Amazon.com (ISBN 0452284066, Paperback)

In his fever-dream novel Deep in the Shade of Paradise, John Dufresne is a goofily, deliriously intrusive authorial presence. He's constantly popping in and declaiming upon his plot and its various themes (which are, incidentally, love and memory and family and Southern cooking.) Toward the end of the book he pronounces, "No characters are minor." This might well be the motto of the book, which is a ridiculously circuitous retelling of A Midsummer's Night Dream, set in deepest Louisiana and cast with literally dozens of cousins. The central story is a love triangle: there's our hero Adlai Birdsong, his cousin Grisham Loudermilk, and Loudermilk's fiancée, Ariane Thevenot. Adlai pursues the beautiful Ariane through plot twists and philosophical digressions, into bars and bedrooms, and finally to the family's old estate where the wedding is to take place. Being a Southern novel, no wedding is complete without a death, and being a Shakespearean exercise, no wedding is complete without a play-within-a-play. Dufresne happily provides all this and more in a novel so completely imagined that in the back, there's an appendix like a capacious satchel, made to hold "items of passing interest." --Claire Dederer