Books by Steve Tesich

Baba Goya is a loudmouth mother who goes through husbands and orphans like the Turkish coffee she makes in a dirty old soup pan. In Queens, she presides over a household comprised of a childish orphan who happens to be a cop, an elderly gentleman who explodes every time somebody calls him "Grandpa," a dying husband, and an errant daughter who cries all night. The husband, Baba's fifth, is already submitting an ad for her sixth. The cop catches a Japanese man stealing cameras and chains him to a radiator, the daughter guiltily confesses she voted for Nixon and runs off, and the husband, who may not die after all, insists they must wait out Watergate for a Democratic president.

Karoo is a professional fixer of other people's scripts and, by his own acknowledgement, he ruins them all. Calamity and comedy follows shambolic Saul Karoo as his life breaks down. He is a man prone to luck both good and bad, and when a young woman with a strange connection to his past shows up, the plot of his own life comes into sharp focus.