Comedy Humor World

After fleeing crumbling, volatile Venezuela, Yola Palacio wants nothing more than to settle into a peaceful new life in Trinidad with her family. And who cares if they’re there illegally - aren’t most of the people on the island? But life for the Palacios is far from quiet - and when Yola’s aunt Celia dies, the family once again find their lives turned upside down. For Celia had been keeping a very big secret - she owed a lot of money to a local criminal called Ugly. And without the funds to pay him off, Ugly has the entire family do his bidding until Celia’s debt is settled.

To listen to The Little World of Don Camillo is to travel to the valley of the River Po, Italy's widest and most fertile plain, with its unique atmosphere, culture, and natural history. And to do so in the incomparable company of a cast of fictional characters who testify to the exquisite humor and humanity of their creator. Here, eternal forces grapple with the absurd drama of everyday life, and hilarious and unearthly things can happen.

Irreverently juggling magical realism, film noir, hip hop, and chicanismo, Tropic of Orange takes place in a Los Angeles where the homeless, gangsters, infant organ entrepreneurs, and Hollywood collide on a stretch of the Harbor Freeway. Hemmed in by wildfires, it's a symphony conducted from an overpass, grandiose, comic, and as diverse as the city itself - from an author who has received the California Book Award and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award, among other literary honors.

Motl is middle-aged, poor, nerdy, Jewish, and in desperate need of a shave. Since having his balls shot cleanly off as a youth in WWI, he's lived a quiet life at home in Vilnius with his shrewd and shrewish mom, Gitl, losing himself in the masculine fantasy world of cowboy novels by writers like Karl May - novels equally loved by Hitler, whose troops have just invaded Lithuania and are out to exterminate people like Motl. As friends and neighbors are killed around them, Motl and Gitl escape from Vilnius, saving their own skins.

In a suburban Atlanta neighborhood where divorce is as rampant as kudzu, Mary Bliss McGowan doesn't notice that her own marriage is in trouble until the summer night she finds a note from her husband, telling her he's gone. Stunned and humiliated, a desperate Mary Bliss, left behind with 17-year-old daughter Erin and a mountain of debt, decides to salvage what's left of her life by telling one little bitty lie.

In 2006, Julia Lerner is living in Moscow, a recent university graduate in computer science, when she’s recruited by Russia’s largest intelligence agency. By 2018, she’s in Silicon Valley as COO of Tangerine, one of America’s most famous technology companies. In between her executive management, self promotion, and work in gender equality, she funnels intelligence back to the motherland. But now Russia's asking for more, and Julia’s getting nervous.

Tiller is an average American college student with a good heart but minimal aspirations. Pong Lou is a larger-than-life, wildly creative Chinese American entrepreneur who sees something intriguing in Tiller beyond his bored exterior and takes him under his wing. When Pong brings him along on a boisterous trip across Asia, Tiller is catapulted from ordinary young man to talented protégé, and pulled into a series of ever more extreme and eye-opening experiences that transform his view of the world, of Pong, and of himself.

As a police launch speeds across Miami's Biscayne Bay - with officer Nestor Camacho on board - Tom Wolfe is off and running. Here is a big, panoramic story of the new America, as told by our master chronicler of the way we live now. Based on the same sort of detailed, on-scene, high-energy reporting that powered Tom Wolfe's previous best-selling novels, Back to Blood is another brilliant, spot-on, scrupulous, and often hilarious reckoning with our times.

The plan is to leave. As for how, when, to where, and even why - she doesn’t know yet. So begins a journey for the 24-year-old narrator of Days of Distraction. As a staff writer at a prestigious tech publication, she reports on the achievements of smug Silicon Valley billionaires and start-up bros while her own request for a raise gets bumped from manager to manager. And when her longtime boyfriend, J, decides to move to a quiet upstate New York town for grad school, she sees an excuse to cut and run.

In this clever and quirky follow-up to The Gates and The Infernals, Samuel Johnson's life seems to have finally settled down - after all, he's still got the company of his faithful dachshund Boswell and his bumbling demon friend Nurd; he has foiled the dreaded forces of darkness not once but twice; and he's now dating the lovely Lucy Highmore.

