Bowl of Cherries (2007)

Judd Breslau is a prodigy of seriously unrealized promise. At 14, he and his poet mom are abandoned by his dad, an emotionally mingy, mediocre academic. A year later, he's kicked out of Yale. Soon, he finds himself in a minor province of war-torn Iraq in a prison built primarily of human excrement, awaiting execution. How he gets there is a picaresque of inexhaustible comic invention by debut novelist Millard Kaufman, whose dexterous prose swims with Judd's delightfully precocious turns of phrase in Bowl of Cherries. One fave: ''The room was permeated with the lingering stench of old and laminated farts.'' A