Books like The Hundred Brothers

There's Rob, Bob, Tom, Paul, Ralph, and Phil; Siegfried, the sculptor in burning steel; blind Albert and ninety-three-year-old Hiram; Foster, the New Age psychoanalyst; and Maxwell, the tropical botanist, who, since returning from the rain forest, has seemed a little screwed up somehow.  When PEN/Faulkner Award finalist Donald Antrim brings them and their eighty-nine equally eccentic kinsmen together in the decaying library of their family estate for cocktails, a light supper, and a little ritual sacrifice, the result suggests a high-speed collision between The Brothers Karamazov and the Brothers Marx.  Moving swiftly from slapstick to horror and back, The Hundred Brothers establishes Antrim as one of our most mordantly and satanically playful young writers, whose insights into the agonies of kinship are as serious as they are hilarious.