Description: It's Christmas Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve in Manhattan -- five days from holiday Ground Zero -- but Tad Leary, the most confused man on earth, doesn't know whether to celebrate or go crazy. He's just been fired, he's about to be evicted, he's getting nowhere on his overdue folklore thesis, "Social Hierarchies of Imaginary Places." On top of everything else, at age thirty-four (older than Christ, for chrissakes), he's five foot one and still baby-faced, and he's treated like a child wherever he goes. Nonetheless, he's been invited to seven different Christmas parties on this day, and he decides to explore every one of them for possible work, apartments, love, and just plain distraction. Tad's a walking punch bowl of joy and fear, good will, and alienation. By midnight, he will have visited all parts of his past -- from brunch with his Boston Irish parents and arguably more successful brothers, to dinner with his beautiful Swedish ex-girlfriend, to a fancy, colossal, uptown bash where, by now dangerously looped, he bumps into an ex-boyfriend "looking as glorious and golden as a roast turkey."

In his brilliant new novel, the first since the widely enjoyed Getting Over Homer, Mark O'Donnell takes us on a wild and funny tour through the Christmas season's ultimate challenge: the day of too many parties.

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