“Dazzling. Mind-blowing. About as much fun as you can have without risking arrest.” —Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls and Chances Are…

“Joshua Ferris is one of our best writers, and A Calling for Charlie Barnes is wonderful: fast and deep, urgent and brilliant. Ingeniously written, it had me up reading late into the night. A hilarious, intimate, and scathing takedown of so many American vanities.” —Dana Spiotta, author of Innocents and Others

“A deeply funny, very moving book about that most pivotal and permanent of destinations: death. Ferris's hijinks are serious; his play is profound. There is magic in these pages.” —Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies 

“If Augie March was a ‘Columbus of the near-at-hand,’ Charlie Barnes is a whole America: a dreaming, scheming paterfamilias forever ‘expanding out to the coasts’ and outstripping whatever inconvenient facts or exuberant fictions might hope to contain him. Is he for real? Are any of us? This much is certain: Funny, moving, and formally a work of genius, A Calling for Charlie Barnes is quite literally the book Joshua Ferris was born to write.” —Garth Risk Hallberg, author of City on Fire

“With meticulous, wry prose and a dash of self-effacing metafiction, Joshua Ferris delves deeply into the simultaneously extraordinary and ordinary life of Charlie Barnes, a man with as much failure in him as found in our bankrupted country. This novel, about dentures and toupees and all the ways we disguise ourselves from our intimates, is at its large heart a moving portrait of a father and son to rival the best of Roth.” —Teddy Wayne, author of Apartment