Christopher Buckley Books in Order

Buckley's first book draws on his time at sea aboard the tramp freighter Columbianna. It captures typhoons, smuggling, stowaways, hard drinking, and the strange comedy of shipboard life.

Framed as a mock White House memoir, this novel follows loyal aide Herbert Wadlough through the chaos of the Tucker administration. Infighting, scandal, and official nonsense pile up almost immediately.

When industrialist Charley Becker's granddaughter dies of a cocaine overdose, he goes after everyone responsible. His revenge trail climbs from small-time dealers to a Peruvian drug lord, and the violence keeps escalating.

Nick Naylor is the smooth, shameless spokesman for Big Tobacco, talking circles around critics while trying to stay a halfway decent father. Buckley turns lobbying, media spin, and moral compromise into very sharp comedy.

This collection brings together Buckley's comic essays and columns from the 1990s. Politics, culture, travel, and public foolishness all get the same dry, highly amused treatment.

A failed Wall Street trader retreats to a monastery and reinvents himself as Brother Ty, a monk with a talent for money. This comic collaboration spoofs both business guru talk and spiritual self-help.

After a Washington talk-show star is seemingly abducted from a golf course, he becomes the unlikely face of the UFO movement. The novel skewers pundits, conspiracy culture, and the hunger to believe.

First Lady Elizabeth MacMann is on trial for the death of her unfaithful husband, and the lawyer who might save her is an old flame. Buckley plays the scandal as both courtroom farce and love story.

Buckley leads readers on a witty walking tour of Washington, D.C., mixing monuments, backstory, and personal anecdote. It is as much a love letter to the city as a guidebook.

Florence Farfaletti, a frustrated State Department staffer, joins a secret plan to push women's rights in a Gulf emirate through television. Buckley turns diplomacy, propaganda, and palace politics into explosive satire.

Part memoir, part cultural time capsule, this book revisits growing up in California in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Buckley writes about Catholic school, music, cars, and the strange glow of remembered youth.

A 29-year-old blogger suggests that Baby Boomers should get government incentives to die by age seventy-five, and Washington explodes. The result is a fast, nasty satire about entitlement, media, and generational warfare.

When Senate battles block his serious nominees, a president picks TV judge Pepper Cartwright for the Supreme Court. Her confirmation fight, new job, and messy love life drive this broad Washington satire.

A short Buckley fiction piece set around a suspicious sailing trip, a shaky boss, and trouble waiting back on shore. What looks like a job on the water starts to feel riskier with every mile.

Buckley writes about losing both his father, William F. Buckley Jr., and his mother, Patricia Buckley, within a single year. It is funny, sad, and unusually clear-eyed about family love and grief.

Desperate Washington lobbyist Bird McIntyre joins forces with hardline pundit Angel Templeton in a reckless scheme to stir anti-China panic. What starts as cynical spin becomes an international farce with real stakes.

This wide-ranging essay collection shows Buckley on politics, travel, friendship, culture, and the smaller absurdities of daily life. It is witty, restless, and easy to dip into a piece at a time.

In 1517, relic hunter Dismas and his friend Albrecht Durer cook up a fake holy shroud for powerful buyers. Their fraud quickly turns into a dangerous quest through Reformation-era Europe.

A poetry collection about distance, memory, travel, and the places the mind keeps returning to. The poems balance private feeling with a wider sense of history and landscape.

These poems move between the everyday and the cosmic, asking where one life fits in a restless universe. Buckley writes about mortality, wonder, and time with a calm voice that still leaves room for surprise.

In Restoration England, unemployed Balty St. Michel is sent to the New World to track down two judges who helped kill a king. The chase mixes danger, political revenge, and Buckley's gift for comic historical chaos.

In this poetry collection, Buckley asks large questions about belief, fate, aging, and the physical world without pretending to have neat answers. The tone is curious, ironic, and often unexpectedly warm.

A selection of Christopher Buckley's longer poems, this volume ranges through memory, art, California landscapes, and spiritual uncertainty. The pieces are expansive, reflective, and built to linger in the mind.

Told as a fake memoir, this satire follows Herb Nutterman, Donald Trump's unlikely seventh chief of staff. A loyal former hospitality man, he is pulled into Russian intrigue, reelection chaos, and the daily absurdities of the White House.

This edited collection looks back at the Fresno poets through interviews and essays. It preserves the friendships, teaching, and literary energy that made Fresno a remarkable poetry center from the 1960s onward.

Edited by Christopher Buckley, this anthology gathers twenty-one poets writing about Philip Levine's long poems. It is part tribute, part close reading, and a useful guide to Levine's reach and influence.

During the Covid lockdown, an aging screenwriter holes up in coastal South Carolina with his wife, Peaches, and too much time to think. His stalled work, odd routines, and gathering anxieties turn quarantine into a darkly comic spiral.