Robert Ward's fiercely funny new novel, FOUR KINDS OF RAIN (St. Martin's Minotaur, $22.95), might be read as a cautionary tale about liberals who hide from themselves behind their humanitarian values.

Adam Sandler's fiercely funny performance is filled with worldly wisdom.

In a fiercely funny first act, a border state reversal of David Storey's "Changing Room," female wrestlers are in a dingy locker room preparing for the evening's show.

That child is fiercely funny and an artful mimic, remembering her divisive parents as if they were characters in a movie of her life.

She goes on a teenage tear--tormenting Anna's younger brother (who wonders why Mom's acting so weird), getting down and dirty on a TV talk show where Tess is supposed to discuss her book on aging--with fiercely funny conviction.

She describes herself as a BAP, a Black American Princess, and she is fiercely funny in her denunciation of men.

The results are fiercely funny, honest and moving.

Though Kathy Acker's feminist version of "Don Quixote" - which turned the knight into a contemporary woman who travels through New York and London accompanied by a talking dog - was fiercely funny at times, it was also tendentious and heavy-handed.

The result is fiercely funny, honest and moving.