James Finn Garner books

Non-Fiction

Politically Correct Bedtime Stories Reading Order

Rex Koko, Private Clown Reading Order

Short Stories/Novellas

Standalone Novels

James Finn Garner is a Chicago-based satirist who became a household name in the mid-1990s with Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. That book spent 64 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, including six weeks at number one, and sold over 2.5 million copies in the United States alone. It was translated into more than 20 languages. Before the book took off, Garner had performed comedy in Chicago nightclubs for years and written for publications including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Chicago Tribune.

After the Politically Correct books ran their course, Garner branched out. He wrote Apocalypse Wow!, a satirical look at millennium-era anxieties, and later produced two film-related humor books. But his most surprising turn came with the Rex Koko, Private Clown series, which he launched in 2011. These mystery novels are set in a circus ghetto called Top Town and follow a clown detective through cases involving murder, theft, and general circus mayhem. Garner invented a whole genre for them: Clown Noir. The series blends the structure of hard-boiled detective fiction with the absurdity of circus life, and the first book, Honk Honk, My Darling, won the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year for Nontraditional Fiction.