The protagonist, a cockroach named Numbers, has big plans. He wants to get Ira Fishblatt's very messy girlfriend to come back to the apartment ... so that the plentiful food will return with her. He has a problem, though, because the strength and longevity of his species derives from their inherent lack of cooperative effort. The title is their best attribute: their selfishness is their strength.

Hilarity ensues as Numbers' plans hit a variety of snags, and I found myself rooting for this very unusual insect. It is a well-written novel, and the pages fly by. If you have the stomach for it, this makes for a different and interesting reading experience.

If this doesn't change their minds, then you may want to dig that 'mad-money' out from the mattress and run like hell.

This is one of those books where the conclusion is at the beginning, with the remainder of the book detailing the events that led up to the climax of the story.

The book describes the events leading up to the wedding of Solomon Beneviste and Allison Pennybaker. He is Jewish and she is Catholic, which is where the problems begin - not for them, but for their respective families.

It is written as a set of short chapters, each being an excerpt from the diary of one of the three women in the book (the bride, her mother and the grooms mother). Someone (the author? the publisher?) decided to allocate a different typeface to alternate chapters, so it is obvious when there is a change of narrator.

Like all good books, this one makes you think - who exactly benefits from the large and elaborate weddings that are organized for those couples who choose a 'traditional' marriage ceremony?

A quirky book and nothing like the other book of his that I have read (Hell on Wheels), but an interesting read nonetheless. The short chapters also ensure that it is easy to pick up and put down at short notice.

For those who like their satire black, this compulsively readable comic novel is a deliciously dark dose. Weiss takes the awkward and contemporary dance of intermarriage and gleefully ups the stakes until it's transformed into a fiery, high-stakes tango set to the tune of theSpanish Inquisition.

The trouble all begins when white-bread WASP Allison Pennybaker and Sephardic Jew Solomon Beneviste announce their engagement. Allison's family gets busy planning an overpriced church wedding that appalls Solomon's intense mother, Miriam. She meanwhile, is occupied creating her own gift for the ill-fated couple -- a family tree that traces the bizarre Beneviste genealogy all the way back to the era of the autos-da-fe.

Using squeaky, callow Allision and coolly singleminded Miriam as his narrators, Weiss spins a horrifyingly funny, take-no-prisoners tale in which the past rumbles to life, rearing its head up through the green lawns of American suburbia to curse this interfaith engagement of two innocents. He playfully uses biblical references and other allusions to artfully braiding a black chapter in Jewish history into the present action, and the results are tragicomic. Allison's plump and pompous mother, Louise, is a modern-day reincarnation of Torquemada. A scene where Miriam swoons during a beer-soaked all-American baseball game played by athletes with Spanish surnames is a particularly pleasurable set piece.

While keeping all his satirical balls in the air, Weiss displays some remarkable gifts. He plays nimbly with societal stereotypes of WASPs and Jews. The Pennybakers and Benevistes are complex, delightfully unselfconscious and eminently credible. They're immeasurably enriched by Weiss's uncanny and chameleonic talent for writing in a wide range of voices. "The Swine's Wedding" is one of the most original books to come around in a long time: richly symbolic, brilliantly built, witty and disturbing.

The Swine's Wedding surpasses that image.

Daniel Evan Weiss is expert at realistic characterization: People in his books say and touching at once. The protagonists and their parents can be loved and hated, and the reader can develop mixed emotions as the plot progresses.

This is a book that stays with you after you put it down.