariner." Lyndon Johnson assumes the presidency on the death of the assassinated John Lennon. Aging stooge Moe Howard (whose trademark line gives Boylan her title) is transformed into a bearded, tablet-bearing Moses. ("Oh, a wise guy.")

In twenty stories that mix comedy and horror, face and fantasy, Jennifer Boylan pursues the absurd, the grotesque, and the surreal with a relentless, deadpan logic. The merely eccentric, however, he invests with an offbeat charm that masks a barely controlled manic energy. "That's what it's like to be a human cannonball, Johnson," a former circus star tells his piano tuner. "Jesus, if we had a cannon around here, I'd show you."