Tucked in an uncut page of a two-hundred-year old poetry book is a letter Samantha McDonough believes was written by Jane Austen, mentioning with regret a manuscript that went missing at Greenbriar in Devonshire. Could there really be an undiscovered Jane Austen novel waiting?

Four interlocking narratives unfurl in four American cities, creating a richly comic feast about love, academia, an elusive Tibetan novelist who might be a plagiarist, and SOFA, a protest group so mysterious its very initials are open to interpretation. Bad Teeth follows a cast of young literary men and women in four very American cities--Brooklyn, Bloomington, Berkeley, and Bakersfield. It's four (or more) books in one, a Pynchonesque treat: a bohemian...