A missing sister. A broken heart. A whole lot of trouble... Rilla is getting married. Except she isn't. She's running away - from her confused fiancé, Simon, her big mad family, and the memories nipping at her heels. Her sister Rose would know what to do in such times of crisis. But the trouble is, Rose is the crisis. She disappeared years ago, and Rilla's heart went missing, too.

Mr. Mani is a deeply affecting six-generation family saga, extending from 19th-century Greece and Poland to British-occupied Palestine to German-occupied Crete and ultimately to modern Israel. The narrative moves through time and is told in five conversations about the Mani family. It ends in Athens in 1848 with Avraham Mani's powerful tale about the death of his young son in Jerusalem. A profoundly human novel, rich in drama, irony, and wit.

Nivedita (a.k.a. Identitti), a well-known blogger and doctoral student, is in awe of her supervisor—postcolonial and race studies professor Saraswati. But her life and sense of self are turned upside down when it emerges that Saraswati is actually white. Nivedita’s praise of Saraswati during a radio interview just hours before the news breaks calls into question her own reputation as a young activist. Following the uproar, Nivedita is forced to reflect on the key moments in her life, when she doubted her identity and her place in the world.

Elvira Carr believes in rules. She also strongly believes in crisp schedules, clear guidelines, and taking people at face value. Not that the 27-year-old sees many people. After several unfortunate incidents, her overbearing mother keeps her at home. But when her mother has a stroke, Elvira is suddenly on her own. To help her navigate a world that is often puzzling, she draws up seven ironclad rules. Armed with these, a notebook full of questions, and guidance from a helpful neighbor, she takes charge of herself.

"A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say 'Slum!' because he could see no more." But to its residents, this derelict corner of Trinidad's capital is a complete world, where everybody is quite different from everybody else. In this tender, funny early novel, V. S. Naipaul renders their lives (and the legends their neighbors construct around them) with Dickensian verve and Chekhovian compassion.

In the court of the “King”, everyone knows their place. But as the Artist wins hearts and egos with his ballads, uncomfortable truths emerge that shake the Kingdom to its core. Part surreal fable and part narco-lit romance, this prize-winning novel from Yuri Herrera questions the price of keeping your integrity in a world ruled by patronage and power.

Olivia Huang Christenson is excited-slash-terrified to be taking over her grandmother’s matchmaking business. But when she learns that a new dating app has made her Pó Po’s traditional Chinese zodiac approach all about “animal attraction,” her emotions skew more toward furious-slash-outraged. Especially when L.A.’s most-eligible bachelor Bennett O’Brien is behind the app that could destroy her family’s legacy....

Rarely has an Evangelical upbringing been depicted with the relentless honesty, wide-ranging empathy, and Superbad-meets-Siddhartha playfulness of USA Today best-seller HELL IS A WORLD WITHOUT YOU. During the time of Pizza Hut buffets, 9/11, and all-night Mario Kart parties, a grieving teenager faces a mortal crossroads: fire-and-brimstone certainty vs. forbidden love. And whether or not you’ve ever begged God to delay the Rapture (so you could have time to lose your virginity), that kid’s story is about you.

Laissez-vous gagner par cette famille fantaisiste digne d'Almodóvar. Réunion de famille impromptue dans un café. Fernando, sa mère, Amalia, ses deux sœurs, Emma et Silvia. Tous espèrent un coup de téléphone qui tarde à arriver. L'attente, fébrile, est ponctuée de scènes savoureuses, de quiproquos et de malentendus. Les vérités cachées ou à demi dites s'égrènent sans fin. Et on rit aux larmes de cette comédie familiale plus profonde qu'il n'y paraît.

When the greatest female mathematician in history passes away, her son, Alexander "Sasha" Karnokovitch, just wants to mourn his mother in peace. But rumor has it the notoriously eccentric Polish émigré has solved one of the most difficult problems in all of mathematics and has spitefully taken the solution to her grave. A ragtag group of mathematicians from around the world descends upon Rachela's shiva, determined to find the proof or solve it for themselves - even if it means prying up the floorboards for notes.