A humorous and philosophical trip through life, from the New York Times-bestselling coauthor of Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar … Daniel Klein’s fans have fallen in love with the warm, humorous, and thoughtful way he shows how philosophy resonates in everyday life. Readers of his popular books Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar … and Travels with Epicurus come for enlightenment and stay for the entertainment. As a young college student studying philosophy, Klein filled a notebook with short quotes from the world’s greatest thinkers, hoping to find some guidance on how to live the best life he could. Now, from the vantage point of his eighth decade, Klein revisits the wisdom he relished in his youth with this collection of philosophical gems, adding new ones that strike a chord with him at the end of his life. From Epicurus to Emerson and Camus to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr-whose words provided the title of this book-each pithy extract is annotated with Klein’s inimitable charm and insights. In these pages, our favorite jokester-philosopher tackles life’s biggest questions, leaving us chuckling and enlightened.

Stoned out of his skull–this is how we find washed-up New York magazine writer Digby Maxwell when he is offered a last chance to redeem himself by becoming editor of a small philosophy magazine headquartered in a rural Vermont college town. Digby’s assignment is to make the magazine relevant to contemporary culture. For starters, that requires several more tokes, very deep tokes.

A wildly witty novel in the tradition of J. P. Donleavy and Nick Hornby, Nothing Serious takes serious potshots at Manhattan pop culture and academic small-mindedness, sexual obsessions and political correctness, twenty-first century alienation and philosophers ranging from Aristotle to Sartre.

Small, almost imperceptible changes are rippling through the New England village of Grandville, altering it in ways its inhabitants cannot yet imagine. The sixty-five-year-old projectionist at the local movie theater encounters an unexpected love affair. The town’s drama leader wrestles with self-doubt over a politically-correct play a New Yorker is pushing her to produce, while her teenaged daughter discovers long-lost black relatives living nearby. Laced through these episodes are stories that reach back to a seventeenth-century family in Rotterdam, an eighteenth-century migration by a farmer’s lonely son, and a nineteenth-century underground railway journey by a gifted runaway slave. Each episode in Grandville’s history comes to bear on the lives of current residents. Does every event, no matter how small or distant in the past, influence all events that follow?

The best-selling coauthor of Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar, Daniel Klein delivers a stirring meditation on the simple pleasures to be found late in life. Traveling to the Greek island of Hydra, Klein set out to discover what could be learned about aging from the sage philosopher Epicurus. Equal parts travel book and guide to living well, Klein’s delightful work shines a welcome light on the richer aspects of one’s golden years.